Blogger Sees Arabs Hopeful over U.S. Election

Nov. 11, 2006 — -- You might think living 6,000 miles from Washington would be too far to follow the U.S. midterm elections. But if you lived anywhere in the Arab world, you would have found coverage nearly as complete and detailed as it was in America.

Marc Lynch, who monitors the Arab media for his blog AbuAardvark.com and who teaches at Williams College, says this year's reporting in the Middle East reached new levels of sophistication.

The mainstream Arab media, including al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, "were covering it down to the detail of individual congressional races, and they were looking at the implications for specific committees."

The focus was on how the elections would affect Arab issues, especially Iraq. But it also reflected, Lynch says, the growing degree to which people in the Arab world see American politics as part of their own.

As the election approached, Lynch sensed skepticism on the television and Internet services he reviews. After all, their Arab producers had watched, as Americans had, Bush's victory in 2004 despite his growing unpopularity. It seemed to confirm a fact of political life in their region -- the ruling party never yields power.

The sentencing of Saddam Hussein to death by hanging just two days before the election only added to that skepticism. The timing, Lynch says, was "universally seen as the result of Republican political calculations, and it really discredited it."

But as the election results came in Tuesday night, Lynch says many Arabs were both surprised and delighted. A guarded optimism is growing in the region, although it's tempered with real concerns. He says the Democratic victory has given Arabs hope for a "more rational foreign policy and maybe a chance to really start dealing with Iraq in a more serious fashion."

Arabs also marveled at the election of the first Muslim to the U.S. Congress -- Minnesota Democrat Keith Ellison, who will be sworn into the House of Representatives with his hand on a Koran.

"That a Muslim could be elected in America," Lynch says, "at a time when bin Laden, and many more than bin Laden, are spreading the idea that this war on terror is a crusader war of Christianity against Islam is really very powerful."