”His image put up more resistance than he did,” said a commentator in the leftwing Beirut newspaper al-Safir, referring to those symbolic moments in Firdaus Square, Baghdad, when an American tank recovery vehicle came to the assistance of the jubilant Iraqis trying to topple the giant statue of Saddam Hussein.
What many Arabs see as the craven, ignominious, completely selfish manner of his going has only added contempt to the other emotions they feel — anger, despair, exasperation, and a profound sense of impotence — at the larger meaning of the cataclysm.
And it appears that for almost all of them, except of course the Iraqis themselves, the meaning is bleak indeed.
”April 9 2003: The Second Catastrophe,” ran the front-page headline of the Beirut daily al-Kifah al-Arabi, the first ”catastrophe” being the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.
Al-Anwar went further back, to the collapse of the Ottoman empire when, reneging on its promise to give the Arabs their freedom, Britain conquered and occupied Iraq. ”It is as if at the beginning of the 21st century,” it said, ”our fate is to fight again for the independence that we first gained in the course of the 20th.”
Others set Saddam Hussein’s downfall against the backdrop of all the high endeavours of modern times: the pursuit of national dignity after centuries of foreign domination; social justice and material progress; the unification of an Arab world which the colonialists had divided.
One-time ”revolutionary” movements such as Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party were the standard-bearers of this ”national liberation project”.
Its supreme task, the proof of its success, was to have been the ”liberation” of Palestine from the Zionists.
But now, with this new ”catastrophe”, what is left of Palestine is expected to suffer yet further reverses, or so everyone fears. For the hawks of the Bush administration hardly disguise their ambition to make ”liberated” Iraq into the fulcrum of a new Israel-friendly regional order.
The Arabs note that the Israelis are rejoicing that the regional balance of power has shifted dramatically in their favour, that after Baghdad others, starting perhaps with Damascus, will become targets for regime change, or at least a very serious, US-enforced change of attitude.
The Iraqi defeat was seen as all but inevitable from the outset. But it was at least expected that Saddam, the man who cast himself as a latter-day Saladin and vowed to make Baghdad the graveyard of the ”aggressors” in a second ”mother of battles”, would go down fighting.
In the earlier stages of the war Arabs found some solace in such resistance as there was to the invaders; some crumbs of comfort in the fact that the ”uprising” on which the ”liberators” were counting had signally failed to materialise; some pride in the Arab volunteers who went to the defence of this threatened province of the greater Arab homeland.
But glorious last stand there was not to be.
Even the Iraq opposition, contemptuous though it was of Saddam Hussein, had expected better than this. As Ali Allawi, one of its leaders, put it: ”We thought he was drawing the coalition forces into a closed ring of defence in Baghdad. But there was no strategy. It was the bluster of a cheap dictator who has been terrorising people for years.”
As if his shabby exit were not bad enough, there was also the spectacle that accompanied it: the Iraqi people finally erupting with joy and hosannas of gratitude for George Bush and Tony Blair.
This was perhaps the unkindest cut of all. While the rest of the Arab world was decrying the Anglo-American ”aggression”, here were the Iraqis, supposedly its victims, rejoicing in it, or at least in the one thing — the downfall of the tyrant — that they wanted of it.
Disgust
”Baghdad did not fall a martyr while resisting,” the Amman daily al-Arab al-Yaum lamented, ”and its women ululated like Palestinian mothers when their sons are martyred by Israeli gunfire.”
Some Arab viewers turned off their television sets in disgust at the spectacle.
The gulf that may now widen between Iraqis and other Arabs is a product of a moral and political confusion apparent long before the war.
In opposing military intervention the Arabs had been opposing the wishes of those, the Iraqis themselves, most directly concerned and with greatest right to the decisive voice in their own future.
And the Iraqis had always wanted to be rid of Saddam Hussein, and did not much care about the means: the joy in Firdaus Square was perhaps the best proof of it.
The Arabs now fear the worst; their newspapers are full of gloomy predictions that a puppet regime will be established in Baghdad and it will soon be fulfilling the pro-Israeli wishes of its American puppet-masters. What, they ask, is to be expected of such an avowed admirer of Ariel Sharon as the new military governor of Iraq?
Whether the predictions prove true or false, the lack of sympathy which the Arab regimes displayed towards the Iraqis during their long night of despotism is one reason why Iraqis may willingly distance themselves from Arabs and Arab causes.
But most Arabs clearly do acknowledge that it was the sheer awfulness of Saddam Hussein’s regime, combined with the neo-imperial ambitions of the Americans, that brought this Arab catastrophe about.
Some say it was unique in its depravity, that its fate is not a precedent for others in the region. ”We can’t compare it,’ the Saudi columnist Jamal Kashoggi said, ”with Iran or Egypt or Saudi Arabia. His was a regime outside history.”
Others contend that it was just the worst of a very bad lot. ”All the Arab rulers are now more than ever hated by the people,” said Leila Qadi, a Lebanese researcher, ”and when their turn comes their people will celebrate it just like the Iraqis did Saddam’s. And I think some of them are now trembling on their seats.” – Guardian Unlimited Â