region. In reality, Arab leaders are more concerned that the ouster of Saddam will produce popular jubilation - followed by demands for political reforms at home. The claim that the Arab street is bursting at the seams with pro-Saddam sympathies is a convenient justification for increased restrictions on civil liberties.

Most Arab regimes also have more direct interests in the preservation of Saddam's regime. The Kuwaiti government worries about his departure because Iraq's pariah status is an impediment to the country's rearmament. The Saudis fear that the establishment of a pro-US government in Baghdad will diminish their status as a strategic American ally and guarantor of moderate oil prices. Syria's cash-strapped regime has benefited from illicit oil imports from Saddam, which bring in up to $1 billion in annualinternational law who signed the petition. "Our lives are at stake with all these chemical weapons."12 Other signatories include Kuwaiti MP Hassan Jawhar, Egyptian film director Yousri Nasrallah, and Kamel Labidi, a prominent Tunisian journalist and human rights activist.

While the petition framed the call for Iraq regime change as an endeavor to avoid an American-led invasion of Iraq, some intellectuals in the Arab world have begun to express guarded optimism about impending US military action. "I feel a positive outcome might ensue from the coming war," wrote Saudi political analyst Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi. "[It] promises a new free, democratic and stable Iraq instead of today's fragmented dictatorship; a constitutional and tolerant Iraq run by the rule of law; an Iraq at peace with its neighbors; an Iraq that