Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., USFS (Ret.)

Washington, DC

I am very pleased to be able to meet with you on this, the first day of a week–long examination of relations between our country and the Arab world. I have been asked to speak about American foreign policy as it bears on this topic.

The causes of Arab and Muslim alienation from the United States are not hard to discern and describe. They are policies that have demonstrably served our interests no better than theirs, or for that matter, Israel’s:

• Our decision to back Israeli efforts to pacify the Palestinians rather than to continue to try to mediate a Palestinian–Israeli peace. This succeeded only in discrediting us as peacemakers without gaining security for Israel, and it empowered Islamist unilateralists among the Palestinians to match the equally unilateralist Israeli government.

• Our collusion with Israel in the effort to isolate and overthrow the democratically elected Hamas government. This first left Hamas nowhere to go but further into the Iranian embrace. It then catalyzed armed conflict among Palestinians, partitioned the occupied territories, encouraged an Israeli effort to crush or starve the Gaza ghetto into submission, and made the prospect of a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians based on a two–state solution more remote than ever.

• Our witless transformation of our punitive expedition to capture al Qaeda leaders and chastize their Taliban hosts into a long–term occupation of Afghanistan directed at excluding radical Muslims from a role in governing it. This has turned the Islamic world against our intervention there, conferred new life and undeserved nationalist resistance credentials on the Taliban, and lent unhelpful credibility to al Qaeda’s charge that we are engaged in an anti–Muslim crusade. (It has also had the perverse result of making Afghanistan so safe for poppy cultivation that it is now the source of almost all the world’s heroine.)

• Our catastrophic march into the strategic ambush of Iraq, where we remain pinned down. Iraq is now a country militarily occupied by us but politically occupied by Iran. Our “transformational diplomacy” there has birthed a catastrophic mixture of anarchy and gang warfare, mounting civilian casualties and infrastructure collapse, and an eruption of embittered refugees to every corner of the mostly Sunni Arab world.

• Our continual demonstrations of strategic ineptitude and politico–military incompetence. We persist in an attempt to impose military solutions on political problems in Iraq — thereby precluding political solutions to them — even as we cooperate in Shiite suppression and ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs and thrash about in search of a way out of the mess we’ve made.

• Our apparent plans to perpetuate our occupation of Iraq through the establishment of permanent military bases there from which we can dominate the Arab world. This is the one thing we’ve come up with that has succeeded in uniting Sunni and Shiite Iraqi Arabs — in almost universal opposition to such bases.

• Our open encouragement of Israel’s sadistic mutilation of Lebanon last summer. This cemented Hezbollah’s ties to Iran while transforming it into the dominant political force in Lebanon.

• And our recent efforts to block peace talks between Israel and Syria. This ensures a continued state of war along Israel’s Golan front, continued proxy wars in Lebanon, continued Syrian reliance on Iran, and continued stalemate in US–Syrian relations.

The policies that have produced these disasters for our interests and those of our friends could clearly do with some revision. As I noted, al Qaeda has shown that it has the capacity to learn from its mistakes and correct them. Do we? I wish I could be here to ask the senior official that question on Friday.

American Foreign Policy and the Arab World | Middle East Policy Council