Saddam and the Arabs: The Devil in the Hero

By LANCE MORROW

The figure of Satan flickers through the rhetoric of the Middle East. The Arabic language likes to inflate politics with supernatural meanings: a mere mortal enemy -- George Bush, for example, or the West -- may be transformed into the Great Satan. The phrase has moral and dramatic clarity. It is a bright blade of denunciation flashing on a battlefield of absolutes. But it is difficult for Arabs to use such a weapon against a mortal friend -- against a brother.

What are Arabs to do with Saddam Hussein? What are they to think if they see the devil in the hero, the thug tricked up as a Pan-Arabist dreamer? In considering Saddam, many Arabs are sorting out complexities in themselves. They are formulating an attitude toward their collective past and future, toward the Arabs' place in the world. The exercise does not leave them entirely happy.

Many Arabs despise Saddam, condemn his invasion of Kuwait and welcome the coalition's war against him. They know that in his blood-drenched career, Saddam has acted truly, not metaphorically, satanic. It is reported, credibly, that in the evening, before bed, he has been in the habit of watching a video of an execution that he ordered, preferably one carried out that day. He is apparently conscienceless, a murderer of Caligulan whimsy. In August 1979, during a purge of his Baath Party, Saddam arranged this scene, reported by a former Iraqi Cabinet member: "The party officials were handed machine guns. One by one the guards brought in the accused, their mouths taped shut, and their hands bound. Saddam asked everyone to start shooting. At least 21 were killed, and every victim received at least 500 bullets in his body."

But Saddam also represents the yearnings of the Arab people: a defiant assertion of dignity, unity and honor. He has given fierce expression to the emotions of many Arabs on matters that mean the most to them: opposition to foreign domination, the achievement of a kind of moral parity with the West, just distribution of Arab oil wealth, settlement of the Palestinian problem, the purity of Islam. He leads the Baath Party, whose name means renaissance. So powerful are these emotions that millions of ordinary Arabs, from factory workers to university professors, are willing to tolerate Saddam's otherwise evil performance -- his despotism that permits no freedom, his sacrifice of thousands of young lives to advance his ambitions, even his use of chemical weapons against his own people.

In a universe of sometimes incapacitating grievance, a practical Arab future opening onto a larger world, onto a new century, may be more difficult to imagine than a romantic past. The past has a powerful, seductive glory. It seamlessly encloses itself within fundamentalist Islamic virtue. It mobilizes the mind for a classic conflict of Islam vs. the West, that historical cliche -- the sword of Islam against the last crusade.

To cast Saddam merely as a gangster is to misunderstand not only why he invaded Kuwait but also why he has gained so much popular support among the "Arab masses." Saddam's propaganda variously portrays him as Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian King who destroyed Jerusalem in 587 B.C., or as Saladin, the Kurdish warrior who fought off the Crusaders.

Saddam also fancies himself as an Arab version of Otto von Bismarck. In ! Europe more than 100 years ago, the Iron Chancellor fused German-speaking principalities into one mighty nation. Saddam remembers as well his patron Gamel Abdel Nasser, who organized Arab pride and resentment against Western hegemony. Saddam's ambition has been to use Iraqi muscle and achievement to unite the Arabs and thereby re-create the vast Abbasid Empire, which lasted 500 years. In that sense, the war in the gulf is transpiring in a time warp. It is a retrospective vision.

Centuries of foreign domination have left Arabs with a sense of violation, of second-class status. When communism collapsed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, the feeling of vulnerability deepened. Arabs found themselves without strategic allies to help them counter Israel's -- and, by extension, America's -- power. George Bush's new world order did not seem to promise much for the Arabs, who militarily remain weaker than Israel. Saddam's answer -- standing up to the world's only superpower -- thus struck a chord within the Arab psyche.

"We all hate Saddam," explains an Iraqi woman. "But it was you, the United States, that made us support him when you sent your troops to Arab soil to attack an Arab country." An Arab diplomat says, "He anticipated and welcomed some U.S. reaction. That's part of his strategy for making himself bigger. When you have a strong enemy, that makes you stronger."

With a certain brutal genius, Saddam has worked three Arab themes: poverty, Palestinians and piety. The Aug. 2 heist of Kuwait harmonized with the profound resentments that many Arabs harbor in regard to the oil sheiks. "People do not like the Kuwaitis," a Cairene named Mohammed Fawzy said last week. "The Kuwaitis are always in the nightclub and casino. All they think about is money. They think they can buy anything." The mass of Arabs recoil from the injustice of oil wealth that buys Scotch and an opulent life for the sheiks' Cairo holidays during Ramadan and leaves so many of their brothers in poverty and squalor. A Moroccan journalist remarks, "I don't care if he is a fascist. At least he doesn't gamble and chase women." Many Arabs admire Saddam for his hazem, a sort of relentless strictness, although the image is at odds with a more secular impression that Iraq made until Saddam began shading his nation and himself toward fundamentalism. Last week, in a gesture of piety and defiance, Saddam ordained that Allahu akbar (God Is Great) should be sewed into the Iraqi tricolor flag.

Saddam appeals to an obscure, almost magic sense of inevitability among some Arabs. Jordanians last week were recalling a popular but apocryphal tale that contains a prophecy. It is written that the Bedouin of Arabia, together with the Franks (Westerners) and Egypt will gather in the desert against a man called Sadam (sic), and they will all be killed, and none will escape. This will happen between the second half of December and the second half of February.

Many Arabs believe the text predicts the destruction of the enemies of Saddam Hussein. Ahmad Oweidi Abbadi, chairman of the Jordanian National Front, a member of Parliament and chief of one of the largest nomadic tribes in the country, quotes the prophecy with a glare in his hawkish eyes. "We Arabs are proud of our dignity," he says. "Saddam talks about the things we feel. The U.S. will win the battle but lose the war. Both Arab Christians and Muslims want a jihad against America, against the U.K. and the Jews. The citizens of every nation fighting against Iraq will be in danger -- those with blue eyes and a red face. You Westerners are keen to live. We are keen to die because we go to paradise. As the U.S. destroys Iraq, it will give birth to the jihad that will destroy the West."

Arabs cling to their spiritual distinctiveness: it gives them, they think, a metaphysical edge in the long haul. Moraiwid M. Tal, brother of the assassinated (by Black September) Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi Tal, says, "Saddam is a Muslim fatalist, though he is a secular Arab and a nationalist. You in the West believe man can shape his destiny. We in Islam believe God controls our destinies."

In the Arab countries where support for Saddam is strongest, U.S. embassies have been drawn down to skeleton staffs. Saddam's strongest support is in Jordan, with its majority Palestinian population and a powerful fundamentalist movement. Western diplomats are worried that the U.S. embassy in Amman could be torched and American citizens in the kingdom targeted for terrorism or violence. There is growing concern that King Hussein might be unable to control the streets of his capital.

Yemen and Sudan have recently tried to distance themselves from Saddam, but there is substantial popular support for him in both countries. The radicalism and fundamentalism sweeping through the politics of the Maghreb have put Americans at some risk in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. Mauritania, where Saddam has test-fired missiles in the past, is considered dangerous territory for U.S. citizens. Ironically, of the five Maghreb nations, only Libya appears to be relatively safe for Americans, most of whom live and work, in violation of U.S. government regulations, in oil fields far from urban centers.

Apart from Jordan, with its pronounced Palestinian coloration, most of the Arab countries where Saddam has popular support are economically impoverished and tending toward political radicalism.

In the Arab nations backing the coalition, sentiment is mixed. In Syria, Saddam is believed to have widespread support -- despite the brute personal animosity toward Saddam that moved President Hafez Assad to join the anti- Saddam alliance. Assad's ruthless secret police keep popular support for Saddam muted.

Much of Egypt's vast population of 55 million survives barely above the level of subsistence and would seem an ideal constituency for Saddam. Yet notwithstanding the presence of radical and fundamentalist sentiment, his appeal there is limited. One reason is the bitter experience of thousands of Egyptian laborers maltreated in Iraq at the hands of their employers; hundreds are believed to have been killed. Another reason may be the strong leadership of Hosni Mubarak. By supporting the U.S. and Saudi Arabia against Saddam, Mubarak won considerable financial benefits. Both nations have forgiven billions in Egyptian debts, for example.

In addition, by stirring up trouble in the Middle East, Saddam has been a disaster for the Egyptian tourist trade, an immense business and an important source of income. "He is a very bad man," says the manager of an elegant furniture store in a Cairo bazaar. "It is not a way to act, for one Arab brother to attack another, as Saddam attacked Kuwait. If everybody did this, what would our region be like?" A woman who claims to be one of only two female licensed cabdrivers in Egypt is blunt about Saddam: "He is a very dirty man. He is destroying everything." Then she hurries home to watch the latest episode of Falcon Crest, which is a popular Western intrusion in the life of Cairo.

In the gulf states, sentiment in favor of Saddam is scarce. Complaints about the local rulers' opulence and corruption are endemic, but people still regard Saddam as a much greater threat to their well being than kings and emirs.

Virtually all Arabs feel a kind of residual kinship with Saddam because of ! their common cultural ties. But they react to him in markedly different ways. In their profound and continuing frustration, many of the Palestinians are instinctively attracted to Saddam. That seems odd in at least one way: the Palestinians might be expected to sympathize more with the Kuwaitis, as Arabs displaced from their homeland. Instead, most identify with Saddam's aggressions and his determination to get even with Israel.

The future of Saddam probably depends upon two factors: 1) how long the war goes on, and 2) whether, or how, Israel becomes involved. In a short war, Saddam in Arab psychology might be dispensable -- a humiliated failure when the Arab cause needed a triumphant hero, not a martyr. But if the battle is prolonged, if Arab casualties mount, if television cameras show the bodies of Iraqi civilians blasted by American bombs, then Arabs will recoil in even greater anger from the U.S. and the others in the coalition. Even in defeat, Saddam could emerge stronger still.

With reporting by David Aikman/Cairo and Scott MacLeod/Amman