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In an earlier post, I meditated on the effect that the demise of the Hussein family -- father as well as sons -- ultimately might have on the willingness of the American public to support the war in Iraq. But Newsweek columnist Christopher Dickey points out that the effect on the Iraqis might be more important:

Adnan Abu Odeh, a former advisor to Jordan’s King Hussein and one of the region’s real wise men, offers another scenario. He suggests the Iraqi people see themselves struggling against two enemies now: Saddam on the one hand, the American occupiers on the other. “Ironically, if Saddam is killed as well as his two sons,” says Abu Odeh, “that will accelerate the process of seeing the Americans as the real enemy.”

I suspect the end of the Saddam era may have a similar effect throughout the Arab world. I don't have any first hand knowledge about this, but my impression during the war and immediately afterwards was that many Arabs who were enraged by the U.S. invasion were no fans of Saddam -- either because they recognized the depths of his cruelty and incompetence, or because his brand of secular tyranny offended their Islamic principles.

A good example of the former is Said K. Aburish, a Palestinian journalist and businessman, who once worked for the Iraqi government, but broke with the regime in the late 1980s. In an interview with PBS show Frontline, he described the evolution of his thinking about Saddam and his regime:

There is a whole generation of people like me. We are about the same age as Saddam -- I'm two years older actually -- who believe that is where the Arab dream was -- in Iraq ... We knew Saddam was tough. But the balance was completely different then. He was also delivering. The Iraqi people were getting a great deal of things that they needed and wanted and he was popular. He eliminated people here and there. With time, as with all dictators, the balance switched. And all we saw of Saddam was elimination and very little benefit to the people.

This attitude may seem morally bankrupt -- an example of the "you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs" school of totalitarian apology. But before you judge Aburish, try to understand the despair that so many Arabs feel over their repeated defeats -- at the hands of the British, the Israelis and now us -- and their contempt for the corrupt oil sheiks and bureaucrats who do our bidding in the region.

Saddam vowed to deliver the Arabs from their humiliation. And people like Aburish -- educated people, intelligent people -- believed him, for a time, because they had nothing else to believe in.

As Aburish notes, that mirage eventually faded, especially after the fiasco of Iraq's war with Iran, and Saddam's failed gambit in Kuwait. But the anger and the humiliation remained. As long as Saddam was defying America, he retained some residual emotional loyalty among many non-Iraqi Arabs, who didn't have to live under his bloody fist.

Aburish: The fact that Saddam Hussein eliminates people, kills innocent men, uses a chemical weapon against his own people, is actually in a way secondary to this image. The Iraqi people are concerned with the latter. They suffer because of the latter. But the Arab people outside of Iraq do not suffer because Saddam Hussein eliminates people, because he doesn't eliminate them. He eliminates Iraqis.

So there is a division between the vision of Saddam Hussein that the Iraqis have and the vision of Saddam Hussein the rest of the Arabs have. To the rest of the Arabs, he is the man standing up to West. To the Iraqis, he is the man who dragged us into this state of misery. Unwillingly.

This dichotomy was on full display, of course, after the "liberation" of Baghad, when the rest of the Arab world grieved yet another smashing defeat, while the Iraqis -- or at least, the Shia and the Kurds -- celebrated Saddam's fall. This contradiction, and the clashing psychological images it produced, demoralized the Arab "street," allowing the region's repressive regimes to return quickly to business as usual.

But when Saddam is finally gone, that contradiction will be permanently resolved, at least among the Sunnis. The emerging Iraqi resistance movement is amorphous enough to let everyone (every Sunni Arab, that is) see what they want to see in it -- national liberation struggle, holy war, defense of threatened cultural values, etc.

Just by being there, the American army gives the insurgency a coherence and meaning it wouldn't otherwise have -- turning a Lebanese-style civil war into an Israeli-style occupation. This, time, though, the intifada is better organized, better trained and a hell of a lot better armed. So this war could quickly become an Arabic version of the Death Wish movies -- a chance to take a little vicarious revenge against the bad guys (us).

Public opinion polls show America already has very few friends in the Arab world, other than those it has bought and paid for. The Kuwaitis, the Iraqi exiles, some of the educated elites in Jordan and the gulf emirates -- that's about it. It will be interesting to see how this corporals guard reacts as Arab mass opinion coalesces behind the struggle in Iraq. Kuwait's man in the street, I'm guessing, will switch sides -- Gulf War I was a long time ago, and like everthing else, gratitude has a shelf life. Once Saddam is gone, it's likely to curdle pretty fast.

The rest will keep their heads down, and trust -- as they always do -- in their own homegrown Mukhabarats to keep a lid on things.

Does this matter? Yes and no:

No, because the Arab street has shown time and again that it is too feeble to overthrow its rulers. However weak the regimes may be, the street is even weaker.

Yes, because Arab support and solidarity with the resistance in Iraq will shore up morale, which otherwise is going to be pretty badly battered by the kind of firepower and technology the USA will eventually bring to bear on the guerrillas and their civilian supporters.

This, in turn, increases the odds that the war ultimately will be lost, just as Vietnam and Algeria were lost -- not because the insurgents won, but because they were able to hang on and deny the counterinsurgents the clear proof of victory needed to maintain support for the war back home.

Letting Saddam roam free might not change the scenario much either way -- Arab sympathies are probably going to be with the guerrillas in any case, and he doesn't seem to be particularly essential to the insurgency, which appears to be highly decentralized.

But, net-net, it may well be the case that Saddam does the Americans more good alive and on the loose than he would dead or in a cage. In which case, you'd have to say that a Hussein in the bush is worth the two in the hand -- and maybe even more.