In the Gulf, Quiet Anticipation
By David Ignatius
Friday, March 14, 2003; Page A27
KUWAIT CITY -- Ali Khalifa Sabah, this country's former minister of oil and finance, arrives for a meeting Wednesday night in the midst of a blinding sandstorm. "God must be Iraqi, or French," he jokes.
A former Saudi diplomat calls puckishly from Jiddah on Wednesday to say that at last he understands America's real aim in the war with Iraq. "Your goal is to topple Tony Blair," he deadpans.
These humorous comments, at a time when the world is facing a deadly serious diplomatic crisis, illustrate something I have discovered in my recent travels in the Middle East: The closer you get to Iraq, the less gloomy people are about the coming war. Saddam Hussein's neighbors know the Iraqi leader for what he is. They may be antiwar, but they're also strongly anti-Hussein. They know that change in Iraq will bring many benefits, as well as risks.
"I'm a peace activist, but peace cannot be achieved so long as Saddam is in power," says Saad Ajmi, Kuwait's former minister of information and now a linguistics professor and newspaper columnist here.
Over the past six weeks, I have visited most of the countries that circle Iraq -- Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia and now Kuwait -- and I have yet to find a person who will speak up for Hussein. That strikes me as important. There are anti-American protests in the Arab world, as there are everywhere else these days. But almost nobody is carrying Hussein's portrait or claiming that he's the champion of the Arabs, as they did in the past.
Kuwait's leading Arabic newspaper, Al Watan, has just started publishing a special 12-page daily edition called "The War to Liberate Iraq." "You need a lot of courage here to say 'liberate,' " observes Mohammed Jassem, the paper's editor. But Jassem did it, with the support of the paper's owner, Sabah, because he knew it was the truth.
The question, my Arab friends agree, is how to remove Saddam Hussein, the man whose time has come and gone. They would passionately like to achieve that result without a war, which would have unpredictable and potentially dangerous consequences. But they understand that Iraqis won't take the risk of rising up against a leader they detest -- but also mortally fear -- unless they are certain the United States stands behind them.
"I don't think the Iraqi people will risk going against him in Baghdad until they're sure the American Army is very near," says Sabah.
Which brings us back to the war that lies just over the horizon. I seem to feel more hopeful about the future when I'm in the Middle East than I do in Europe, or even the United States. Something new is happening here, a process of Arab perestroika that is affecting everyone, from the Syrians to the Saudis.
Here, you feel in your gut that liberating Iraq will be a gift to the Iraqi people, and probably to the Arab world as a whole. But back in Europe, you know that if the war is launched without United Nations support, it will mean lasting damage for America in its relations not just with France, Germany and Russia but with countries around the world that believe in the primacy of the United Nations.
Given the potential costs of an Iraq war for the United States, people are confused about why America is marching into it. "It's really about oil, isn't it?" many of my Arab friends will say, and when you answer no, they'll insist that it must be about Israel. When you explain that Israel isn't the reason, either, they throw up their hands. How can you have a war with so little strategic rationale?
Perhaps this is a war like Vietnam -- fought with a fuzzy mix of Wilsonian idealism and realpolitik -- to prove that America is tough enough to fight a bigger, more important one elsewhere. In the case of Vietnam, America wanted to show that we would stand up to the Soviet Union in Europe. In the case of Iraq, President Bush may want to show that America is tough and powerful enough to vanquish any who would dare to topple our skyscrapers.
The big difference from Vietnam is that this war is probably winnable -- and quickly, too. The U.S. military forces that are everywhere in this city in their desert camouflage uniforms seem impatient to get on with it -- to go in and get the job done. It's a roll of the dice, to be sure, but it's one that most Iraqis (and many other Arabs) would secretly like America to take.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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