The widening gap and deepening holes of America’s foreign policy were illuminated by a leading Arab-American public policy adviser in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union on Tuesday night.

James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute, a public and political policy research institution for the Arab-American community, delivered a lecture titled “The Mess We’re In: How U.S. Leaders Have Failed Us in the Middle East and What You Can Do.”

Zogby’s lecture focused around the main point that the current U.S. administration and every major colonial power since World War I has misunderstood the history of the Middle East region and the history of its people, which has led to constant political strife and an ongoing tension that has only spiraled downward. There has also been a failure on the part of American history book writers who have failed to inform the U.S. of the history and culture of other people, he said.

“We never got it right. The mess we’re in didn’t start with George Bush. It’s older and deeper than that,” Zogby said.

Zogby talked about constant and consistent bad policy measures, beginning with the English and the French’s “carving up the Mid-East and dismembering of it,” which arbitrarily drew lines and put people of differing nationalities together inside borders drawn without regard to cultural boundaries.

“People woke up one day and they were suddenly Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, or Palestinian,” he said.

Zogby also talked about the “sphere of influence” the neo-conservative movement has had that pits “good versus evil” and isn’t about “accepting compromise with evil,” which has led the American image in the Middle East to wane.

“The polls show that they don’t hate our values, they hate our policies,” he said of the American image in the region. “They like everything about us but our policies, and that’s where the numbers drag down. Ultimately, it’s the overall feeling of the way we treat them [that] is where the numbers go down.”

Zogby pointed out that the rise of Islamic extremism in the region is of our own design, and our currently policies have only exacerbated the situation.

“[We knew they had weapons of mass destruction] because we sold it to them in the ’80s,” he said. “The next generation of the people who will hate us is being born on the streets of Baghdad right now.”

Zogby’s solutions were two-fold.

He suggested that to “get out of the hole that we are in,” we must first get all the nations that have a vested interest in Iraq to sit down and solve all problems concerning policy, since “it is not possible” to partition Iraq, he said.

The second part is more local – he suggested we as Iowans and Americans could elect officials who have an understanding of the region and can “get out responsibly.”

Students who came to hear the speech heard about the situation in Iraq and the surrounding region, with some ideas they may not have had known before.

“I don’t know much about the war, and I needed to know more about it. I found it to be very interesting,” said Beth Henderson, sophomore in pre-business