what the people say? we wanna live it up. what the people want? please deliver us

"Shibley Telhami has just released the results of the latest round of his six-nation surveys of Arab public opinion, his first since 2006 (covering Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE). All the usual disclaimers about survey research in the Arab world apply. Most headlines will focus on attitudes towards the United States (still, amazingly enough, not positive: 4% claim very favorable views of the US and 11% somewhat favorable - a next increase of 3% on the "somewhat" in the last two years) or the most admired leader (two Shia figures, Hassan Nasrullah (26%) and Mahmoud Ahmedenejad (10%), while Bashar al-Assad scores 16% - up from 2% in 2006, for some reason, and nobody else cracking double figures - bin Laden's 6% ties him with the most popular Western figure, Nicolas Sarkozy). As always, I find some of the internal questions more interesting, especially those which have been asked in consecutive surveys which give some trends.

The questions about Iraq reveal an intriguing combination of skepticism about the current state of affairs but a degree of conditional confidence about the future. There has been little rethinking of past opposition to the war or of its consequences: 81% say that the Iraqi people are worse off than before the war and only 2% say they are better off. Concerns about spreading Iranian power seem to have diminished in salience, however, compared with fears of instability: only 8% name "Iran is a more powerful state" as one of their two greatest concerns about Iraq, down from 15% in 2006, while 59% say "Iraq will remain unstable and spread instability in the region" (up from 42%)."
Abu Aardvark