President Bush's condemnation of Russia as a bullying intimidator in the Georgian conflict struck a hypocritical note in a Middle East that has endured violent reverberations from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and where the sharp White House rhetoric against Moscow echoes what many Arabs feel about the U.S.

The president's swaggering style and frequent veiled threats of military force have angered and baffled a region that blames his administration for alienating Muslims and instigating turmoil in a misguided war on terrorism.
Now Bush's spirited attack on Russia's invasion of its weaker neighbor, Georgia, has raised derisive smirks among Arab commentators, who say the U.S. president is condemning the same power politics he practices.
Bush should be ""too ashamed to speak about the occupation of any country; he is already occupying one,"" said Mohammed El-Sayed Said, editor-in-chief of the Egyptian independent daily al-Badeel. ""U.S. forces have been in Iraq for five years and they still fight in an unacceptable manner that violates human rights conventions. Bush had better talk about his own occupation of Iraq.""
Bitterness and suspicion toward Washington, D.C., are summoned easily from Cairo to Beirut, Lebanon, to Baghdad. The Iraq war, the sense of drift over the unresolved Palestinian question, and Washington's perceived failure to pay more than lip-service to promoting democracy and human rights have undermined American standing in the region.
It is also widely noted here that the U.S. stood by uncritically during Israel's military incursion into southern Lebanon in its 2006 war with Hezbollah.
So when Bush declared Friday that, ""Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century,"" many people dismissed it as a double standard.
""The U.S. administration is stumbling in the Middle East without considering any horizons for the future,"" said Sateh Noureddine, political analyst and columnist in the Lebanese daily Assafir. ""It is totally obsessed with the idea of its war against terrorism, and this makes it lose even in the simplest political sense.
""The U.S. administration has done more harm to its allies in Georgia and the Middle East than to its enemies.""
(Source: courant.com)