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."