But this argument and much of the debate following the September 11, 2001 events has profoundly misrepresented the history and nature of US Middle East policy to the point where it has become a caricature of reality.

An important point is that not all Arabs or Muslims, or their leaders, or the states where they live, agree on their own interests or goals. Here is the heart of the matter: today, radical groups wish to seize power in the Arab world by defining themselves as the only legitimate Muslims against whom any resistance is opposition to Islam itself.

To begin with, it should be noted that for the last half-century US policymakers have continually had it in mind to avoid insult, antagonism, or needless friction to Middle East Arabs or Muslims. It is literally impossible to find a single statement by any American official during the second half of the twentieth century that was "anti-Arab" or "anti-Muslim" in intention or content.

During the 1940s and early 1950s, US leaders wanted to play an anti-imperialist role in the Middle East. When Gamal Abdel Nasser took power in Egypt in 1952, American policymakers welcomed his coup.

The Cold War – the global US-Soviet conflict that shaped all of US foreign policy from the 1950s through the 1980s – altered this strategy. By the mid-1950s, US leaders believed with good reason that this conflict was being extended into the Middle East, where local governments were also taking sides.

Basically, though, what US policy did was simply to take sides in an inter-Arab conflict that had also taken on global implications. Far from being anti-Arab, between the 1950s and 1980s, the United States backed some Arab countries that were under assault by others which happened to be allied with the Soviet Union. This same fundamental factor — minus the USSR — was the pattern that prevailed in the Kuwait crisis of 1990-1991.

Why would the United States’ taking sides in this inter-Arab conflict be an "anti-Arab" policy? This is only true if one holds that radical Arab nationalism represented the people’s will and that the other regimes were merely stooges of the West. Consider a Cold War analogy, the kind of claim made by Soviet propaganda: By opposing the triumph of Communism in Western Europe, the United States foiled the wishes of the European masses. In this context, the United States could be labelled "anti-European."

A powerful source of this type of claim that America was "anti-Arab" or "anti-Islam" is the myth of Arab or of Islamic unity. Ignoring the differences between the national and group interests of various Arabs and Muslims–which have even led to bloody wars in recent years–the claim is that they are really all on the same side. Thus, if not for external interference, they would all live happily together. If there is strife, then, the true cause must be American interference.

And yet history tells a different tale. In fact, American involvement resulted from, and was not the cause of, conflicts among Muslim and Arab groups or states. Did Muslim Iraq attack Muslim Iran? Did Arab Muslim Iraq take over Arab Muslim Kuwait? Did Arab Muslim but secularist Nasser’s Egypt threaten Arab Muslim–and more authentically Islamic–Jordan or Saudi Arabia? Did Lebanese fight each other in an indigenously inspired civil war? Did Arab and Muslim Algerians murder each other in another civil war?

Even with the existence of an Arab-Israeli conflict, most of the battles in the region have been between Muslim and Arab parties. Sometimes the United States took sides in these conflicts. There was nothing "anti-Muslim" or "anti-Arab" in this policy. Ironically, Osama bin Laden’s main anger arose from the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia starting in 1990. Yet this action was not only to protect Saudi Arabia and to free Kuwait from an Iraqi threat, it was sanctioned by a vote of the Arab League. Ironically, the grievance most closely associated with the September 11 attacks was clearly based on a US action that was pro-Arab and pro-Muslim.

The claim of anti-American grievances also arises out of the myth that "real" Arabs or "real" Muslims" must support revolutionary causes. So if these forces do not take power, it could not possibly be because the masses don’t want them or the governments fight effectively against them. The true factor ensuring the success of the "counter-revolution" must be the United States.

This situation also poses an insoluble dilemma for US policy common to all great powers. If the United States supports and aids a government like that of Egypt, it can be accused of sabotaging revolutionary movements that seek to overthrow that regime. But if the United States opposes any given Arab government, or presses it to be more democratic or tolerant of human rights, it can be accused of meddling in domestic affairs and thus of acting in an imperialist manner against the Arabs.

In fact, though, the United States only played a very limited role in the internal conflicts that pitted radical Islamist revolutionaries against Middle Eastern regimes in the 1980s and 1990s. Arab regimes neither wanted nor needed US help to fight and defeat Islamist insurgents. Of course, the Islamists are quite willing to forget the fact that the most ruthless suppression of Islamist revolutions took place in two anti-American states–Syria and Iraq.

Even if the United States had totally ignored the Middle East during the 1980s or 1990s it is doubtful that a single additional Islamist revolution would have succeeded. Again ironically, the deepest and only really direct involvement in a battle between regimes and Islamists took place in Afghanistan, where the United States actually took the side of Islamist forces to battle the Soviets.

As Professor Fawaz Gerges has accurately noted: "Radical Islamists blame the US for their defeat at the hands of the pro-US Arab regimes. They claim that the West, particularly the US, tipped the balance of power in favour of secular regimes by providing them with decisive political and logistical support." But this does not mean that the claim is true. The real reason these revolutions failed was because the local regimes defeated them, the masses didn’t support them, and the militants were not very competent.

But one could also put it this way: If radical nationalist or Islamist revolutions had not been stopped in Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia, people in those countries today would be as happy and prosperous as those in Iraq, Syria and Iran are under their "revolutionary" regimes and Kuwait would have been under permanent Iraqi annexation.

In listing the many "pro-Arab" and "pro-Muslim" acts of the United States in the Middle East and related issues over many decades, it is possible to cite a remarkable number of such cases. The list should include:

• The United States saved Yasser Arafat in Beirut in 1982 by arranging safe passage for him out of the country after he was besieged there by the Israeli army. It initiated a dialogue with the PLO in 1988 and turned a blind eye to the terrorism of PLO member groups until a blatant attack and the PLO’s refusal to renounce it made this policy impossible to sustain in 1990. It became the patron of the Palestinians between 1993 and 2000. The United States forgave Arafat for past involvement in the murder of American citizens, including US diplomats. The United States worked hard to mobilise financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. The United States almost always refrained from any criticism of the PA. Finally, the United States tried to broker a peace agreement that would produce an independent Palestinian state with its capital in east Jerusalem. After Arafat rejected the US peace attempts and did not implement ceasefires he promised to the United States, American leaders did not criticise him.

• The United States proposed numerous détente efforts with Islamic Iran. The United States did maintain sanctions on Iran to try to change three specific Iranian policies (sponsoring terrorism, developing weapons of mass destruction, opposing Arab-Israel peace) but it also sought to find ways to end those sanctions through diplomatic compromise and never waged a campaign to overthrow that regime.

• The United States saved Afghanistan from the Soviets; Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from Iraq; and Bosnia and Kosovo from Yugoslavia. This involved, in three instances, the actual deployment of US troops and their commitment in combat. In short, the United States risked American lives to help Muslims.

• Year after year, administration after administration, US governments were careful not to hurt Muslim sensibilities in any speech or policy. In every statement, distinctions were made between radical Islamist movements and Islam itself.

• The US government supported Muslim Pakistan against India, though Congress put some sanctions on Pakistan because of its nuclear weapons program.

• In Somalia, where no vital US interests were at stake, the United States engaged in a humanitarian effort to help a Muslim people suffering from anarchy, civil war, and murderous warlords. When it became clear that the mission could not succeed, US forces left. Now that voluntary end to a humanitarian mission is being portrayed as the defeat of an American anti-Islamic imperialist effort by Muslims, in short as a grievance justifying anti-Americanism.

• The United States supported Arab Iraq against Iran during the latter part of the Iran-Iraq war at the urging of such Arab allies as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

• For many years, the United States kept its military forces out of the Persian Gulf to avoid offending the Arab and Muslim peoples there. It went in only when requested, first to re-flag Arab oil tankers and later to intervene against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Its forces never went where they were not invited and left whenever they were asked to do so by the local states. Once Kuwait was liberated, the United States even advocated the concept of the Damascus agreement, in which Egypt and Syria would have played a primary role in protecting the Gulf. It was the Gulf Arab states who rejected this.

• The United States rescued Egypt at the end of the 1973 war by pressing Israel to stop advancing. The United States became Egypt’s patron in the 1980s, after the Camp David peace agreement, providing large-scale arms supplies and other military and financial assistance while asking for little in return. Indeed, all of this US help and support gave the United States no leverage over Egyptian policies, nor even good will in the state-controlled Egyptian media and the statements of that country’s leaders.

Indeed, in 12 major issues where Muslims had a conflict with non-Muslims or secular forces, or Arabs had a conflict with non-Arabs, the United States sided with the former groups in 11 out of 12 cases. The only exception to this pattern was US support for Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

If the Arabs and Muslims are so aggrieved at US support for Israel, it may be because this is the only significant contrary case in the Middle East.

This pattern of US attempts to maintain good relations with Arabs and Muslims was so strong that even after 3,500 Americans were murdered in a massive terrorist attack, US leaders spent much of their time urging that there be no retaliation against Muslims or Arabs in the United States. American policymakers repeated at every opportunity that they did not see Islam as the enemy.

Again, the fact that many or even most Arabs and Muslims in the Middle East did not recognize that consistent thread in US policy does not mean it did not exist. But what it does demonstrate is that there were forces and factors within the region that had a stake in distorting American policy for their own purposes.

Just as an examination of US policy shows its overall support for Arabs and Muslims–or at least for relatively moderate states against radical and aggressive ones – a consideration of what the United States did not do in the Middle East also undercuts the notion of overwhelming and justified Arab/Muslim grievances based on American misdeeds.

If the United States wanted to carry out "anti-Arab" or "anti-Muslim" policies as it is charged, or even if it wanted to act as a traditional great power, it could have implemented dozens of actions in the Middle East that could have been justified by events there. The fact is that whatever America has done in the Middle East it has used a small portion of its potential power; stopped far short of what it could have done, often with justification; and avoided intervention whenever possible.

How can the real record be so disregarded in the Middle East?

There are four ways being used to distort this history. The first is simply to ignore the truth about US policy. This has been an extremely important factor. For reasons of their own, the Arab and Iranian media hardly ever say anything positive about the United States, while Arab and Iranian leaders – even those who benefit from US help – rarely praise America. Shut off from contrary information and constantly fed antagonistic views, it is hardly surprising that the masses are hostile to the United States.

The second technique is to distort the record. For example, bin Laden himself charges that the suffering of Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia–whom the United States actually protected–or in places like East Timor, the Philippines, and Algeria–where the United States had no role–are America’s fault. In other areas, American motives can be misrepresented. For instance, US humanitarian efforts in Somalia are portrayed as an imperialistic, anti-Muslim campaign defeated by heroic local resistance.

A third method, and one that has been less noticed by outside observers, is to ignore other threats to the region. An outstanding example here is the whitewashing of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. After all, the Iraqi leader began two wars; killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims and Arabs; looted and vandalised Kuwait; threatened all his neighbours and thus the holy cities of Mecca and Medina also; tortured and repressed his own people, against some of whom he also used chemical weapons; fired missiles at Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel; and was working to develop nuclear arms with which he could seize power in the Gulf.

Yet now the Arab peoples are told that it is the United States, not Iraq, which threatens to dominate the Gulf and enslave its people. American-backed international sanctions against Iraq and the use of sporadic force to make Iraq less dangerous are cited as major reasons justifying the assault on America.

Fourth and finally, there has been an attempt to reduce all of American policy to a single issue, defined as "US support for Israel," while also distorting the nature and policies of Israel itself. It can be said that to try to negate all the United States has done for the Arab and Muslim world–and all that it has NOT done to the Arab and Muslim world–on the sole basis of US-Israel relations shows the flimsiness of the case against America.

Before considering the real roots of anti-American views and behaviour, however, the issue of the US-Israel relationship requires some separate consideration. Clearly, the United States has been Israel’s main ally since the 1970s. But what does the concept that "the United States supports Israel" mean in the overall contexts of US policy and the current spate of anti-Americanism.

The United States has not "supported" Israel in some bid to dominate the Middle East, to oppress or exterminate Arabs or Muslims, or any of the fanciful–though deeply believed–notions so often put forward in the Middle East.

US policy regarding Israel has revolved around two basic principles: to help Israel survive in the face of real, powerful threats to eliminate that state and also to help broker a negotiated peace agreement that would be acceptable to both sides in order to end the conflict. It is regarding these two points that the radicals’ objections to US policy toward Israel becomes clear, for they wish to destroy Israel and to block any negotiated arrangement that would allow Israel’s survival and defuse their ability to use the issue to foment revolution.

For many decades, the Arab states and the Palestinian movement were not yet ready or willing to make peace with Israel. Whenever opportunities seemed to arise for progress in negotiations, the United States seized them throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. In the 1993-2000 Oslo process, the United States tried to facilitate a deal on the Israel-Palestinian and Israel-Syrian fronts. While it is possible to critique the details and timing of specific American efforts, the overall goal was quite clear. During the Oslo process, the United States put such peacemaking at the top of its international agenda. Over time, it moved considerably closer to the Arab/Palestinian standpoint and urged Israel to do so as well.

Negotiating a compromise agreement was always in the US interest precisely because it did want good relations with the Arab world. By resolving this heated issue, the United States would be better able to promote regional stability, reduce the possibility of war, and ensure its own position in the region. For these same reasons, the Islamist radicals opposed this policy.

Bin Laden’s ideological framework was laid down and the September 11 attacks were being planned at a time when the peace process seemed closest to success, even though the crisis actually took place at a time when it had clearly failed.

In addition, the implication of the claim that the crisis is almost totally due to US backing for Israel neglects and misrepresents other key points:

• It implies that the collapse of the peace process and a gigantic crisis in the Middle East has resulted largely from a dispute over one or two neighbourhoods in east Jerusalem or two or three percent of West Bank territory rather than other issues entirely or a refusal to make peace with Israel at all.

• It ignores the fact that bin Laden and his allies have shown little interest in the Palestinian issue in the past and that this question is a secondary point in an analysis which sees Islam at war with the West on a dozen fronts.

• Since Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon was taken by radical Islamists as a reason to increase violence, arguing that Hezbollah’s strategy of armed struggle brought success, wouldn’t an Israeli pull out in the West Bank and Gaza be taken as proving that the September 11 attack made big gains possible and thus encourage more anti-American terrorism?

Even if one does not accept all the examples given in this article to show American attempts to help Arabs and Muslims, a huge amount of evidence still remains to show that the case against American Middle East policy does not stand on an objective assessment.

Certainly, many Arabs and Muslims do not see the situation this way or act as if they do so. "For many Arabs, regardless of their politics, the US has replaced colonial Europe as the embodiment of evil," Gerges wrote. "In their eyes, the US is the source of the ills and misfortunes that befell their world in the second part of the past century."

Obviously, difference of opinion in viewing events is rooted in a whole set of cultural and historical factors. Nevertheless, to attribute this outcome to simple misunderstandings or honest disagreements over the facts is insufficient to explain what is going on in the region. The real basis of a wave of anti-Americanism in the Arab world is that this is a strategy that offers something for everyone there, and at no significant cost either:

• For the radical oppositionists, anti-Americanism is a way to muster mass support after they failed to do so for an anti-government revolutionary strategy. Given the inability of revolutionary Islamist movements to overthrow any Arab government using a variety of strategies, they are desperately seeking some new tactic. An added benefit for the radical opposition movements to use anti-Americanism is that it is a relatively safe strategy. Arab regimes that will quickly and brutally repress a challenge to themselves will do nothing against militants who only attack the United States.

• For the regimes, anti-Americanism is a way to distract attention from their numerous failings. Instead of pressing for democracy, human rights, higher living standards, less corruption and incompetence, a change of leadership, or any of numerous other demands that would damage the interests of the governments and rulers, the focus of attention could be turned to shouting at the United States.

• For the masses, anti-Americanism falls in line with what they have been taught in school, told by the state-controlled media, heard preached at the mosque, and seen purveyed by their leaders (or the opposition movements). Hating America as being responsible for everything wrong in their lives makes them feel better and provides an explanation of how the world works. It is important to understand that these attitudes are not merely outbursts of spontaneous anger or the result of seeing pictures of the Palestinian intifada on al-Jazeera television but are the product of decades of one-sided, state-sponsored conditioning and propaganda.

In short, it is not true that "where there’s smoke, there’s fire" in the sense that US foreign policy itself has sparked antagonism. It would be more accurate to say that where there’s smoke, there are arsonists at work.

Are there legitimate Arab and Muslim grievances against America? Of course there are. But one must assess the overall level of legitimate grievances and the legitimacy of a terrorist response to them. A good way to do so is to compare them to the grievances and responses of people in other countries and regions.

If one wants to assess relative grievances against America based on past US policies, the Arabs and Muslims of the Middle East would be relatively far down on the list. After all, one could far more easily find, justify, and see as larger the grievances of Native Americans and African-Americans; the Japanese and Germans, defeated and occupied after World War Two; Latin Americans, who faced US supported coups and military regimes along with a high level of economic influence; Filipinos and Puerto Ricans, who were ruled by the United States for decades; Cubans subject to US sanctions; Russians and other ex-Soviet peoples defeated in the Cold War; and Vietnamese or other people in Southeast Asia who suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties as well as American carpet bombing, napalm, and deforestation.

Everyone has grievances against America but in only one part of the world does this hatred take on such an intensive and popular form.

Traditional Islam and aspects of Arab society are under assault by Westernisation or Americanisation, modernisation and globalisation. But the same situation applies also to every other part of the world, including Europe. Nowhere else in the world, however, is resistance so uncompromising and thoroughgoing as it is in the Arab and Muslim world.

A subtlety of labelling is very revealing on this point. Starting with the Iranian revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in the 1970s, it has become commonplace to label the United States as the "great Satan". But Satan, in both the Christian and the Muslim religions, is not an imperialist bully, rather he is a tempter.

Many of the extremist Islamists, including most of the September 11 suicide terrorists, had a great deal of personal contact with the West, as did many of the militant Iranian students who supported Khomeini and seized the US embassy in Teheran in 1979. They were people who came close to yielding to the "temptation" and they came to define their Islam not as most normal Muslims do as a body of belief they feel secure in but as a way of maintaining personal identity against the West precisely because they fear their own desire to join Western society. This basic attitude, to a greater or lesser extent, is common among Arabs, especially the class of people who govern and who dominate the media. In short, anti-Americanism in this respect arises not from the ugliness of US policy but from the attractiveness of American society.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the new anti-Americanism–though even this point is not so new–is the contradiction between seeing the United States as an arrogant bully whose mistreatment of the Arabs and Muslims merits punishment and as a cowardly weakling.

While the radicals must portray America as a bully to provoke outrage against it, they must also portray America as weak to encourage Arabs and Muslims to fight it and believe they can win. So the revolutionaries must persuade the masses and leaders that America is simultaneously horrible and helpless.

Here, too, is a key problem with the US debate over the terrorism crisis: American opinion-makers, diplomats, and academics are defining America’s mistake in the Middle East as having been too tough. Instead, the belief that America could be defeated and the readiness to try such a strategy arises from the fact that the United States was too weak and meek in its behaviour. Far from attacking America because it is really a big bully, extremists past and present launched assaults to prove their belief that the United States was a paper tiger.

Thus, while US policy has made mistakes perhaps the biggest mistake of all is the precise opposite of what it is accused of doing by critics both at home and in the Middle East. Rather than having been guilty of bullying, the United States has been too soft to merit respect. Here is a country in which the most influential text on the Middle East, Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, charges that Americans — and especially American scholars — totally misunderstand and constantly insult the Middle East. In fact, the Middle East’s miscomprehension and hostile behaviour toward America far exceeds these same qualities on the part of the United States.

The quotes that begin this article show that respect, rather than love, is the quality prized in a Middle East which accepts realpolitik down to its very bones. If you study the diverse ideologies of Middle East radicals–Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, or bin Laden for instance– all of them argue that America is really weak and can be defeated by the proper methods.

At the same time, the alleged big bully–the United States–has been mainly concerned about proving itself to be a friend to Arabs and Muslims. Terrorist attack after terrorist attack took place from the 1970s on without any tough American response. Iran seized hostages and the United States replied only with a disastrous failed rescue mission. When Saddam threatened to invade Kuwait, American diplomats assured him that the United States wanted to avoid involvement. Syria and the Palestinian leadership mocked American mediation attempts and the United States gave hardly a word of criticism.

Anti-Americans attributed US behaviour to cowardice in arguing that striking against America was a reasonable, practical, and successful way of getting what they wanted. They were wrong in their reading of US motives. But if America acted in this same manner instead out of a desire to prove to Arabs and Muslims that America was a friend and to win their support, the result could be the same.

The United States will not persuade its adversaries and critics that anti-Americanism is a mistake, a misunderstanding. Even if the United States were to pressure Israel, end sanctions on Iraq, pull its troops out of the Persian Gulf, and take other such steps, the Arab media, opposition, and even regimes will not praise it as a wonderful friend and noble example. Instead, these acts would be taken as signals of fear and weakness that encouraged contempt and make a campaign of anti-American terrorism seem irresistible.

Finally, the ferocity of anti-Americanism, in word or deed, will leave the longest-term, most lasting damage on the Arab world itself. The blaming of external forces blocks any serious effort by Arabs to deal with their own very serious internal problems and shortcomings that are the real causes of continuing dictatorship, violence and instability, relatively slow economic and social development, and other problems.