Behind the Arabs' Iran double talk

NY Post ^ | December 12, 2010 | ERIC TRAGER

[Scanian]

The WikiLeaks dump of State Depart ment cables confirmed what practi cally every foreign-policy analyst not named Stephen Walt already knew: that Israel is hardly the only Middle Eastern country worried about Iran's nuclear ambitions.

From Cairo to Riyadh to Abu Dhabi, Sunni Arab leaders have repeatedly singled out Iran as the greatest threat to regional stability -- in private. But they refuse to speak out publicly, telling US diplomats that they'd face a tremendous domestic blowback if they were seen as siding with the West against a Muslim country.

Yet this is a dilemma of their own making. Even as they have repressed every other political ideology, Arab leaders have spent decades encouraging the proliferation of anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments to divert attention from their authoritarian ways.

Consider Egypt. Despite getting $2 billion a year in US foreign aid, President Hosni Mubarak's regime has competently crushed every opposition movement to emerge in the previous decade -- except when those movements dedicated themselves to protesting the West.

When Egyptians took to the streets in the spring of 2005 under the banner of Kefaya ("Enough!") to demand fair elections, the regime held carefully manipulated contests before launching a violent crackdown. According to reports, state-security officers raped female Kefaya activists in public while arresting many other activists.