“This is a horrible event. It badly damages America’s already weak image around the world. This is going to complicate American foreign policy, obviously, in the Islamic world, but will also complicate American foreign policy generally,” said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for Foreign Policy and Defense Studies at the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank.

The photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqi war prisoners will circulate through the Muslim world for years, and perhaps for decades. “This has permanently damaged America’s credibility, has permanently damaged its reputation. There is no way to overcome that,” Carpenter said.

Carpenter said that according to opinion polls taken late last month, 57 percent of the Iraqis wanted the US-led coalition forces to leave their country immediately. The United States was viewed favorably by only 23 percent of the Iraqis.

“That was before the scandal broke out, so I would think that the support among the Iraqis for the US-led mission is now even weaker than it was at that time,” Carpenter said. “I am certain that probably 80 to 85 percent of the Iraqis now regard the United States as occupiers, not liberators.”

With the abuse scandal, withering support among the Iraqis and all the other bad news coming from Iraq, it has certainly become much more difficult for the United States to move ahead with its ambitions for the Middle East, said Leon T. Hadar, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

President Bush hopes to put forward the Greater Middle East Initiative at the G-8 summit meeting next month to encourage economic and democratic reforms in the Middle East countries. Most Arab and Muslim countries, including the US allies Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have rejected such an initiative.

The abuse scandal will force the United States to change its strategy in Iraq and find a more viable one, Hadar said.

“The United Nations should be the main legitimate outside power that will provide security for the Iraqis until they can take charge of their interests. This is the only viable option at this point,” Hadar said, adding that the United States should also allow the international community, including European and Arab countries, to play a stronger role in Iraq.

“What the United States needs to do now is to find a formula that will come up with a clear, coherent exit strategy,” he stated. “The bottom line is that most Iraqis want the United States to eventually leave Iraq.”

Carpenter agreed that the United States should develop “a fairly rapid” exit strategy from Iraq and turn over “real power, not just nominal sovereignty” to an interim Iraqi government.

If the Bush administration goes in the opposite direction and pours in more troops into Iraq, the United States might repeat the same kind of mistakes as it made in Vietnam in the 1960s, Carpenter noted.

(Xinhua News Agency May 13, 2004)