`If the U.S. hits Iraq, no Arab ruler would be able to curb the fury of the people. I fear a state of disorder and chaos.” So predicted Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak last month. It is a cautionary note delivered by one Arab leader after another. Attack Iraq, they say, and it is we, your allies, who will be destabilized because of the inevitable and uncontrollable eruptions of the “Arab street.”
Actually, these authoritarian rulers are uncomfortable with one of their own getting kicked out of power. It sets a bad precedent. And if under American prompting, some form of a democratic order emerges from the post-Saddam Hussein political debris, then that’s doubly troubling.
Nevertheless, as someone who grew up in Iraq and who follows Iraqi and Arab politics closely, I suspect their fear of a possible explosion of the Arab street (mostly young males who gather in “spontaneous” demonstrations) is probably genuine. Much of it is fanned by the strident rhetoric in the Arab media and by Islamist and other ideologically entrenched activists. “The gates of hell will open,” opined Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League and ex-foreign minister of Egypt.
Moussa is given to hyperbole, but the truth is, there exists an expectation of widespread demonstrations in Arab countries against an American action in Iraq.
In all of this, there is little mention of Saddam Hussein; it is after all, no longer politically chic to publicly defend the “Butcher of Baghdad.” So the focus is on the plight of the Iraqi people, and how these poor folk would endure more suffering in the event of an American invasion. Whether this concern is genuine, it is time that we in the West stop being taken in by the threatened hazards of the Arab street.
One thing is certain: Any eruptions in Arab cities will be silenced immediately by the enthusiastic support that will come our way from the Iraqi street. Hussein’s Arab admirers are apt to look silly demonstrating against an action that finds great favor among the Iraqi people. One wonders what spin Al Jazeera TV would put on such an awkward conundrum.
Hussein and his apologists have made much of the suffering of Iraqis under sanctions, and have painted Iraq’s human misery as the result of American callousness. But in Iraq the take is different. After all, it is the Iraqis who have endured the barbarism of Hussein’s killers and torturers; it is the Iraqis who every day under the sanctions regime contrast their desolate existence with the obscene abundance in which Hussein, his family, and his cronies live.
The ever-ruthless Hussein has prudently cast more than a weary eye toward the seething resentments of his Iraqi street. The countrywide celebrations of his 65th birthday last April, in which no expense was spared even though his spokesmen continued to lament Iraq’s malnourished children, had one important item missing: the birthday boy himself. Hussein deemed it unsafe to be out amongst his own people. Similarly, during last month’s extensive military parades commemorating Iraq’s “victory” over Iran, the “victorious leader” was nowhere to be seen except in the safe surroundings of his own TV studio, buried deep in one of his many bunkers.
It is uncanny how many Iraqis have told me the following story about Saddam’s own assessment of his chances for survival: After his monstrous son, Udday, killed a member of a prominent Iraqi tribe, Hussein summoned the elders of the tribe and offered them generous monetary compensation in lieu of the age-old eye for an eye tribal maxim. Observing the sullen faces around him, Hussein reportedly told them, “You’re thinking you’ll wait until I’m weak, then you’ll get here and exact your revenge. But that will never happen, because if I ever get weak I know that by the time you get to me, I and every member of my family will already have been butchered into a thousand pieces.”
This weakness that Saddam Hussein fears and Iraqis fervently hope for will be triggered by the entry of American troops into Iraq. Indeed, our troops might very well find themselves protecting Hussein and his family from the wrath of the Iraqi street.
Now, that would be the mother of all ironies.
