Youssef Ibrahim, former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, now managing director of the Dubai-based Strategic Energy Investment Group — and someone who previously "felt that Bush’s attitude toward the Mideast has been all wrong" — reports from Dubai:
Listen to the conversations in the cafes on the edge of the creek that runs through this Persian Gulf city, and it is hard to believe that the George W. Bush being praised by Arab diners is the same George W. Bush who has been widely excoriated in these parts ever since he took office.
Yet the balmy breeze blowing along the creek carries murmurs of approval for the devoutly Christian U.S. president, whose persistent calls for democracy in the Middle East are looking less like preaching and more like timely encouragement.
Nowadays, intellectuals, businessmen and working-class people alike can be caught lauding Bush’s hard-edged posture on democracy and cheering his handling of Arab rulers who are U.S. allies. . . . [I]t is not quite a lovefest but a celebration nonetheless.
"His talk about democracy is good," an Egyptian-born woman was telling companions at the Fatafeet (or "Crumbs") restaurant the other night, exuberant enough for her voice to carry to neighboring tables. "He keeps hitting this nail. That’s good, by God, isn’t it?"
At another table, a Lebanese man was waxing enthusiastic over Bush’s blunt and irreverent manner toward Arab autocrats. "It is good to light a fire under their feet," he said.
Actually, it’s a fire in the minds of men. Ibrahim writes that:
[T]here is a keen sense of irony that a passionately Christian American president who has supported Israel, invaded an Arab country and presided over an occupation marred by violence might actually make a positive difference in the Muslim world.
It has people here citing the Koranic verse that speaks of a catastrophe that bears good fruits.
Perhaps it will be remembered as a "catastrophic success."
Mark Steyn in his article "The Right Side of History" notes the difference between American neocons and French diplomats in the Middle East:
A couple of years back, I went to hear Paul Wolfowitz. I knew him only by reputation — the most sinister of all the neocons, the big bad Wolfowitz, the man whose name started with a scary animal and ended Jewishly.
In fact, he was a very soft-spoken chap, who compared the challenges of the Middle East with America’s experiments in democracy-spreading after the second world war. He said he thought it would take less time than Japan, and maybe something closer to the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe. I would have scoffed, but he knew so many Iraqis by name — not just Ahmed Chalabi, but a ton of others.
Around the same time, I bumped into Dominique de Villepin, the French foreign minister and man of letters. He was just back from Egypt, where he’d been profoundly moved when he’d been asked to convey the gratitude of the Arab people to President Chirac for working so tirelessly to prevent a tragic war between Christianity and Islam.
You don’t say, I said. And, just as a matter of interest, who asked you to convey that? He hemmed and hawed and eventually said it was President Mubarak.
Being a polite sort, I rolled my eyes only metaphorically, but decided as a long-term proposition I’d bet Wolfowitz’s address book of real people against Villepin’s hotline to over-the-hill dictators. The lesson of these last weeks is that it turns out Washington’s Zionists know the Arab people a lot better than Europe’s Arabists.
Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkroff has another remarkable roundup of the past two weeks’ good news from Iraq. Worth reading in its entirety (and it will take a while).