Associated Press, Thursday, April 10, 2003
Arabs Outside Iraq Stunned By Collapse
By JASPER MORTIMER, Associated Press Writer
CAIRO, Egypt - Arabs responded Thursday to the sudden collapse of Saddam
Hussein's government with anger, shock and even disbelief. One newspaper refused
to acknowledge that Baghdad had fallen.
Across the Middle East, people struggled to reconcile images of celebrating Iraqis
with widely held suspicions about the United States' motives.
"We discovered that all that the (Iraqi) information minister was saying was all lies,"
said Ali Hassan, a government employee in Cairo, Egypt.
"Now no one believes Al-Jazeera anymore," he said, referring to the Arabic-language
television news channel.
The entire front page of the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat was devoted to a
photograph of the pulling down Saddam's statue in Baghdad. Above it, the headline:
"And Saddam's regime fell — Shock in Arab capitals, joy in Baghdad, destruction of
statues and the looting of official buildings."
Many Arabs — even those who saw Saddam as an oppressive dictator — had viewed
the war as the struggle of an Arab underdog against foreign invaders interested in Iraqi
oil. Most Egyptians, for instance, do not believe that Saddam had terrorist
connections or weapons of mass destruction.
So the quick fall of Baghdad and Iraqi jubilation came as a shock. Many people
resorted to conspiracy theories to explain the rapid collapse.
"There must have been treason," said Ahmed Salem Batmira, an Omani political
analyst.
People across the Arab world clustered around TV sets in shop windows, coffee
shops and homes to see the pictures of U.S. troops driving from one side of an Arab
capital to the other, almost without resistance.
The Egyptian opposition newspaper Al Wafd refused to believe it. Its front page story
said: "Iraqi and Arab fighters desperately try to defend Gomhuria Bridge that the
invading armies are trying to use to reach the eastern bank of the Tigris and central
Baghdad."
Nowhere did Al Wafd say that U.S. troops had overwhelmed central Baghdad.
Some painted Iraq's defeat as another Arab humiliation caused by U.S. military
technology, and recalled the Middle East war of 1967 when Western-armed Israel
thrashed numerically superior Arab armies.
Arabs are very much aware that the Apache helicopters and other weapons used in
Iraq are the same ones that Israel is using against the Palestinians, Maher Othman, a
senior editor of Al Hayat, said on British Broadcasting Corp. television.
Doubts persisted about the United States' intentions and Iraq's future. Mohammed
al-Shahhal, a teacher in Tripoli, Lebanon, recalled the poverty and political turmoil in
Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"Those who applauded the collapse of Lenin's statue for some Pepsi and hamburgers
felt the hunger later on and regretted what they did," al-Shahhal said.
Some, however, said they hoped the fall of Saddam could signal a new move toward
democracy in the Middle East.
"I don't like the idea of having the Americans here, but we asked for it," said Tannous
Basil, a cardiologist in Sidon, Lebanon. "Why don't we see the Americans going to
Finland, for example? They come here because our area is filled with dictatorships
like Saddam's."
Bahraini physician Hassan Fakhro, 62, said he was saddened by the crumbling of the
Iraqi resistance in Baghdad.
"Whatever I'm seeing is very painful because although Saddam Hussein was a
dictator, he represented some kind of Arab national resistance to the foreign invaders
— the Americans and the British," he said.
Copyright © 2003 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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