The old man who sat before a steaming cup at the Baghdad Coffee House in the heart of Bahrain's Indian bazaar was of an age where he no longer cared that government informers might overhear him. "Listen to me," he demanded, urgently tapping a Westerner on the knee. "Any time an independent Arab leader looks strong," he boomed, "the West beats him down. They did it with Nasser. They have run a vilification campaign against Assad. And look what they did to Arafat. It dates from the Crusades, and it will never change." The man, a retired printer, paused. "Saddam will not win this war," he said, "but we hope he gives the West a hard time trying."
The Bahraini was expressing a point of view echoed elsewhere in the Arab world. As war in the gulf looks ever more probable, the uneasiness and frustration of ordinary citizens are beginning to bubble over. The looming prospect of battle has sobered some of the more exuberant supporters of Saddam Hussein's bold defiance of the West, yet in certain quarters -- especially in Jordan, Yemen, the Sudan and the Maghreb -- his following remains strong.
More important, to be anti-Saddam is not to be pro-West. Many Arabs who condemn Saddam for seizing Kuwait also consider the foreign presence in the gulf an equal if not greater abomination. "Even if Saddam was wrong," says a senior official of a Tunis-based Arab organization, "we can't allow the United States to simply come and destroy a brother Arab state."
Such sentiments are deeply rooted in the past. Arab humiliations at the hands of Europeans, most recently during the colonial period, have given rise to a visceral antipathy among many Arabs to any involvement by outsiders in their affairs. This is aggravated by the fact that the main foreign player in the region now is the U.S., the No. 1 supporter of Israel. "In the minds of certain groups," acknowledges a member of the Saudi royal family, "the U.S. is the devil incarnate."
Washington's motives in the gulf are frequently dismissed in the Arab world as contemptible. High-minded dissertations by U.S. officials on the sovereignty of nations and the sanctity of the new world order evoke smirks in the suqs of such cities as Algiers, Tunis, Damascus and Amman. "All the Americans want is control of the oil," says Abdul Hamid Sadiq, a Syrian archaeologist. Principle, he adds, means nothing to a country that "ignored the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the occupation of Jerusalem and the daily maiming and killing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank."
It does not help Washington's cause that Desert Shield aims to secure and restore monarchies that many Arabs consider anachronistic. Even in the gulf states, where the vast majority of citizens are grateful for protection from Saddam's hordes, there is some bitterness on this point. "What does the West think?" asks a retired Omani municipal worker living in Bahrain. "That we want to be servants to these corrupt ruling families forever?"