Flynt Leverett, who was a counterterrorism analyst on the Policy Planning Council in Colin Powell’s State Department, and senior director for Middle East affairs from 2002 to 2003 on the National Security Council, says the United States’ standing in the Middle East has fallen sharply because of the perception in the region that the United States is now “an occupier.” He says this started after the first Gulf War when U.S. forces were based in Saudi Arabia, and persists because of the Iraq war. He says the “formula” for ending this is to promote stability in the area, including a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, and to be willing to hold comprehensive talks with all the parties in the region with everything on the table.

Q: The United States is held in very low esteem in the Middle East these days according to every conceivable poll. What’s caused this?

Mr. Leverett: A principal reason for the decline in America’s perceived standing in the region stems from the war on terror, which had very substantial support in the region, and internationally as well, when it was launched. But when we shifted course from a fairly directed campaign against al-Qaeda and its Taliban supporters in Afghanistan and moved to Iraq, we lost a significant measure of support in the region. The way the Iraq war unfolded, with a prolonged U.S. occupation coming in the aftermath of the war, seriously hurt the United States in the region, and is really the principal grievance. It is the perception of occupation, and at this point, remarkably, the grievance is not occupation of Palestinians by Israelis, or other Arabs by Israelis, it is occupation by the United States.

This grievance did not begin immediately in the post-9/11 period, but is a problem we have faced ever since the first Gulf War, when, rather than revert to the “over the horizon” military posture from which we had fought the first Gulf War, we made a commitment to keeping significant numbers of forces on the ground in Saudi Arabia and in other places in the Gulf region. That began to create this sense of America as occupier.

Once we went into Iraq—and we are now into the fourth year, of a seemingly very open-ended occupation of a major Arab state—the perception of the United States as occupier has gone through the roof. That’s a very important reason for the decline in American standing.

Q: The U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia was started in the Clinton administration, so you are saying both parties are responsible for the decline in American popularity?

Mr. Leverett: The extent of the mistakes that have been made by this administration certainly exceeds that of its predecessors, but the Clinton administration made many of the same mistakes. Not going back to an over-the-horizon posture in the 1990s was a fundamental mistake. ...

Flynt Leverett is a Senior Fellow with New America Foundation and Director of the Geopolitics of Energy Project. For the complete article, please visit the Council on Foreign Relations website.