Wednesday, February 26, 2003

Will George Bush's actions in the Middle East alienate pro-U.S. moderates in the region? They already have:

For Hamad Abdel-Aziz Kawari, a former Qatari ambassador to the United States, the disillusionment itself is enough.

Sitting in his seaside office in Doha underneath two pictures of former president George Bush, he boasted that his three children were graduates of George Washington University. He straddles two worlds, he said, having served eight years in the United States. But the American ideals he respects, he said, are overshadowed by the foreign policy he sees.

"You want to be friends. And to be friends you have to be convinced your friend is doing something good," he said.

"Believe me and write this," he added. "Nobody hates America. America used to be a great example, it was not a colonial power in the region. Our sons and brothers work with American businesses. I am very sorry that American policy is threatening the human relations between the nations. The Americans are antagonizing their friends."


That's from a Washington Post article titled "Old Arab Friends Turn Away From U.S.: Policies Toward Iraq and Palestinians Alienate Pro-American Generation."

And this is before we've dropped a single "massive ordnance air burst" bomb on Iraq ("The MOAB's massive explosive punch, sources say, is similar to a small nuclear weapon").

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