Press Room

AAI in the News

Activist: Iowans key to Mideast peace

By Steve Gravelle
The Gazette
Posted on Monday April 16, 2007

CEDAR RAPIDS – The dwindling chances of progress the Middle East may lie with Iowa political activists, according to the president of the Arab American Institute.

“The place where it starts is here, in the debate we have to have as Americans,” James Zogby said Sunday afternoon. “You really have to help America, and you have to help the rest of the world.”

Zogby, who founded the Arab American Institute in 1985, was in the state this weekend urging Iowans of Arab heritage to take advantage of its first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses to press candidates for a change in direction on foreign policy. Zogby’s tour included an hour-long address to about 50 people at Coe College in Cedar Rapids. He also was scheduled to speak last night in Iowa City.

“They all have to answer the questions,” even if their answers don’t square with his own positions, Zogby said. “I just want to be free enough to have a debate.”

The issue is critical as conditions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere deteriorate, Zogby said.

“Maybe for the first time, I can’t see the future as clearly as I’d want,” said Zogby, active in the Middle Eastern policy debate for 30 years. “It’s been clouded over by obstacles that have been created. I don’t see that Iraq can get any better. There are no easy answers to the damage that has been done by our leadership. We have dug a hole so deep in Iraq that I don’t see any way out.”

The only hope, Zogby said, is to shift American policy to take advantage of the residual good will toward American values that exists in Arab nations.

“They like our values, they like our people,” he said, noting the Planet Hollywood restaurant next door to his usual hotel in Saudi Arabia. “They even like our television programs. They want to know what happened to our sense of justice and fair play.”

While Zogby fiercely criticized the Bush administration’s policies, he doesn’t support an immediate withdrawal from Iraq.

“We owe more to the Iraqi people,” he said. “There was not an al-Qaida in Iraq before we invaded, and there is now