We've all seen the scenes of the Iraqi celebrating the fall of the Saddam regime and welcoming the coalition forces. But in the rest of the arab world, these scenes are greeted with surprise and disappointment. The rest of the arab world supported Saddam Hussein and saw him as a hero but what about the Iraqi people? The other arabs forgot about or ignored them. The Iraqis are celebrating his downfall. What has the rest of the arab world done to help these suppressed Iraqis for the last 25-30 years?
they don't like saddam just as much as the rest of the world... their hope was that saddam and his army would stand up to the american forces like nobody in the arab world had ever done before; it was not that they liked him and are sad to see him go...they just wanted to see him stand up to the united states and britain as they saw him as someone who could, and would.
This is just a guess, but most of the folks doing the celebrating in Iraq seem to be Shiite, who were particularly under Saddam's thumb. The Sunnis in Iraq seem generally to be more subdued, although perhaps that will change if it becomes apparent that they won't be punished with Saddam, that they won't be at the receiving end of a new, despotic Shiite regime, etc. Except in Iran, most of the Arabs outside Iraq are also Sunni. Additionally, there are a lot of expressions of shock from Arabs around the region regarding the relatively easy fall and particularly lack of fight put up by an army/leader who'd been regarded as one of the regions heavy hitters. It's an ongoing source of humiliation for many arabs that the region has been dominated by the West for so long, and this just adds to it. As to why they didn't help the Iraqis, many of the regimes in the region aren't much better than Saddam's, so if they were moved by humanitarian concerns the first place to start would be at home.
bungadiri's take is interesting. Maybe there's something to it. But the from the reports I'm reading online, the Arab world believed al-Jazzeera and the other Arab media. They were as surprised at the sudden collapse of resistance as we were when the Iraqis hung tough the first 2 weeks.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030410/wl_nm/iraq_arabs_dc_5 At least one of them gets it:
I would tend to agree with you there but they were supporting Saddam more than they were supporting the Iraqi people. Plus if it takes George Bush and Tony Blair to free them from the Saddam regime, maybe the other arabs should be shamed that they never did anything to help the regular Iraqi on the street...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2935177.stm A few more quotes from the Arab press around the world. The Yahoo collection emphasized more the interesting notion that Arab leaders need to "watch out," as Alex quoted above.
If I'm not mistaken this is one of the ideas built into the larger strategy that the war on Saddam was part of--that his fall would catalyze change in the Mideast. The planners clearly hope this change will be a trend toward democratic reforms. I'm not sure it'll work out that way (as I said before the war started, I hope I'm wrong). My concern is that the assumption that the nation state will continue to be the primary political identity for people in the Mideast is faulty, and that other organizations (worst case scenario, organizations like Al Qaeda) will wax stronger as a result. This is why the plans/results for a post-war Iraq are so important.
Well, the Wolfowitz coterie are from the neorealist school. That their unit of analysis is faulty is not fleshed out by our media and therefore citizens of the USA.
Re: bungadiri Just because they speak Farsi doesn't mean they're not arabic. I know of some Iranians who are arabic and they speak Farsi. Iranians (the great majority) are not Arabs, they're Persian.
awesome link dude on a separate note, I would like to say that your previous avatar looked like a drunk Jocksha Fisher.