Arab Press Review

A weekly look at some of the news and views published in the leading Arab language newspapers.

Syrian minister labels the US administration the most 'violent and stupid ever'

The US is only impressed by those who bow down in deference according to statements made by Farouq Al-Shar'a, Syrian foreign minister, published in Asharq al-Awsat on Monday.

"The administration of President Bush is exceptional. Perhaps there have been similar administrations in the past but never one at the same level of violence and stupidity," he said.

He went on to criticise The Syrian Accountability Act, the legislation that is going through Congress that would impose sanctions on Syria until President Bush certifies that it has ceased its support for terrorist groups, withdrawn its forces from Lebanon and halted its development of missiles and biological and chemical weapons.

"The external pressure applied to Syria is the heaviest it has ever faced, perhaps since the sixteenth century. The danger lies in the fact that those applying the pressure do not recognise its elements," he said.

He accused the US of not being interested in having good relations with Syria because of Israeli pressure on Washington. The heads of the US administration fear Israel, he said, so how can they pressure it?

Saudi royal calls on US enemies to study Vietnamese tactics used against the US during the Vietnam war

Prince Amr Muhammad Al-Faysal, a visible and vocal member of the Saudi royal family who regularly contributes to the Arab News, the leading Saudi daily, said on Sunday that the US military had reached a point of total bankruptcy.

The Prince said he was appalled that 200 US soldiers backed by helicopter gunships, missiles and mortar shells attacked the house where Uday, Qusay and his 14-year-old son Mustafa were living.

"Western military doctrine is incapable of achieving victory. It took a 50:1 ratio of crack troops five hours to kill three men and a boy who were hiding in a simple villa," he said.

We have to start to learn from people who have a proven track record of success, such as the Vietnamese, he writes.

"The Chinese also have a thing or two to teach us. Do not forget that they fought the US and its allies to a standstill in Korea at a time when the US was at its mightiest militarily," he said.

"The East, brothers and sisters, is where we should look. Forget about the West, for they are finished."

Two years after September 11 the terrorist threat is growing

As long as the west's anti-terrorism drive continues to be motivated by fear and waged exclusively on a platform of police procedures, terrorism will prevail, writes Mohamed Sid-Ahmed in Al-Ahram.

"A few days ago two thousand Muslims attended an Islamic conference in Granada under the title "Islam in Europe" which denounced capitalism as the source of all evil and called on Muslims everywhere to stop using western currencies like the dollar," he said.

He notes that as the second anniversary of 9/11 draws closer more than 3,000 suspected terrorists are still awaiting trial in different parts of the world.

President Bush's war on terror has placed the al-Qaeda network on the defensive. The way out of the quagmire is neither through terrorism nor counterterrorism, nor by getting more and more involved in the military occupation of a territory, he writes.

"The way out is by identifying the reasons that stand behind the exacerbation of terrorism. These reasons are located in the world system itself. The results on the balance sheet are far below what they should be two years into the war on terror. There is no guarantee that the cataclysms on the scale of September 11 will not occur again," he concludes.

Iran is in the firing line, not Syria

Iran is heading to fit the US image of membership in the "axis of evil", writes Hazem Saghieh in Al-Hayat on Thursday.

Citing recent events such as the torture of a Canadian-Iranian journalist in a Teheran jail, the country's feud with Europe and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Teheran's admission that it holds a number of senior al-Qaeda members, Saghieh concludes "It is the place where the issue of terror and WMD's intersect in a transparent way. It is a country where there is no room for human rights."

Teheran has no stronger ally than Syria and, "Add to this that Tony Blair and George Bush spoke more of Iran than Iraq in their most recent meeting."

He accuses the regime of turning Canada into an enemy and the Europeans into half enemies.

"Its economy is extremely poor and its domestic situation, which ripples with an intense student movement that may succeed in turning into a revolution, calls for deflecting attention to other issues," he added.

Some say that the transformation in Iraq will reflect first on Syria. Others say it will reflect first on Iran.

"And it seems that the latter is more in a hurry than the former," he said.

The US imperial perspectives are distorted

The Palestinian academic Edward Said, a regular contributor to Al-Ahram, criticises the US handling of Iraq and examines the distortions of 'imperial perspectives'.

"Every empire, including America's regularly tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires and that it has a mission certainly not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate the peoples and places it rules directly or indirectly. Yet these ideas are not shared by the people who live there," he writes.

He accuses US diplomacy of being permanently impaired by a systematic attack conducted by the Israeli lobby on the so called "Arabists."

The short-sightedness of the imperial gaze is being repeated in the US view of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, he says.

"The trouble with these views is that they are so incompetent and ideological: they provide Americans not with ideas about Arabs and Muslims, but rather with the way they would like Arabs and Muslims to be."

He wonders how Paul Wolfowitz, "a moderately intelligent bureaucrat", could be running policies of such "colossal" incompetence and at the same time convincing people he knows what he is doing.

"Underlying this perspective is a long-standing view that will not permit the Arabs as a people to exercise their right to national self-determination. They are thought of as different, incapable of logic, unable to tell the truth, and fundamentally disruptive and murderous," he says.