PERSPECTIVE ON THE ARAB WORLD : All Their Children Are Hostages : No matter what Saddam Hussein has done wrong, the ever-bullying West is the greater evil in the eyes of many Arabs.

As I write, I have before me a letter from a distinguished and charming Palestinian writer and film-maker. He speaks excellent English, was educated in the West, and his many children have made homes and careers in Britain, America and Canada.

“We’re all concerned,” his letter begins, “about the feelings and worries of the families of the so-called foreign guests”--and then it goes on to justify their detention.

“This move is for peace rather than in the direction of war. First, it frustrates superior power to dictate what should be the object of rational negotiations. Second, it tries to move the common people in the West into thinking and applying pressure on politicians. . . . Finally, the move gives time to everybody to re-think the whole thing again.”

The letter continues with a long quotation from the Koran and ends, “I do pray for all the victims, and pray that the politicians will awaken to the truth.”

Outrage is one’s immediate reaction. How can a civilized man endorse hostage-taking in this way? How can he, and many others, go along with the sickly euphemism that turns prisoners into guests?

It is hard for us to grasp a moral universe in which the use of hostages is acceptable, but many Arabs, and not only in Jordan and Palestine, do see it that way. One reason is that the Middle East does not share our habit of looking at a deed in isolation and awarding it the character of bad or good. There, an action is seen within a vast context--of grievances both immediate and historical, of other evils and injustices, of pain endured in the past and pain to be endured in the future. Chains of consequences are calculated or imagined, and only then can the whole significance of a particular act be weighed.

As American forces mass against Iraq, Arabs see above all that the West is able to inflict pain without suffering much pain itself. The civilians of Iraq, and perhaps of Jordan and Israel, will be in the front line, while those of the West will be safely watching the war on television, hundreds or thousands of miles away.

At dinner the other night, an Arab businesswoman blazed with anger at the insouciance with which Western newspapers print maps bristling with tank and aircraft symbols and likely missile targets. The West was treating this as a war game, while at home in Amman her 8- and 10-year-old sons were sleeping, and each morning she woke up convinced the war had begun, and the bombs and the missiles would soon be falling. The most the West was worried about was the price of petrol and the collapse of the stock markets.

Your children are not going to be bombed, she said, so you cannot feel as we feel.

The only thing stopping the West from looking at everything she’d loved and valued as a disposable item on the war-game board, she implied, was the presence of so many Westerners in Iraq.

When asked to try to justify Saddam Hussein’s action, most inhabitants of his world do not express wholehearted approval, but they want to explain how this wrong--the use of Western civilians in this way--fits into a whole series of other wrongs, most of them by the West against the Arabs.

The first line of argument usually is that the West’s determination to continue to control the Arab world is a great wrong from which other wrongs spring--including evils wrought by Arabs themselves.

The same reasoning is encountered in discussion of Saddam Hussein’s brutal record at home in Iraq. Even if it is accepted that the West’s motivation in moving against him is far from pure, you may say, should he not be stopped simply because he is the worst kind of dictator? Few Jordanians or Palestinians would agree. “Saddam’s character is about No. 22 on my list of worries at this moment,” said the same businesswoman from Amman. It is Iraq that is going to be attacked, Arabs argue, Iraq whose back is going to be broken. Saddam’s Hussein’s record is incidental to that.

The plain refusal to face facts is hard for a Westerner to swallow. Jordan, for instance, has a leader--King Hussein--who in nearly 40 years of rule has killed only a handful of political opponents, and those legally. Saddam Hussein has killed as many over a weekend.

Prison or exile have been the maximum penalties for political opposition in Jordan, and those used with restraint. Plotters, dissidents and critics have been pardoned, given jobs, pensions, sinecures.

It has been autocracy tempered by kindness and, from time to time, by elements of genuine democracy. Yet Jordanians seem to repudiate this gentle tradition when they endorse, as some of them do, Saddam Hussein and all his works.

Arguing with one left-wing journalist from Jordan whose equivalents in Iraq have long since been purged, I said, “If you were an Iraqi, you would be dead.” He did not demur, but carried right on with his arguments in support of Saddam Hussein. That a triumphant Saddam might achieve such influence over Jordan as to control him and his future--if he would then have one--did not seem to concern him.

These days, Arabs resemble Europeans and Americans in many ways. They watch the same films, wear the same clothes, aspire to the same material way of life. But a great difference remains, and a situation like this reveals its extent.

Where we see only the dictator, they see that they are once again being dictated to by the West. Where we see a threat to the world order, they see a threat to our world order, an order that has never favored them. Where we see a threat to the oil that fuels the world economy, they see a threat not to oil, but to Western control of oil.

Where we see one bully, they see two--Saddam Hussein and George Bush. Where we see a war in which the West will prevail, they see their cities destroyed.

So when Arabs watch British children on television at the side of an ominously jovial Saddam Hussein, they see the unfairness and injustice of the situation. But they see it alongside other images--of the intifada’s many dead, and of their own children now at risk in the wider war that threatens, and at risk in a way that children in London and Paris and New York are not.

The moral laxity that can excuse Saddam Hussein must be confronted. But our easy habit of looking only at the morality of a particular issue, while ignoring the broader context, is also a kind of dishonesty.