This is Robert Fisk's excellent article on a year of war in Iraq. From the London Independent.
Iraq: a year of warBut we also have to face a fact: that Arab societies seem to be uniquely capable of absorbing these dictatorships, of playing along with the 99.9 per cent presidential election victories, and the secret policemen and the torture chambers, and the lies and distortions - able even (here is the difficult part) to give real loyalty to the monsters we decided should rule them.
The French have a very good word for this: infantilisme. Many Arab populations have indeed been "infantilised" by their leaders and regimes. In private, they may cast their eyes to the ceiling to show their abhorrence of the regime, but in front of an audience their enthusiasm might almost be real. And I suspect that it often is real. I recall a very intelligent Syrian lady who, in private, would always criticise the late president Hafez Assad. Could I believe how stupid the regime is, how little Assad understands the world or, indeed, Syria? Did I realise how the Syrian people would be happy when his regime ended? Yet when I met her the day after Assad's death, this same woman turned to me with tears in her eyes. "Robert, you cannot understand how we feel," she cried. "He was a father to us, a real father."