Pew: Arabs and Iran

The 2006 Pew Global Attitudes report is out - I had seen some of these numbers a little bit ago, but they were embargoed until now.   Lots of interesting stuff in there, as usual - I'll focus here on the two Arab countries were surveyed this time, Jordan and Egypt.   

All in all, the Pew surveys aren't showing much evidence of greater success in public diplomacy - if you think that these surveys should be such a metric (I don't think they should be but inevitably will be... kind of like the US News college rankings.  I'll elaborate on that in a forthcoming paper, not now.)  Favorable opinions of the US in Jordan have dropped back to 15% (from 21% last year), while 30% of Egyptians expressed favorably opinions of the US - which seems a bit high to me, but who am I to argue with the gold standard of international survey research?   Well, it seems a bit high to me.  16% of Jordanians "support the US war on terror" - up from 12% in 2005, suggesting a 4% "Zarqawi bump" after the Amman hotel bombings.  Only 10% of Egyptians support the US war on terror - which again makes that 30% favorable rating look odd.   Only 10% of Egyptians and 16% of Jordanians (familiar numbers, no?) think that the war in Iraq made the world safer.   

There's a lengthy section of the report about the Iran question which is quite relevant to my research into Arab attitudes towards Iran.  42% of Jordanians and Egyptians alike support Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. 39% of Egyptians and 51% of Jordanians have favorable views of Iran in general.  And only 26% of Egyptians and 22% of Jordanians express some or a lot of confidence in Ahmednejad personally - better than Bush, but rather lower than their confidence in Chirac or Haifa Wehbi.  Those numbers suggest real limits to the allegedly great enthusiasm for Ahmednejad among the Arab public.  On the other hand, only 14% of Egyptians and 19% of Jordanians see Iran as a threat to world peace (the US in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rate far higher).  57% of Egyptians and 67% of Jordanians think that Iran would only use nuclear weapons defensively... but at the same time 65% of Jordanians and 61% of Egyptians think that Iran would use them to attack Israel. 

Comments

[raf*]

ya AA,

do you (or anyone else perusing this blog) have a link to that gallup poll on muslim women recently touted across the news media? so far, the articles i've read in papers like the n.y.t. are rather uninformative.

thanks.

--raf*

www.aqoul.com

[Craig]

57% of Egyptians and 67% of Jordanians think that Iran would only use nuclear weapons defensively... but at the same time 65% of Jordanians and 61% of Egyptians think that Iran would use them to attack Israel

Yeah. Defensivly destroy Israel, eh? That's why they don't think Iran is a threat to world peace too. They view Israel as the threat to world peace.

Really wihs you'd drop the whole "public diplomacy" thing. If that's your field, you should probably change it, no? There's no such thing. It's an art that involves creating false impressions of reality. We don't need false impressions, we need to deal with the truth. We had enough BS about how "well liked" we were in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

I reacll in October 2001 when the first such poll results were realesed, and the US was seen unfavorably by over 60% of KUWAITIS (and that was the best score) how shocked and dismayed the journalists reporting the story were. You know, because they'd been repeating the good news that we were so well liked in the ME to their American audiences.

Look at your reader, Nur. She wants all white people and all christians dead. Flat out. What good is public diplomacy, with somebody like her?

[the aardvark]

raf - I've seen the Gallup data, but don't think it's online anywhere. Sorry. It's really high quality stuff, though, all face to face interviews and a very interesting battery of questions. I hope it gets released soon.

[raf*]

dear AA,

i do hope that the report gets released soon, too. so far, the various articles about it have been pretty crappy & used to paint a kind of "the so-called 'oppressed' muslim women are actually quite happy with their lot" picture. kind of like that meeting karen hughes had with saudi women when they all protested her idea that women in k.s.a. might be treated like 2nd-class citizens.

so ... the full data (& the questions) would be nice to have.

cheers,

--raf*

[Philip Grant]

More very anecdotal evidence from Yemen on Arabs and Iran. I watched the Iran-Mexico game in the World Cup (football, or soccer if you insist) with about three thousand Yemeni men on a big screen in a Sana'a stadium: about fifty people cheered the first Mexican goal, five the second and a similar number the third; everyone cheered the Iranian goal with great enthusiasm, and there was a lot of whistling with displeasure when the match finally ended with Iran soundly defeated. Also, watching an earlier game on the ART channel (I think part of al Arabiyya) the commentator twice, in announcing that the next game would be Iran-Mexico, wished the Iranians good luck, once calling them "the Middle Eastern representative". Generally only Saudi Arabia and Tunisia generate more enthusiasm on the part of Arab commentators; and as might be expected given Saudi dominance of pan-Arab media ownership, there is a definite bias in favour of the Saudi team.

Of course this should all be taken with a large pinch of salt. I have watched quite a few games so far, and although Saudi and Tunis have not yet played (they play each other today), no team generates quite as much enthusiasm here in Yemen as Brazil - star-studded and glamorously talented, and resolutely unArab and unIslamic.

[Bob]

If you're really interested it looks like you can sign up for their 30 day free trial and see the poll. Not sure what all's attached string-wise.

Here's the link: http://poll.gallup.com/content/default.aspx?ci=22180&pg=1
-Bob Saccamanno

[jinnilyyah]

double shukran, bob! that works great. ;)

[raf*]

dear bob,

that's a different poll.

cheers,

--raf*

www.aqoul.com

[SP]

Here's a piece from the Guardian that suggests Iran didn't so much seek Arab support or leadership of the Middle East as have it thrust upon it:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1801867,00.html