Arab publics supported Saddam despite reviling him, because he resisted the West

Evidence

Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR’s thinking, “he is our bloody tyrant.” In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the West. Arab intellectuals, one study reported, “despise the Iraqi regime and deplore its brutality and authoritarianism, but regard it as constituting a center of resistance to the great enemy of the Arab world, the West.” They “define the Arab world in opposition to the West.” “What Saddam has done is wrong,” a Palestinian professor said, “but we cannot condemn Iraq for standing up to Western military intervention.” Muslims in the West and elsewhere denounced the presence of non-Muslim troops in Saudi Arabia and the resulting “desecration” of the Muslim holy sites. The prevailing view, in short, was: Saddam was wrong to invade, the West was more wrong to intervene, hence Saddam is right to fight the West, and we are right to support him. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 687

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the identity-conflict dynamics already examined in earlier chapters on civilizational fault lines and the West versus the rest.