The Persian Gulf Primary

By Joe Klein

In an effort to escape the thrilling claustrophobia of the presidential campaign, I took a busman's holiday and spent Presidents' Day weekend at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha. But there, too, our campaign was pretty much what everyone was talking about. "Excuse me, Mr. Joe," a confrere from Qatar asked, "what's a superdelegate?" An Iranian businessman told me that "Obamamania" was sweeping the America-loving young people of Tehran. And so I expected a fair amount of passion at the panel I'd been asked to moderate: three Muslims venting on what the Islamic world should expect from the next President of the United States.

But no. The first panelist, a member of the Palestinian parliament from Gaza, began with a shrug. "We've made all these arguments before," he said, speaking mournfully. He didn't expect much different from the next President than what Palestinians had gotten from Bill Clinton or George W. Bush--a belated fling at trying to "solve" the Middle East. "Why do they always wait till their last year in office?" he asked, seeming too weary for fury. The next speaker, from Indonesia, wasn't very angry either. He hoped the next President would emphasize soft power rather than military force. The final speaker, a charismatic religious leader from Egypt, didn't want to talk about the next President at all. He wanted to talk about the problems of Islamic youth. But, I pressed, what do you want from the next President? "Change," he said, innocently, "and hope ... for the future."

The Americans in the audience smiled at that: clearly an Obama voter. The notion that the U.S. might elect someone named Barack Obama seemed almost surreal to most of the Islamic delegation. But what was most striking was the overall sense of subdued despair after all the battles and outrages of the Bush years. "The past few years, the Muslims were throwing tables at us," a U.S. Middle East policy expert told me. "Maybe they're just worn out."

The distress was deeper than exhaustion. Many of the Muslim delegates seemed stunned, finally, by the rush of history unleashed by the Bush Administration. "Everything the United States has favored is now radioactive, especially democracy," said Rami Khouri, a Lebanese journalist. The Administration had pushed for elections in places like the Palestinian territories where the essential components of democracy--a free press, a free economy, the rule of law--did not exist. Religious parties had won, or gained momentum, in most of these elections, and the U.S. had backtracked, refusing to accept the Hamas victory in the Palestinian territories, re-embracing autocrats like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. "Our indigenous democratic reformers," Khouri said, "are in retreat across the region."

The war in Iraq was barely mentioned in the public sessions, aside from a few perfunctory Islamic calls for immediate U.S. withdrawal. It was a different story in the private conversations in the corridors. "Obama and Hillary Clinton can't be serious about leaving Iraq in 12 to 16 months," a well-informed Jordanian said to me. "If you do that, there will be chaos. The Turks will attack the north. The Iranians will take over the south." I pointed out that the same may or may not be true if we leave in 10 ... or 100 years, as John McCain has defiantly suggested. "Yes, you have created quite a mess for us," he said, not quite accurately; the mess was created 90 years ago by Europeans drawing foolish lines on a map they barely understood. Bush's feckless invasion had tossed a hand grenade into a house of cards--and now there was the stunning realization that only an exhausted U.S. Army blocked a bloody revision of borders. "We are one people," insisted the Iraqi Communist Mufid al-Jazairi during one session. "We are not Sunni and Shi'a. We are Iraqis." The other delegates exchanged pained glances or looked away.

If an Obama presidency seemed surreal and unlikely to the Islamic delegates, a McCain presidency was the more realistic expectation. And so the most startling bit of news at the conference was a poll about, of all things, U.S. public attitudes, presented by Steven Kull of WorldPublicOpinion.org. The war in Iraq was unpopular, of course, and 63% of respondents also believed that Bush's peremptory militarism had made America less secure; 75% wanted to work to improve relations with Iran through diplomacy rather than threats. If those attitudes hold, McCain's rude bellicosity faces an uphill climb. It is likely, of course, that the numbers will melt in the heat of a campaign, especially when words like victory and patriotism are invoked, but for a moment in Doha it was possible to believe that the distance between the U.S. and Islamic worlds was closing a bit. Or, as a Libyan said to me, employing an Obamism, "I think everyone is ready to turn the page."