Notice that Ajami and Friedman use the same expressions: "He also mastered, by all appearances, the rules of his neighbourhood." What rules of neighborhood? Like the Arab neighborhood is different from say the European neighborhood? And has any neighborhood produced more wars and killings than the "advanced" European neighborhood? Also, he says: " The Arabs needed swagger." What does that mean? Bush was praised for his swagger in his first campaign but American voted for Bush; Arabs never voted for Saddam. And " Grant the man from Tikrit his due; he had a keen sense for the mood of the crowd and of “the street”." Oh, no. I would not even grant the man that. Saddam never inspired mass support, and was never a mass idol. As one Palestinian once explained to the Washington Post: we support Saddam because he chants for Palestine. And if the monkey chants for Palestine, he will get our support. And Saddam, unlike Nasser, spent millions to cultivate his image in the Arab world and to buy off journalists. He would not have to do that if he had the "street" support. This native informant also says: "But the Shi’ites were strangers to the Arab courts and to the intellectual class alike." What is that about? Shi`ites were strangers to the Arab courts as were other Arabs. And the intellectual class, during the secular days, included Shi`ites before the rise of the fundamentalist movement supported by Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Sadat's Egypt, Israel, etc. And the intellectual class in Iraq itself included many Shi`ites. And notice that he spares no effort to recycle the dreaded superficial cliches of Western generalizations about Arabs: " Assad’s caution may have been the temper of the man. Conceivably, it was also the caution of his community of Alawites, an esoteric faith of the insular Syrian mountains." Is it not amazing that people still take this man seriously when he offered the administration (read Cheney's famous speech in which Ajami was quoted back in August 2002--available in the archives of this site) the assurances that Arabs--not only Iraqis--would welcome an occupation of Iraq?