New York City>

IT OCCURED TO ME TODAY TO ASK "where are the Arab opposition groups?" Why is it that in almost every Arab country you look at -- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine -- the only opposition to the ruling monarchical kleptocracy in the area is an Islamic extremist group that seems even less palatable than the folks currently in charge.

Elsewhere in the world -- Iran, China, Burma, Zimbabwe -- wherever one finds repression one also finds some significant group of people fighting to build a free, democratic, secular, market-oriented society -- why not the Arab world? It's not something about the Arabs per se because the Iraqi National Congress (INC) is an opposition group of the sort I'm looking for.

I can think of a few possible reasons why I don't know of any decent oppositionists elsewhere in the Arab world. First off, there might be some, but I just don't know much about them. It's my feeling that if this is the case, then I'm hardly alone in my ignorance, so if you know of any, please let me know and help spread the world.

The second possibility (and the one that I fear is correct) is that the influence of oil companies on American policy lo these past fifty years has made America so reluctant to support even democratic opposition to the regimes of the Middle East that any young US-admirers in the region quickly became dissilusioned, leaving the field to fanatics. Iraq would be an exception on this point for the obvious reason that that's the only country in which we give any measure of support (even rhetorical support) for democratic change.

A third possibility is that Arabs really are culturally or temperamentally undemocratic and that it's only the beneficent influence of the Kurds that have created the Iraqi opposition we know and love (as a sidelight here it occurs to me to mention that the Iraqi opposition, while infinitely preferable to Saddam and all the other groups in the region isn't really all that it's sometimes cracked up to be by it's supporters).

What does all this mean? I don't really know. Going around and sponsoring the overthrow of all kinds of countries in the area doesn't sound very practical to me. As a start, though, I think it would be nice for the President to just speak out and say that he thinks the people of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Syria, Bahrain, etc. should get a chance to elect their leaders and that Islamic law should not be the law of the state even in a state most of whose inhabitants are Islamic. The we could just wait and see what the reaction would be.

It seems to me that America's weird disregard for the quality of the lives of the people in all the Arab states that do exist probably underlies at least as much anti-Americanism as our lack of support for Arafat. Maybe I'm wrong -- maybe no good would come of it -- but clearly whatever we've been doing for the past four or five decades hasn't worked very well.