The Arab World: The Fuse Grows Shorter

By Lisa Beyer.

Saddam Hussein may have figured it right if he was calculating that he could win on the Arab street even while losing in the skies and the sands of the gulf. Each day that the allies throw their best punches at him and leave him standing, Saddam's prestige among ordinary Arabs grows. And so does hatred of the U.S. and its coalition partners -- at least in certain quarters.

"The U.S. pretended to come to free Kuwait, but instead it is bombing the Iraqi people," says Mohammed Kamal, a Jordanian senator and former ambassador to Washington. Even in Saudi Arabia, many citizens, disturbed by the ferocity of the air strikes on Iraq and widespread expectations of a drawn-out conflict, harbor doubts about the wisdom of the war.

Even where attitudes have not changed much since the battle's onset, governments remain edgy. In Egypt, for instance, though opposition to the fight against Saddam remains limited to a relatively small group of leftists and fundamentalists, authorities cracked down hard on the first, small anti- U.S. demonstration, which occurred last week. When the participants refused to disperse, 200 riot police waded into the crowd and arrested a handful of protesters.

The stakes in the battle for public opinion are especially high in three places:

JORDAN

The King Speaks Out

From the beginning, Jordan's King Hussein has professed neutrality in the gulf confrontation, though by allied lights he has tilted toward Saddam. In an uncharacteristically sharp-tongued television address last week, the King appeared to abandon his balancing act and instead focused on blasting Baghdad's challengers. The war in the gulf, said Hussein, is "against all Arabs and Muslims, not only against Iraq." Its "real purpose," he went on, is to "destroy Iraq and rearrange" the Arab nation so as to put "its aspirations and resources under direct foreign hegemony." Such a speech, playing up the themes of Muslim unity and foreign designs on the region, sounded a lot like recent pronouncements from Baghdad.

Washington's public reaction to the King's outburst was mild at first. President Bush said the Jordanians had "made a mistake to align themselves so closely with Saddam," but added that he had tried to understand the pressures on King Hussein. By the next day it was clear that the President, who last Christmas sent King Hussein a card bearing the inscription "I'm still your friend!," had lost his patience. The Jordanians, Bush said, "seem to have moved over, way over into Saddam Hussein's camp." That, he said, "complicates" U.S.-Jordanian relations. The White House announced that it was considering withholding aid to Jordan, which was expected to total $55 million for 1991.

While those who know him say King Hussein is genuinely bitter that the U.S. attacked Iraq, his behavior is also clearly influenced by popular opinion in Jordan, which is avidly -- and almost uniformly -- pro-Saddam. Says Samuel Lewis, former U.S. ambassador to Israel: "The King is concentrating on riding his domestic tiger."

In the early days of the war, Amman was unexpectedly quiet, in part because of the efficiency of the police, who have stationed patrols along major roads to prevent unrest. Since the people and government in Jordan share the same position on the war, the friction that gives rise to protest is also reduced. In addition, the country's relatively free press serves as a vent for popular fury. Nonetheless, in recent weeks, extremists have shot at or set fire to several Western targets in Amman, including the French Cultural Center, a branch of the British Bank of the Middle East and a parked car belonging to the U.S. military attache.

The attacks caused no injuries but helped persuade the State Department two weeks ago to ask all 5,000 Americans still in Jordan to leave and to draw down the U.S. embassy in Amman to a skeletal staff. That only elicited more vituperation from Jordanians, many of whom believe the move was unwarranted and calculated to tarnish the country's reputation.

The massive scale of the allied bombings of Iraq has stunned and outraged many. "We thought Americans were civilized," says Sheik Muhammad al-Faiz, a prosperous landowner who lives south of Amman. "But now we see that they are savages." The fact that Jordanians have died in the attacks has further inflamed emotions. As of last week, 31 Jordanian trucks, which Amman says were carrying oil, had been hit on the Amman-Baghdad highway, killing seven of the drivers and wounding ten. Jordan officially protested to the U.S., which replied that it had good information that Iraqi war materiel was being moved in convoys containing civilian oil trucks, making them legitimate targets.

Meanwhile, Iraq's missile strikes on Israel, while militarily insignificant, have proved a political bonanza for Saddam among the Arab masses. "It was incredible to see Tel Aviv in a panic," says Amman businessman Ahmed Abdul Khaleq. "This is the strength of Saddam. For once, we can hit the Israelis."

SAUDI ARABIA

Qualms Among The Protected

In Saudi Arabia, Saddam has no following to speak of. The Saudis remain unwavering in their disdain for him and in their opposition to his invasion of Kuwait. Still, some Saudis are privately beginning to question the conduct of the war, Washington's motives for waging it and the consequences for Riyadh's future relations with other Arab states.

Many Saudis, naively, were shocked to learn that the war will be neither fast nor painless. "Truly this war is worse than Saddam," says a religious ; teacher in the Eastern province, expressing a level of dissent rarely heard in his tightly wrapped society. "The Americans are testing their weapons on our Arab people," he says. "They promised this would be quick and it is not."

The shifting objectives of the U.S. have raised suspicions. Some Saudis complain that first the Americans said they would use military might only to defend Saudi Arabia; then that they would use force to push Saddam from Kuwait; now they are making it plain that by pursuing targets deep inside Iraq, they also mean to emasculate the Iraqi military. Says a Saudi journalist: "I think they want to leave the Arab countries as weak as they can for the sake of Israel."

Some Saudis are also questioning the high profile of the U.S. in their country. "The Americans are running the government," grumbles a high-ranking industrial executive. "This is an occupying force here." Others are troubled by the long-term consequences of the U.S. presence. "The Islamic world will blame the Saudis," says an intellectual from Jiddah. "They will say, You're the ones who brought the Americans. No one will have respect for us in the Arab League."

Saudi Arabia's religious conservatives are particularly dismayed by the presence of non-Muslim soldiers in the kingdom and the destruction of a neighboring Arab country. Warns a prominent Saudi prince: "If the government does not sort them out" -- that is, contain their influence -- "then in ten years we will have a Khomeini-like regime." With this in mind, the government has arrested a number of Islamic activists.

THE MAGHREB

A Torrent of New Converts

While Jordanian antipathy to the war was expected, the reaction in the Maghreb was something of a surprise. There, pro-Iraqi passions have grown so strong that they threaten to destabilize the governments of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.

Sympathy for Saddam has been expressed most freely -- and violently -- in Algeria, whose reforms two years ago made it the most democratic of the North African countries. Soon after the war erupted, the opposition Islamic Salvation Front, which has unsuccessfully pressed the government to organize training camps for volunteers to fight for Iraq, led 400,000 people in a march through Algiers carrying signs such as MITTERRAND ASSASSIN. BUSH ACCOMPLICE. A follow-up rally two weeks ago attracted 60,000 people. In angrier manifestations of popular feeling, protesters in Constantine sacked part of the French consulate and set fire to the Air France office. In the capital, the bureau of the French news agency was fire bombed and a French teacher was beaten and stabbed.

Faced with such fervor, President Chadli Bendjedid has attempted to ride the popular wave so as not to be engulfed by it. Though he initially condemned Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, he proclaimed in a recent radio address, "Algeria stands at the side of its brother Iraq." At the same time, Bendjedid does not want to give carte blanche to the Islamic Salvation Front, which took a majority of the seats in the country's first municipal elections last June and could well dominate a parliamentary vote this spring. In a statement, the government denounced "those who, under the pretext of circumstantial solidarity with the Iraqi people, want to impose an Islamic dictatorship."

Like Bendjedid, Tunisia's President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali is trying to tack with the wind, but it is a fierce one. Support for Saddam has unnerved Ben Ali enough that he gave a speech condemning "the destruction and devastation of Iraq," which he said went "beyond the tolerable."

Tunisia has stepped up security patrols in the cities to prevent demonstrations. Unauthorized protests still occur every few days, to be broken up by police, often brutally. At the start of the conflict, Ben Ali had the leaders of Ennahdha, the principal Islamic organization, rounded up and jailed. Uncowed, another group, the clandestine Islamic Liberation Party, proclaimed a holy war to chase the "miscreant" Westerners from the gulf.

Popular sentiment has forced Morocco's King Hassan II to make an even sharper turnabout than his Algerian and Tunisian counterparts. Grateful for generous Saudi aid in his war against the Polisario Front rebels in the Western Sahara, Hassan contributed 1,300 troops to the allied coalition. But when opposition parties and trade unions declared a general strike two weeks ago to denounce the war, the King, having measured the mood of the country, allowed the protest to take place.

Hassan also agreed to permit a pro-Iraqi march last week. Attracting 300,000 people, it was the biggest demonstration since Morocco's independence in 1956. Although the King had forbidden criticizing the deployment of Moroccan troops to the gulf, some marchers did so anyway, in an unusual display of defiance in a country as tightly controlled as theirs. An estimated 25,000 Islamic fundamentalists brought up the rear of the march in the most organized manifestation of their strength ever seen in the country.

The greatest danger for the leaders of all these countries -- short of a well-aimed terrorist's bullet -- is that the humiliation of a Muslim leader at the hands of infidels, particularly a leader who dared to confront Israel, will fuel religious extremism. "This is a religious war," says Khaled Saleh Khlefat, a Koranic teacher in Jordan. "It will promote Islamic nationalism throughout the Muslim world."

The bitter irony is that even Saddam's followers recognize him as a thoroughly secular man who uses religion only when it is expedient. It is a testament to the power of Islamic solidarity that such a prodigal son can draw the Muslim ranks around him in a crisis that he provoked.

With reporting by Margot Hornblower/Paris, Lara Marlowe/Dhahran and James Wilde/Amman