Four in five say Bush a failure

Two-thirds of people in the Middle East categorise attempts by US president George W. Bush to improve business and diplomatic relations between the US and the Middle East as an “abject failure”, the latest ArabianBusiness.com survey has revealed.

Bush, who is in Abu Dhabi on Sunday to deliver the key address of a whirlwind regional tour, has built much of his political platform on his ability to advance freedom and democracy in the Middle East and to strengthen US ties to the region.

But 80% of respondents to the survey feel that the president's contributions to Middle East business and diplomacy have been a resounding failure.

Almost one-fifth of those polled believe Bush “oversimplified the issues and created many more problems than he solved”, describing the president's contributions to regional politics as a “mitigated failure”.

A further two-thirds of respondents believe there are no mitigating factors to the president’s misadventures in the Middle East, characterising his intervention as an “abject failure” and that "it would have been better if the US had just not got involved".

Responses to a similar poll on the ArabianBusiness.com Arabic website was even more scathing, with more than 80% calling Bush’s diplomatic and military exercises in the region an "abject failure" and only one in twenty saying his ambitions in the Middle East yielded any kind of success, mitigated or qualified.

Results of the poll come at a time when tensions between the US and Iran are at boiling point following a spat in the Strait of Hormuz leading up to the president’s arrival in Israel on January 9, and ongoing political friction concerning Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

The president, who used the first leg of his tour to declare Iran a “threat to world peace”, received a mixed reception when he flew to Bahrain, home of the US navy’s fifth fleet, on Saturday.

Bahrain’s King Hamad hailed the US as “a friend, an ally and a partner” while protestors outside carried banners reading “Get out of Bahrain, criminal”, “No to the US military presence in Bahrain”, and “America cares for oil, not democracy”.

The tour, in which includes stops in Israel, Palestine, Bahrain, the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, ends on January 16.

Many view Bush’s tour as a last ditch effort to make a positive contribution to the Middle East before he steps down at the end of this year.

Bush's previous endeavours in the region, such as the Iraq war, have drawn heavy international criticism and have seen the president’s approval ratings at home drop to the second worst in history for a US president.