WAR ON IRAK

Asia Times: The 'Palestinization' of Iraq

AMMAN - American tanks are now ripping at the heart of Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers" and the cradle of civilization; the US 5th Corps is already engaging the Medina division of the Republican Guards as B52s increase their bombing raids of the "red line" in the outer ring of defenses of Baghdad, over which hangs a surreal, dust-induced dark orange cloud.

For 280 million Arabs, the symbolic effect of the tanks in the country is as devastating as a lethal sandstorm. But Saddam Hussein seems to be one step ahead. It doesn't matter that Iraqi TV was silenced by a showering of Tomahawks (although domestic broadcasts, as well as the international signal, have been restored). Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV will be on hand to record the ultimate image that Saddam knows is capable of igniting the Arab world into an ocean of fire: an American tank in the streets of Baghdad juxtaposed with an American tank in the streets of Gaza.

To date, an estimated 5,200 Iraqis have crossed the Jordanian-Iraqi border, going back "to defend their homeland" as they invariably put it. In already one week of a war that was marketed by the Pentagon as "clean" and "quick" and which is revealing itself to be bloody and protracted, not a single Iraqi refugee has crossed the al-Karama border point into eastern Jordan.

Beyond Iraq, the most crucial development in the Middle East for decades is the fact that from Amman to Cairo, from Beirut to Riyadh, the bulk of the Arab nation is now "Palestinized". Marwan Muasher, the suave Jordanian foreign minister, insists that King Abdullah and his government are doing everything to end the war and "to try to help the Iraqi people" - basically through frantic telephone diplomacy with Bahrain, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The Arab League has meekly called for an end to the war. Washington didn't even register it. And the Arab street is not buying excuses any more.

The widespread anger directed at Arab leaders is overwhelming - from taxi drivers to art students, from construction workers to businessmen. For around half a century, the anger in a way channeled by the Palestinians - who by practical experience have learned not to trust Arab leaders. Now the loss of legitimacy is total - a long decaying process that originated in the early 1990s. The street knows that all Arab regimes - from reactionary Saudi Arabia to relatively progressive Jordan - have failed. They have been incapable of achieving Arab unity and independence. They have been incapable of providing social, economic and technological development. They have been impotent in their promises to try to help liberate Gaza and the West Bank. And they have been shamefully incapable of uniting against what their populations unanimously consider a neocolonialist war in Iraq.

One of the most extraordinary developments of the war so far is how the resistance of the Iraqi population against a foreign invasion has galvanized this sentiment of anger in the Arab world. "We are all Palestinians now," as a Bedouin taxi driver puts it. One of the first things anyone mentions in Jordan - be it a Jordanian, an Egyptian, a Lebanese or a Somali refugee - is their happiness about the way the Iraqi people are resisting the "invaders" (never qualified as "liberators"). Their intuition also tells them that every extra day in this war is further humiliation to the Pentagon - especially because the real war, and not the US version, is being followed by the whole Arab world, in Arabic, through Arab satellite channels.

In a cramped office in downtown Amman near the Roman amphitheater, answering dozens of phone calls, surfing the Internet and zapping incessantly between al-Jazeera and CNN, a Jordanian intelligence source muses on how the Americans will play the war. "They are going to encircle the big cities, Basra, Mosul and Baghdad. But the elite Republican Guard divisions are digging in. The Americans will be forced to attack the best Iraqi soldiers, and thousands, dozens of thousands are now inside Baghdad. The Americans can't occupy Baghdad, they don't have enough soldiers, the city has more people than the whole of Lebanon. They could stay outside and keep bombing. But for how long? They cannot afford a war lasting many months. They will go crazy."