Stardate 20021007.1616

(On Screen): A "broad" opinion poll of citizens in various Arab nations contains bad news and good news for us. But the bad news isn't very bad, and the good news is really good.

The bad news is that they all wish we'd be more balanced in our attitude towards the Palestinians. (Which is to say that we'd stop supporting Israel.) That was, I think, a foregone conclusion and it's hardly surprising to see it. This also has little long term significance.

The good news is that on a deep level they admire our institutions and our general philosophy of government. It turns out that they want freedom, personal and civil rights. Like us, they want to decide for themselves what they do. (Unlike us, they're not permitted to.) They want the benefits of liberal democracy, and that's something we can work with.

It's that feeling, that potential, which is our long term means of fighting and winning this war. Though this war will involve combat, the real theater of conflict is in the individual minds of the Arab peoples, and to win it we will need to cause a shift to the idea of diversity and tolerance and freedom. Once that happens, the war will be over, and what this poll shows is that they're already moving in that direction.

The study asked 3,200 Arab adults of both sexes in Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia such questions as what they valued most in life and how the United States could improve its regional standing.

"The single most important thing the United States can do is change its policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict," the study said.

Depending on the country polled, one-third to one-half of the respondents called on the United States to "be more balanced" toward the Arab world.

That assumes that it's in our best interests to improve our standing in the region in the short term, and I don't believe that it is. We need to do so in the long term, but to accomplish that it will be necessary to make our short term standing even worse, and to anger and humiliate them even more, because we need to induce an Arab cultural crisis which causes them to rethink basic assumptions (like Qur'anic inerrancy).

And it's very helpful to learn that they're already moving in the direction we need them to go.