In all modern warfare winning minds is as vital as winning cities. When Western politics becomes a matter of presentation, it is hardly surprising that American tanks racing through Iraq carry “embedded” journalists. The message that the sweep forwards is unstoppable is a key component of the “psy-ops” campaign. Basra may at last be seizing the chance to rise up in response. But further afield the message is falling on deaf ears. The West is winning almost no support throughout the Arab, or indeed the wider Muslim, world.

For weeks there has been a curious silence in the Middle East. Arab governments said little about the looming conflict. The “Arab street”, that rough and rowdy gauge of public opinion, seemed eerily calm. Of course the governments issued ritual statements about the need for a negotiated solution. But their hearts were not in it. They knew that the conflict was coming. They had already discounted diplomacy as useless. And they knew they were powerless to influence, let alone stop, America.

The West took this for acquiescence. Politicians visiting the Gulf all reported that everyone wanted to see the end of President Saddam Hussein. They fostered the impression, gained from hearsay and exiles, that Iraqis too would rejoice in his downfall. But visitors spoke to elites — the English-speaking and Western-educated rulers, the bankers, businessmen and professionals who chafe at the backwardness of the masses or the politics of the past. The masses think otherwise.

The political divisions in the Arab world, between the rulers and ruled, the Gulf and the Levant, the Islamists and the secularists, have long thwarted the search for Arab unity. The result has been a kind of mental paralysis — an inability to resolve political contradictions and conflicting emotions. Is the West a model for Arab society or a threat? Is America the Great Satan or the land of opportunity? Is Arab impotence the result of foreign domination and Western/Israeli conspiracies or is it due to the lack of democracy, freedom and progress in most of the Arab world?

The common assumption in the West, that the elites and the educated look to it as a model while those lacking opportunity see it as the enemy of Islam is wrong. In fact, many people from both groups hold both views together. And this is why the West cannot win on the Arab street.

Those Arab liberals who most want to rid the Middle East of Saddam, and the ugly image of repression, dictatorship and aggression that he spreads across all Arab politics, are often those who are most vociferous in condemning America. They complain that it is only thanks to US support that so many undemocratic regimes remain in place — largely because they have made their peace with Washington, which turns a blind eye to their human rights records. Liberals feel they are patronised by a West that does not see Arabs as capable of decent government.

But Arab radicals, especially Islamist militants, also blame the West — now seen by most Arabs simply as America — for keeping in power governments they believe are hostile to Islam and rulers who verge on being apostates, the worst sin in Islam. They see America as the force that holds back social revolution which, if allowed, would bring to power the poor and the downtrodden in an Islamic government, ridding Arab society of its inequalities and imported Western fads.

Both project their frustrations with their own societies on to the one society that seems so self-confident and all-powerful (and therefore attractive to immigrants) — America. Both groups also project on to America the Arab world’s unhappy experience with European colonialism. Acutely sensitive that their hard-won independence and freedom from European rule is always under threat (Suez is not forgotten), they see the establishment of US bases, the trade and political agreements binding governments to the US, and even globalisation, as part of a general Western plot to keep them down. It is the old imperialism under a new guise. Only this time, they say, it has a powerful new ally already implanted in the region — Israel.

So all talk in the Pentagon of “remodelling” the Arab world to bolster Western-style democracy on the back of an Iraqi invasion is treated with intense suspicion. The liberals, with an eye on the Palestinian issue, do not trust America to deliver; the radicals do not want what they think America will deliver.

And so although most Arabs say that they want deliverance from Saddam, they do not want it at America’s hands. Perversely, therefore, everyone cheers as Saddam resists. The message from Washington has not got through.

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