Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2005 Taken from the

9
•
Many Arabs are against a war against Iraq
because …
a
•
is an attack on them.
b
•
in order to bring in democracy and human rights.
c
•
it has a culture of religious extremism.
d
•
it is the centre of pan-Arab nationalism and
political Islam.
e
•
they don’t believe the Americans want to bring in
democracy in Iraq.
f
•
they have many social and economic problems.
g
•
they hate the US even more than before.
h
•
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the possible
war against Iraq.
i
•
the Arab-Israeli conflict is the basic cause of their
problems.
3 Vocabulary Work
Find the opposites of these words in the text:
1
•
success
2
•
rise
3
•
love
4
•
internal
5
•
brighter
6
•
capable
7
•
friendly
8
•
anti-American
9
•
moderation
10
•
unwilling

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‘America wants to wage war on all of us’
Level 2 | 
Intermediate
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2
4 Word Building
Complete the table:
Verb Noun
1
•
feel
__________
2
•
fail
__________
3
•
aspire
__________
4
•
promote
__________
5
•
disagree
__________
Verb Noun
6
•
believe
__________
7
•
prefer
__________
8
•
remind
__________
9
•
impose
__________
10
•
remove
__________
5 Collocations
Fill the gaps using an appropriate preposition.
Check your answers in the text.
1
•
began ______
2
•
incapable ______
3
•
in favour ______
4
•
talk ______
5
•
expert ______
6
•
reminder ______
7
•
in danger ______
8
•
impose ______
9
•
at the expense ______
10
•
apply ______
Is it right for the Americans to impose their own solutions on the Middle East?
What are the arguments for and against a war against Iraq?
6 Discussion

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‘America wants to wage war on all of us’
Level 2 | 
Intermediate
4
1 Find the question
1 Nasser
2 Cairo
3 As an attack on themselves
4 In order to bring in democracy,
human rights and accountability
5 The Arab-Israel conflict
6 Iraq
2 Comprehension
1d; 2h; 3g; 4a; 5f; 6b; 7i; 8c; 9e
3 Vocabulary Work
1 failure
2 decline
3 hate
4 external
5 darker
6 incapable
7 hostile
8 pro-American
9 extremism
10 willing
4 Word Building
1 feeling
2 failure
3 aspiration
4 promotion
5 disagreement
6 belief
7 preference
8 reminder
9 imposition
10 removal
5 Collocations
1 with
2 of
3 of
4 about
5 on
6 of
7 of
8 on
9 of
10 to
6 Key

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‘America wants to wage war on all of us’
Level 3 | 
Advanced
1
1 Pre-reading | Key Terms
Match these terms with their meanings:
1. to take the pulse of
a. a cruel and violent act
2. the aftermath
b. to be the best example of something
3. an atrocity
c. a violent attack
4. to boil down to
d. to measure/ to gauge
5. an assault
e. without the necessary resources
6. to embody
f. the effects and results of something
7. ill-equipped g. very 
basic 
8. to give rise to
h. to cause
9. root and branch
i. obviously and without shame
10. blatantly
j. to be the main reason for something
T
here is no better place to take the
pulse of Arab and Muslim
sentiment than Cairo, hub of the
two great movements that swept the
region in recent times, the pan-Arab
secular nationalism of which President
Nasser was the champion, and the
“political Islam” that began with
Nasserism’s failure and decline.
Today, from the air-conditioned
thinktanks on the banks of the Nile to
the sweltering alleyways of the splendid
but dilapidated medieval city, the
preoccupation with the two things that
seem most fateful for the future - the
Israeli-Palestinian struggle and US plans
for a possible war against Iraq - is
overwhelming.
“Bin Laden may have lost a lot of his
appeal,” says Dia Rashwan, an expert
on Islamist fundamentalism, “but that
doesn’t mean the US isn’t hated. It is,
more than ever, and more now from an
Arab than an Islamic standpoint.” It is
much darker for most Arabs than it
might have appeared in the immediate
aftermath of that apocalyptic atrocity in
New York and Washington. One year on,
it seems clearer to them in its
consequences.
As they see it, the US’s post-September
11 “war on terror” now boils down to
an assault on them. For in the Bush
universe of good versus evil, it is
essentially they, with Iran thrown in,
who are the evil ones. In the
collision to come, the Arabs risk further
blows to all those aspirations -
independence, dignity, the unity and
collective purpose of the greater Arab
“nation” - which, after centuries of
foreign conquest and control, the pan-
Arabism of Nasser so triumphantly, if
defectively, embodied. Internally they are
ill-equipped to meet the external
challenge, racked as they are by all
manner of social, economic, cultural and
institutional
sicknesses. These, the US says, are the
very conditions that gave rise to Bin
Ladenism. Few Arab opinion-makers
would dispute it, or doubt their
societies’ desperate need of root-and-
branch reform, ushering in democracy,
human rights, accountability.
“For us”, says Muhammad Said, a
columnist at Egypt’s leading newspaper,
al-Ahram, “the West always preferred
control to democracy. Now 90% of the
problem flows from the Arab-Israel
conflict, that continuous reminder of our
colonised past.” Never before, in Arab
eyes, has the US acted so blatantly in
favour of Israel. So the Arab world, says
‘America
wants to
wage war 
on all of us’
Arabs see regime change not as
cure for political backwardness
but as new term for old enemy:
colonisation

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