GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - One recent Friday morning, Dr. Eyad Sarraj, a Palestinian human rights activist, offered this assessment of what the future holds for the Gaza Strip now that the Islamist group Hamas has taken control: "For two years, Gaza will suffer even more," said Sarraj, a British-trained psychiatrist who founded Gaza's mental health system. Then, he said, President Bush and his advisers will be gone. A new U.S. administration will talk to Hamas, and so will the Israelis.
"They'll have to," he said, "because they'll have seen that Hamas can deliver."
That calculus - that the end of the Bush administration is approaching and things will be different afterward - now underpins political thought throughout much of the Middle East. With 17 months to go in Bush's second term, political leaders in the region are anticipating his departure and preparing for change.
A series of interviews in the Middle East found a startling level of disappointment, disdain and distrust, even among people who, like Sarraj, profess to be friends of the United States or have strong ties to America.
In Cairo, Baghdad, Tel Aviv and the Gaza Strip, no one rose to the Bush administration's defense, not even those who think that a rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would lead to even worse sectarian bloodletting.
Although no single set of interviews can capture the full range of Middle East views, the widespread awareness that Bush will be gone soon augurs poorly for any new administration initiatives.
That might help explain the cool reception that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates received as they crisscrossed the region recently. The results were so disappointing that a lukewarm suggestion from Saudi Arabia that it might consider attending a U.S.-sponsored Middle East meeting was hailed as a breakthrough.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit pointedly mentioned the administration's end as he offered to support American endeavors in Iraq "regarding the upcoming period, which is the next 17 months, the life of the administration."
"No one likes American policy," said the senior diplomat of a Cairo-based Arab organization. The diplomat, who spoke only on condition of anonymity so that he could be frank, used the term "cut and run" to describe efforts in Congress to legislate a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq.
He ticked off the errors he sees in U.S. policy: "Democracy is not only a glass box and a queue," he said, describing Iraq's elections. "You cannot have ministries, each with its own militia," he said, referring to the distribution of Iraq's government by sect. "You cannot have a purge of Baath party members that turns into a general punishment," he said of the initial American efforts to ban members of Saddam Hussein's political party from government jobs.
A senior Israeli official sat silently for several seconds after he was asked which negotiating approach was most likely to lead to progress in peace talks with Israel's Arab neighbors. Then he laughed and, in flawless English, suggested to a colleague that he must not have understood the question. "I don't see any promising pathway," he said. "There is a huge gap between the rhetoric and what people believe."
The Israeli government understands that to have peace with Syria "means giving back the Golan Heights," the strategic high ground that Israel seized in 1967, and "we're willing to discuss it," he said. But with Bush insisting "from the Oval Office" that the U.S. won't talk to Syria, nothing can be expected. "The Syrians really want to talk to the United States," the official said.
