Anti-U.S. Feeling Leaves Arab Reformers Isolated - New York Times

James Hill for The New York Times

The Hezbollah station was on at a restaurant in Damascus, Syria.
Moderate voices are being drowned out by a rising tide of anti-American
sentiment.

Anti-U.S. Feeling Leaves Arab Reformers Isolated - New York Times

DAMASCUS, Syria, Aug. 8 — Moderate reformers across the Arab world say American support for Israel’s battle with Hezbollah has put them on the defensive, tarring them by association and boosting Islamist parties.

The very people whom the United States
wanted to encourage to promote democracy from Bahrain to Casablanca
instead feel trapped by a policy that they now ridicule more or less as
“destroying the region in order to save it.”

Indeed,
many of those reformers who have been working for change in their own
societies — often isolated, harassed by state security, or
marginalized to begin with — say American policy either strangles
nascent reform movements or props up repressive governments that remain
Washington’s best allies in the region.

“We are
really afraid of this ‘new Middle East,’ ” said Ali
Abdulemam, a 28-year-old computer engineer who founded the most popular
political Web site in Bahrain. He was referring to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s statement last month that the situation in Lebanon represented the birth pangs of a “new Middle East.”

“They talk about how they will reorganize the region in a
different way, but they never talk about the people,” Mr.
Abdulemam said. “They never mention what the people want. They
are just giving more power to the systems that exist already.”

His plight is shared by reformers across the Arab world.

James Hill for The New York Times

A soldier cleaned portraits of Syria’s leaders, past and present,
in Damascus. War news has trumped worries over the recent jailing of
activists.