Saddam Hussein promised his soldiers angels, and he promised the Arabs who rallied to his banners a bright new world, a world without the old weakness, free of the old and familiar taste of defeat, but in the end it was all a swindle. Saddam Hussein's performance recalled the devastating Arab defeat in the Six Day War of 1967. ... A society that had lived through that ordeal should have been immune to another pretender, but in a culture susceptible to legend and the promise of the strongman, there were takers of what Saddam Hussein had to peddle.

...

In the end, that war in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf was a battle between a local predator and a foreign savior. Rescue came from afar; there was no assurance that the lessons of this conflict would sink in and endure. On pain of extinction, cultures often stubbornly refuse to look into themselves. They retreat into the nooks and crannies of their history, fall back on the consolations they know. In the scheme of such things, the war had been quick and (outside Iraq) decisive. This left open all sorts of escapes. Those who fell for Kuwait's conqueror were free to claim that they had been misunderstood, that they were only patriots responding to the coming to the Arab world of yet another Western army, that they had only wanted to be heard because there had been no place for them in the "New World Order" the foreigner came to uphold. This was a world with endless escapes. The defeat of the Iraqi predator provided no guarantee that the political sensibilities which had sustained him were vanquished once and for all.

The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey
By Fouad Ajami
Pages 177-184