Middle East already planning for Bush's departure
Mark Seibel
McClatchy Newspapers
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — One recent Friday morning, Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a Palestinian human-rights activist, offered this assessment of what the future holds for the Gaza Strip now that the Islamist group Hamas has taken control:
"For two years, Gaza will suffer even more," said Sarraj, a British-trained psychiatrist who founded Gaza's mental-health system. Then, he said, President Bush and his advisers will be gone. A new U.S. administration will talk to Hamas, and so will the Israelis.
"They'll have to," he said, "because they'll have seen that Hamas can deliver."
That calculus — that the end of the Bush administration is approaching and things will be different afterward — now underpins political thought throughout much of the Middle East.
With 17 months to go in Bush's second term, political leaders in the region are anticipating his departure and preparing for change.
It's no surprise that Bush is unpopular in much of the world.
Even in the United States, his approval ratings have been low all year.
A series of interviews in the Middle East, however, found a startling level of disappointment, disdain and distrust, even among people who, like Sarraj, profess to be friends of the United States or have strong ties to America.
(Continued here.)
McClatchy Newspapers
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — One recent Friday morning, Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a Palestinian human-rights activist, offered this assessment of what the future holds for the Gaza Strip now that the Islamist group Hamas has taken control:
"For two years, Gaza will suffer even more," said Sarraj, a British-trained psychiatrist who founded Gaza's mental-health system. Then, he said, President Bush and his advisers will be gone. A new U.S. administration will talk to Hamas, and so will the Israelis.
"They'll have to," he said, "because they'll have seen that Hamas can deliver."
That calculus — that the end of the Bush administration is approaching and things will be different afterward — now underpins political thought throughout much of the Middle East.
With 17 months to go in Bush's second term, political leaders in the region are anticipating his departure and preparing for change.
It's no surprise that Bush is unpopular in much of the world.
Even in the United States, his approval ratings have been low all year.
A series of interviews in the Middle East, however, found a startling level of disappointment, disdain and distrust, even among people who, like Sarraj, profess to be friends of the United States or have strong ties to America.
(Continued here.)
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