Why Arabs Back Kadafi, Scourge of the Mideast

When the United States and Israel began threatening Libya with military reprisals after the Palestinian attacks on the El Al counters at Rome and Vienna airports, it was easy to predict that Arab governments would rally in support of Col. Moammar Kadafi.

To Americans, that may seem paradoxical. The Arab states have even more reason to hate and fear Kadafi than Western governments have. Over the years, many Arab regimes, and not just Liyba’s neighbors, have been directly endangered by Libyan-sponsored subversion. Yet they all backed the colonel.

Apart from the radical regimes like Syria and South Yemen, who chose to support their ally, for most other governments there was no choice. In this last crisis it was the Arab people who rallied to Kadafi, and though many Arab regimes are firmly repressive, they did not, in this case, wish to run the risk of popular dissatisfaction and possible protest.

There are about half a dozen positive reasons and two negative ones why Arabs support Kadafi. The first and perhaps strongest is Arab family--or fellow-feeling. This is expressed in the common Arab saying, “I against my brother, I and my brother against our cousin, I and my brother and our cousin against the outsider.” The United States may be most concerned with how to fight terrorism; Arabs are most concerned with how not to fight each other.

This sentiment cuts right across the endless squabblings of the Arab governments. This emotional, perhaps even sentimental, oneness--the deep feeling that the Arabs are one people--is based on the solid fact that Arabs from Marakesh to Muscat all speak the same language and are all Muslims, sharing the same millenial society, culture, traditions and historical experience, most recently that of colonial domination.

No other multinational group shares the same sense of underlying oneness, not even the Spanish-speaking Roman Catholics of Latin America. Any outside government that does not acknowledge the feeling of Arab oneness as a fact of great political significance is in for trouble, as the United States is in the process of discovering.

The Arab people know, however vaguely, that Kadafi has used his oil wealth to better the daily lot of his own people, and that his record in providing them with roads, schools, and hospitals is better than many of the other oil-rich states. Libya’s current austerity is seen as part of a general recession in the oil world.

Then there is the colonel’s unwavering support for the pre-eminent cause of the entire Arab nation--Palestine. He is particularly admired for the fact that even while he was under fierce political pressure during the last few weeks he reiterated his backing of the Palestinians’ struggle. He has wavered in supporting this or that Palestinian group or leader, and at one time he even expelled Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization from Libya, but he has always been loyal to the cause as such. His one big blunder on this issue was when he asked the PLO leadership, besieged in Beirut by the Israelis, to commit suicide. But Arafat has since forgiven that gaffe.

Since the Arabs feel they are one people, it is inevitable they should dream, however unrealistically, of Arab unity, of one Arab national federation or confederation. So strong is the pull of this dream that President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who led Egypt from 1958 to 1970, shrewdly and realistically made it part of his program and it remains one of the three main elements in the charter of the Baath Party, now in power in Iraq and Syria.

But Kadafi has tried to do something about the dream: He is forever trying to marry off his rich but scrawny Libyan bride to a poorer but bigger and stronger Arab bridegroom. And although the Arabs smile at the folly or impetuosity of his efforts, they believe him to be, at heart, on the right track--a proof that the spirit of Nasser, the man they consider the greatest modern Arab leader, is not dead.

Kadafi is admired for having another Nasser characteristic--he stands up to bullies, particularly Western ones. When under pressure, he, unlike the leaders of Egypt or Saudi Arabia or the gulf states, becomes all the more defiant. The Arabs are a proud people.

It is universally accepted that Kadafi is his own man, if only because no one else wants him. He is no one’s stooge but, in true nonaligned fashion, is everyone’s headache. That, in the Arab world, is a very positive quality.

Moreover, the colonel has made Islam one of the bases of his appeal to the Islamic Arabs. After all, is not the plain green flag of Islam the flag of Libya? Militant Islam bulks large in Libyan policy and would attract more support for Kadafi if he had not, running true to form, propounded his own heterodox ideas on the faith.

Buttressing these positive reasons for Arab admiration and exasperated fondness for Kadafi are two negative ones. Kadafi’s particular, almost personal, enemies are the enemies of all self-respecting Arabs--peoples and governments: the United States and Israel.

The United States was first considered an enemy because of its total support to Israel, the Arabs’ main enemy; for years, hundreds of cartoons in Arab publications have depicted Uncle Sam as Israel’s slave. But of late, after Lebanon and now Libya, the United States has emerged as an Arab enemy in its own right, as President Reagan and Secretary of State George P. Shultz quarrel with the Syrian and Libyan leaders. So pressure on or threats against an Arab government from the United States, with or without Israel, automatically produce Arab fury.

Lastly, there is a popular predisposition in favor of Kadafi’s often erratic and dangerous policies towards other Arab states, because his two main recent Arab enemies, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Sudan’s Jaafar Numeiri, were, in the end, spurned by their own people. The brief border war that Sadat waged against Libya in 1978 was extremely unpopular outside and inside Egypt, even in the ranks of the Egyptian army. It violated the sense of Arab family oneness, of Arab unity, and was against the wrong enemy, an Arab, instead of against Israel. Those deep atavistic Arab feelings have more or less compelled Arab governments to rally round even that very improbable object of support, the Libya of Moammar Kadafi.