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Arabs shocked Hussein didn't go down fighting

"They wanted him to at least die fighting, not be caught lying down in some hole like a rat."

Mustapha Hamarneh, director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan

When a prominent Jordanian academic heard on Sunday that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had been captured alive, he dialed a friend who had long been a booster of the Iraqi as the last significant Arab leader to defy the US.

He found his friend getting drunk, despairing that Saddam, after more than two decades of painting himself as the knight of the Arabs, had been captured without so much as firing a shot.

"It is a shock to many," said the academic, Mustapha Hamarneh, who is the director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan.

"They wanted him to at least die fighting, not be caught lying down in some hole like a rat. The image they built of him over the past 35 years was that he was a knight who would not die lying down. The real image or the real character turned out to be radically different," he said.

Across the Arab world, the ambiguity that has shadowed the entire American effort to replace Iraq's totalitarian government was reinforced by the indignity of Saddam's capture.

While Arabs harbor no particular love for the deposed dictator or similarly oppressive governments, they despair when they see that an outside power can humiliate the Arab world by capturing such a significant figure with relative impunity, underscoring their own impotence.

"On the one hand, we are very happy, relieved that this man is out of the picture," said Khaled Batarfi, managing editor of Al Madina, a newspaper in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

"On the other hand, to see him so humiliated -- he is an Arab president after all," he said. "Whether you love him or hate him, he is still a member of the family. He did not fight like his sons; he went like a dog or a cave man, so they feel sorry more for Arab pride than for the man himself."

The reactions were not monolithic, of course, ranging from giddy horn-honking in Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, to doubts that the capture had actually taken place. Official reaction was muted, too, with only a few senior government officials stepping forward, mostly to express hope for a better future for the Iraqi people and a fair trial for Saddam.

"We hope that what happened will be a step to accelerate the Iraqi people toward handling their own affairs," Ahmed Maher, the Egyptian foreign minister, said at a news conference.

"We hope that this step will make the Iraqi people more dedicated to building their country and developing greater independence," he said.

Egypt supports a fair trial, with Saddam given the right to defend himself like any other defendant, Maher said.

Some experts wondered if the ease of Saddam's capture might finally undermine his image as the last Arab action hero, but an attitude of denial seemed more prevalent. Many found it beyond belief that a man who had shot dead at least one Cabinet minister, not to mention starting wars against Iran and Kuwait, had not so much as wounded a single American soldier.

In Cairo and elsewhere, there was no shortage of those who found it easier to dismiss the capture as an American hoax.

"The whole scenario makes me doubt that this is Saddam Hussein," said Abdel Moneim Abdel Maq-sood, a lawyer for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

In Kuwait, the mood was more jubilant than anywhere else in the Arab world except perhaps Iraq, with Kuwaitis zapping instant messages on their mobile telephones saying, "Congratulations!"

Several jokes circulated by the same method, reputedly quoting Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf, Iraq's notorious information minister, as denying the capture, saying the man nabbed was actually a Taliban leader.

Elsewhere, though, many Arabs said that at a minimum, they would have preferred that Iraqis, not American soldiers, had captured Saddam.

"It is a shameful day in the history of the Arab nation when a prominent Arab president is caught by foreign occupiers and not the Iraqi people," said Abu Khaled, a Damascus taxi driver who gave only his nickname.

"In the absence of Saddam, the Americans will have no excuses; they will not be able to explain away the resistance as something related to him," said Abdel Bari Taha, a Yemeni political analyst.

"The Americans will come to realize that resistance is coming from the Iraqi people, not his followers or the Baath Party," he said.
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