Iraq

Arab leaders quiet, their citizens shocked, over arrest

CAIRO, Egypt - For many Arabs, the scene on their television screens was inconceivable: one of the Middle East's once mightiest rulers humiliated, dirtied - and in the hands of American soldiers. It was a joy to behold for some, and a shock to those who lionized Saddam Hussein.

"Impossible! No, I don't believe it," Rami Makhoul, who works at a jewelry store in the Syrian capital of Damascus, exclaimed. At an outdoor market in Cairo, shopkeepers could be heard yelling at each other, "They say he's been captured, do you believe that?"

Then when the images were aired showing Hussein in custody - blinking dully, his hair tangled and beard long and unkempt, as a U.S. military doctor examines him - the real shock came.

"I love him so much, I can't stand watching it," said Raafat Logman, 23, a Palestinian avoiding the television playing in the corner of a Gaza City pool hall.

"I didn't expect to see him this humiliated ... shaken and quiet," said Mona al-Mutairi, a child therapist in Kuwait. "He looked like a cave man."

Few Arab governments reacted immediately, perhaps waiting to judge the mood of an Arab public that was fonder of Hussein than were the fellow Arab leaders who had to deal with him for decades. Many Mideast leaders might also be worried if Hussein goes on public trial for war crimes - giving him a forum to air years of dirty laundry.

Some Arab TV stations did not carry the announcement of Hussein's arrest by the American administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer. But the major ones - including the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya in Dubai, all-news stations that reach around the Arab world - did.

But Al-Jazeera's bureau chief in Washington, Hafez al-Mirazi, asked what right Americans have to show Hussein as a prisoner of war on TV when the United States objected to showing American POWs on TV during the war.

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