For Arabs, Arrest Is Bittersweet Outcome

It was a sight that many Arabs have longed to see -- one of the region’s loathed despots dragged unkempt before the world while his people pranced in the streets. But the undoing of the dictator wasn’t supposed to unfold by American design.

From Beirut to Kuwait, Arabs struggled Sunday to reconcile their repulsion for Saddam Hussein with the sting of bruised pride. No matter how much they hated the former Iraqi president, many were embarrassed to see one of the most feared Arab leaders fall into the hands of the United States.

“The end of Saddam Hussein is also the beginning of a new era, an era of defeat for the Arabs,” said Michel Kilo, an opposition figure in Damascus, Syria. “I am not sorry about what happened to Saddam Hussein, but I truly wish it was his Iraqi enemies who had captured him.”

Video images of a shaggy, obedient Hussein being checked for lice and opening his mouth for doctors forced Arabs to confront the contradictions that have long underpinned their response to the war in Iraq -- and their attitudes toward Hussein. Most Arabs declare that they hate him, but also insist that his misdeeds didn’t justify the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and a war they widely regarded as unwarranted.

“It’s very good that they’ve captured him, and they’ll try him,” said Mohammed Isam, a 50-year-old shopkeeper in Cairo. “But who will try the Americans for what they’ve done in Iraq?”

Many Arabs complained that U.S. authorities should have given Iraqis the chance to announce the capture.

“It was offensive to me that Ambassador Bremer was the first person to speak,” Saudi economist Ihsan Ali Bu-Hulaiga said. “[Saddam] didn’t kill Americans -- he killed thousands and thousands of Iraqis.”

Arabs were reeling from the revelation that a man who blustered about being the implacable enemy of the coalition forces had crawled into a hole in the ground to hide from them, and had, in the end, surrendered quietly.

“At first, I didn’t believe it because he has 100 stand-ins. I thought this must be one of them. I was surprised because I thought he would be impossible to capture,” said Suleiman Olum, a street vendor in the teeming Sakaf al Sale old market area in downtown Amman, Jordan’s capital. “I thought he was a wali, a fighter with god-like powers of the legends. But he is not one at all.”

Beneath the confusion, relief bubbled quietly. As night fell over Cairo, engineer Ihad Sobhi lounged in a cafe. Around him, men argued about whether the Americans had indeed nabbed Hussein, or whether they had shown video of a look-alike.

“I don’t want to admit that I’m happy,” Sobhi, 27, said softly. “But I am.”

Hussein has long cut a complicated figure in the Middle East. A widely reviled dictator who slaughtered his countrymen and fellow Muslims, he didn’t make much of a hero. Hussein fought non-Arab Iran in the 1980s and sent his troops south to invade Kuwait in 1990. But some respected his strength.

“People really have conflicting views about Saddam Hussein. He’s a tyrant for some and a hero for others,” Lebanese political analyst Farid Khazen said. “He became a symbol of defiance.”

When Hussein lobbed Scud missiles into the suburbs of Tel Aviv during the Persian Gulf War, many Arabs were delighted by his audacity. Hussein also passed out $25,000 each to families of Palestinian suicide bombers -- all under the banner of Arab unity, which he claimed as his driving political philosophy.

“We didn’t think he would be arrested in such a humiliating way,” said Hatem Abdel Kader, a member of the Palestinian parliament and longtime activist in Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement. “We expected, from what we had heard about him, that he would rather be killed and die as a martyr than be arrested.”

But Kuwaitis honked gleefully and traded congratulatory cellphone messages.

“Everybody is passing congratulations to each other,” Kuwaiti analyst Abdallah Sahar said. “It’s really our day. It’s justice day.”

In recent months, on the run in U.S.-occupied Iraq, Hussein grew slightly more popular, having reinvented himself as a plucky underdog, the only Arab leader willing to thumb his nose at President Bush.

“People thought Saddam was not defeated, but transformed to fight better, from regular to guerrilla warfare,” said Adnan abu Odeh, Jordan’s former ambassador to the United Nations.

But at the same time, stories of mass graves and disappearances began to spill from his fractured country. For the first time, Iraqis were free to tell the world of the profound suffering they had endured -- tales that muted Hussein’s popular support and further muddied Arab sympathies.

“I detest him. Saddam Hussein loved only power, and cared only about himself,” Abdel Nasser, a 38-year-old dentist, said as he wandered through the smog of a Cairo street, window-shopping for shoes.

“But even in these last moments, he plays with Arab feelings,” Nasser said ruefully. “Somehow he moves in us an Arab nationalism.”

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Stack reported from Cairo and Kraul from Amman. Special correspondent Maher Abukhater in Ramallah, West Bank, and staff writer Ken Ellingwood in Jerusalem contributed to this report.