America's open backers will be Kuwait and Qatar -- the first because of the trauma and violation it endured in 1990-91 at the hands of Iraq, the second because it has taken a generally assertive and novel approach in diplomacy as well as a willingness to associate openly with American power. In the main, however, the ruling order in the Arab world will duck for cover and hope to be spared. Rather than Desert Storm, the Arab rulers will want the perfect storm: a swift war, few casualties, as little exposure by themselves as possible, and the opportunity to be rid of Saddam without riding in broad daylight with the Americans or being brought to account by their people.

The political world rarely grants this kind of good fortune, but such is the dilemma of hugely unpopular rulers who have never taken their populations into their confidence, who have lived with American patronage while winking at the most malignant strands of anti-Americanism. Those rulers know that a war against Iraq would be the first war in their midst waged in the era of the satellite channels, at a time when everyone is "wired" and choices are difficult to conceal.

A new campaign against Iraq would find a deeply divided verdict in the region on the Iraqi menace. There are those who, if only out of feelings of historical inadequacy about the Arabs' technical skills, will doubt that the ruler in Baghdad and his military apparatus have at their disposal weapons of mass destruction. Others will see Iraq's weapons as proof that Arabs have come of age in the modern world, and that the powers beyond are bent on subjugating them, stripping them of the same weapons that represent modernity and scientific and military advance in a Hobbesian world of hierarchy and inequality.

Given the belligerence and self-pity in Arab life, its retreat from modernist culture, and its embrace of conspiracy theories, there are justifiable grounds for believing there are no native liberal or secular traditions to embrace the United States and use its victory to build an alternative to despotic rule. Few Arabs would believe this effort to be a Wilsonian campaign to spread the reign of liberty in the Arab world. They are to be forgiven their doubts, for American power, either by design or by default, has been built on relationships with military rulers and monarchs without popular mandates. America has not known or trusted the middle classes and the professionals in these lands. Rather, it has settled for relationships of convenience with the autocracies in the saddle, tolerating the cultural and political malignancies of the Arab world. A new American role in the region will have to break with this history.

LONELY AT THE TOP

The solitude of the United States is more acute than it was during the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91. In that expedition, there was local cover for what was in truth an imperial campaign against an Iraqi state that threatened to shred the balance of power in the gulf. There were even Muslim jurists in Saudi Arabia and Egypt who issued fatwas that sanctioned the expedition of the foreign power.

The three powers of consequence -- Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia -- were arrayed against Saddam Hussein. The last was directly menaced, while Egypt and Syria were given substantial economic rewards for covering the flanks of the gulf states, denying the Iraqi ruler the chance to depict the struggle as a standoff between the haves and the have-nots in the Arab world. Saddam had been particularly obtuse: he had broken the code of the ruling Arab order for which he had posed as a trusted warrior against the Iranian revolutionary state. But for the vast majority of Arabs, Operation Desert Storm was an Anglo-American campaign of hegemony. A predator had risen in the region and a great foreign power, the inheritor of Pax Britannica in the Persian Gulf, had checked his bid for hegemony.

Saddam had sacked a country, but there was an odd popular identification with him, and crowds saw him as the bearer of a lofty Arab endeavor. The gullible saw him as a Robin Hood, an avenging Saladin fighting "the Franks" and their local collaborators, erasing the colonial boundaries imposed after World War I. It may be heretical to suggest it, but the Iraqi ruler would have won a "free" election among Arabs in 1990-91. The dynasties he was warring against were unloved in their world. From Amman to Nablus to Casablanca, the crowds gave their approval to the night of terror that he unleashed on the region. He was a revisionist at odds with the order around him, and in a thwarted world the bandit acts out the yearnings of subdued but resentful crowds.

No great Arab hopes are pinned on the Iraqi ruler this time around. This is the other side of the ledger, for the fickle crowd makes and breaks these kinds of attachments with brigands and false redeemers with great frequency. Saddam had lost his bid; he had treated a world steeped in defeats to yet another calamity. The crowd that had fallen for Osama bin Laden was the same floating crowd that had once trusted its scores with the world would be settled by the Iraqi ruler. The struggle against him is a different matter now. The crowd may shout itself hoarse against the Americans, but its bonds with the Iraqi ruler have been weakened.

One particular but pivotal Arab realm is calmer this time around. In 1990-91, all the currents of political revisionism, the envy of the poorer Arab lands toward the oil states, the bitter sense that history has dealt the Arabs a terrible hand, seemed to converge on Jordan. It was in that country, more than in any other in the Arab world, that the Iraqi dictator was both an avenger and would-be redeemer. He had rujula (manhood), he had money to throw around, and he held out the promise that the oil dynasties would be brought down. It was that radicalism that had forced King Hussein to stay a step ahead of the crowd, breaking with the Persian Gulf powers and the United States to side with Iraq. A group of religious scholars, the Conference of the Ulama of the Sharia (an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood), has issued a fatwa banning any assistance to the Americans, such as "opening airports and harbors to them, providing their planes and vehicles with fuel, offering them intelligence for their war against Muslims." It is impermissible, the fatwa added, "to sell the American aggressor a piece of bread or to offer him a drink of water." This time, however, the monarchy has drawn a line, and wise Jordanians have put the word out that a short war and a reconstructed Iraq would work to the advantage of their poorer and smaller domain.

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