NOT EVERYONE’S HAPPY — but some are catching on:
However, Tannous Basil, a 47-year-old cardiologist in Sidon, Lebanon, said Saddam’s regime was a “dictatorship and had to go.”
“I don’t like the idea of having the Americans here, but we asked for it,” he said. “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.”
Tarek al-Absi, a Yemeni university professor, was hopeful Saddam’s end presaged more democracy in the region.
“This is a message for the Arab regimes, and could be the beginning of transformation in the Arab region,” al-Absi said. “Without the honest help of the Western nations, the reforms will not take place in these countries.”
These voices aren’t in the majority yet — but they’re not in the wilderness anymore, either.
UPDATE: Amir Taheri writes in The Times that we shouldn’t listen to the Arab elites:
The headlines screamed “Americans slaughter civilians” and “Thousands of Iraqis prepare for suicide missions”. None of that happened. The Iraqis proved to be wiser than some of their Arab brethren had assumed. . . .
The Iraqis did not wish to suffer the fate of the Palestinians, that is to say to die in large numbers for decades so that other Arabs, safe in their homes, would feel good about themselves. The Iraqis know that had the Palestinians not listened to their Arab brethren, they would have had a state in 1947, as decided by the United Nations Security Council. The Iraqis know that each time the Palestinians became heroic to please other Arabs they lost even more.
These days the Arab media are full of articles about how the Arabs feel humiliated by what has happened in Iraq, how they are frustrated, how they hate America for having liberated the people of Iraq from their oppressor, and how they hope that the Europeans, presumably led by Jacques Chirac, will ride to the rescue to preserve a little bit of Saddam’s legacy with the help of the United Nations.
Thank God, the peoples of Iraq, not deceived by Arab hyperbole, are ignoring such nonsense.
Are the “long-distance heroes” humiliated? If they are, so what? They should jump in a river. Today, Iraq is free and, despite its legitimate concerns about the future, cautiously happy.
Read the whole thing.