America Will Reap a Festering Bitterness : Gulf: The more democratic Arab countries become, the more they will reject those who dealt them injustice.

Americans are short-sighted and naive to boast that Iraq is not going to be another Vietnam. Militarily, of course, they are right. Although the war is likely to last for months, there is little doubt that Iraq ultimately will be defeated.

Politically, however, the war with Iraq will be the granddaddy of all Vietnams. When the shooting stops, it won’t be George Bush’s coalition--that posse of desperadoes and bounty hunters--that will determine the political trends of the region. It will be the bitter, resentful grass-roots sentiments of hundreds of millions of Arabs.

I would estimate that three-quarters of the people of the Arab world stand with Iraq--not in support of its occupation of Kuwait, but in its confrontation with the United States. Every day that Iraq holds out against the United States and strikes against Israel, that grass-roots support for Iraq grows stronger. Even in the short term, this tremendous grass-roots pressure is likely to result in political turmoil throughout the region, including changes in regimes and leaders.

Understanding the contemporary frame of the Arab mind is essential to grasping the terms of reference within which we have viewed the mounting conflict with the United States.

The Arab world reached a historic turning point in the 1980s: People lost their fear. After the low-water mark of 1982, when the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Lebanese capital of Beirut were shelled from the hills by Israel, supported by the U.S. Navy (which the high-minded Americans now seem to have conveniently forgotten) the Arab people were fed up. They had been so beaten down over the decades by their own autocratic leaders, by their inability to manifest their sense of pan-Arab unity, by their inability to do anything about Israel, by their inability to forge productive and honorable relations with the great powers, that they hit rock-bottom.

Defeat seemed so total that renewal was the only way out. As elsewhere in the world, such as Roman Catholic Poland, large numbers of people turned to God when they gave up on the temporal order. From Jordan to Egypt, from Algeria to Lebanon, it was Islam that initially gave Arabs the strength to fight back.

Even though most Arabs don’t support the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s fearlessness in standing up to our enemies, Israel and America, appeals to the new spirit of the Arab world--a spirit that says we’d rather die on our feet than live groveling on the ground.

Saddam Hussein is, of course, no Santa Claus. He is a rough man. He kills people ruthlessly. He has lived by the gun all of his life. Yet this unlikely, autocratic man has become the medium of a new Arab fearlessness that aims to cast off oppression and subjugation both from abroad and at home.

The great paradox of this conflict is that it is in precisely those Arab countries where the people have started to achieve democracy, where people are free to speak out and express themselves--such places as Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Yemen and among Palestinians--that the support for Saddam Hussein is so fervent and widespread. The United States is supported by only the mercantile autocracies. Egypt, as always, is an exception because of its obsequious political servitude.

Inconveniently for the West, the more free and democratic Arab countries become, the less sympathetic they will be to foreign designs for the region. The more Islamic and anti-Western they will become. Already, for example, the speaker of the House in the Jordanian Parliament is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which holds a plurality there. In Algeria, the Muslim Brotherhood has a majority of local assembly seats. In both places, however, their success has depended on playing within a pluralist framework and by democratic rules.

Saddam Hussein was not the chosen leader of these Arabs seeking a new order. Ironically, it was the Americans who made him so. After he invaded Kuwait, every Arab country, far from praising him, called on him to withdraw at once, and many Arab leaders undertook immediate and fervent diplomatic action to secure such a withdrawal. But the Saudis and the Egyptians panicked and called in the Americans.

The minute American forces landed in the region, the whole equation changed. The issue was no longer Iraq occupying Kuwait. It was Iraq standing up to the arrogant West, holding out for a solution to the many regional economic and political problems that plague us. For all of us now, Iraq symbolizes the willingness to get up off our knees and confront our enemies. And the longer Saddam Hussein drags out the war, the more he will elicit support and redeem the sense of humiliation felt by Arabs for years.

It is a source of pride to Arabs that Hussein hit Israel with missiles, as he promised. Even if they do little real damage, symbolically they are the equivalent of an Arab atomic bomb.

The West has money and high technology on its side. We have human nature and history on our side. That means we may lose the war in the weeks and months to come, but we will inevitably win out in the years and decades ahead.

The thin veil of “Arabization” of this U.S. war through George Bush’s ragtag, cash-register coalition won’t succeed any more than did America’s “Vietnamization” strategy. In time, no doubt, the last days of that Asian war will be replayed in our part of the world, with American helicopters lifting their ambassadors from the roofs of U.S. embassies throughout the region, perhaps with a few Arab leaders in tow, clinging for dear life and looking forward to exile in Hawaii.

If the United States wants to squander $150 billion and the lives of countless Iraqis to keep a bevy of corrupt, undemocratic autocrats in power and maintain by force of arms an inequitable and unstable political order that has failed the Arabs for three-quarters of a century, it will have no more success than did Jaruzelski in Poland or Ceausescu in Romania.