THROUGHOUT THE MUSLIM MIDDLE EAST, the Battle of Baghdad was an enormously depressing non-event. The Arab media had expected the end of Saddam Hussein's regime to be "Basra-plus"--a valiant resistance blending Mogadishu with a hint of Stalingrad. Whether in Egypt's official journal of record, Al-Ahram, on the Arabic satellite-television station Al Jazeera, or on BBC radio and television, anti-American tacticians sounded similar themes. If the regime's paramilitary fedayeen could so surprise and frustrate the Americans and the British in the anti-Saddam Shia south, imagine what they and the Republican Guards Corps were going to do in the capital and towns of Iraq's Sunni heartland.

Arab and Muslim honor were at stake. In the officially certified pantheon of the Middle East's sacred things, pride of blood and faith rests above individual liberty and democracy. The Arab world's Sunni population, which never, truth be told, wept over Saddam's merciless onslaught against the rebellious Shia in 1991, wanted to believe that they and the Shia were one against the United States. Saddam Hussein was not a beloved man in the Arab Middle East--the Saudi holy warrior Osama bin Laden has enjoyed vastly more affection--but he had for more than a decade kept the United States and the West off-balance and divided. Saddam's storm troopers' last stand was meant to salve wounded pride and be condign punishment for American hubris. (Odds are good that most Arab, European, Russian, and Chinese penseurs, not to mention senior French and German officials, were thinking here quite similarly.) The historically inclined among the anti-American Arab political elite also knew that a killing field in Baghdad just might forestall the gut-wrenching reflection that has followed every major Muslim military disaster since Napoleon made mincemeat of Turkish Mamluks in Egypt in 1798.

These hopes collapsed as soon as American soldiers easily captured Baghdad's international airport and began sending armored columns into the center of the capital. CNN's reporting on the "Arab street" relayed quite matter-of-factly the coffeehouse glumness throughout the region. Al Jazeera delivered the same depressing "say-it-ain't-so" message, giving hope to its viewers only through prognostications about the growing anti-Americanism of liberated Iraq. Everywhere anti-American demonstrations evaporated. (It should be said that Al Jazeera, CNN, and the BBC, which have all given prominence to Iraqi sentiments critical of the United States, may in the end be right about the developing power of anti-Americanism in Iraq, but the alacrity of this reporting in such a large country even before Saddam's fall was, to say the least, forward-leaning.)

The virtually nonexistent Battle of Baghdad decisively accomplished what the first several days of the war--the "shock-and-awe" portion--had not, or at least had not in the eyes of many beholders (postwar commentary from surviving Iraqi soldiers will provide the last word on whether the Pentagon misnamed its battle tactics). America's armed forces had taken from Saddam Hussein his hayba--the awe that belongs to indomitable authority. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was only a republic of fear, as Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi dissident writer, has been saying for years, and not a nationalist enterprise. Once the dread vanished, nationalism did not fill the void, as some academic experts on the country had predicted. Rank-and-file Iraqi soldiers, let alone civilians, did not interpret their love of land and faith against the United States. They did not in numbers join Saddam's irregulars.