TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/021891/0218994.000

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                                                          THE GULF WAR, Page 28

THE ARAB WORLD

The Fuse Grows Shorter


Each day that Saddam survives the war he becomes more of a
regional hero while the image of his opponents grows
increasingly menacing

By LISA BEYER -- Reported by Margot Hornblower/Paris, Lara
Marlowe/Dhahran and James Wilde/Amman


    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.