Saddam Hussein’s trial in Baghdad may be a blip on the evening news to American television viewers, but in the Middle East it is a major news event, broadcast live or near to live by the famed Al Jazeera of Qatar and its competitor Al Arabia of Saudi Arabia.

Between them, the two Arab satellites command an audience easily topping 100 million viewers in the Arab-speaking world and many more millions in the Muslim world beyond. That is a bigger audience than any cable or other outfit can claim on any given night in a part of the world where literacy is barely 50%.

The trial footage is beamed out of Iraqi satellites with a 20-minute built-in delay, giving Iraqi censors enough time to remove inflammatory theatrical declarations by the once-great leader. Yet, what survives is surprisingly inflammatory. You would think little Iraqi folks running around Iraqi recording studios are silent partners of the anti-American insurgency raging in Iraq, using the trial tapes as their weapons of destruction.

Resplendent in his neatly pressed cotton suits, pepper-and-salt gray beard and jet flowing black hair, Saddam is still a hero to hundred of millions of Arabs and Muslims in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and some of the former Soviet republics where folks can understand enough Arabic, the language of the Holy Koran, to seize his meaning. (I know we are nice guys, but do we have to press his suits?)

He insults judges, the prosecution, and the Iraqi government which he never fails to describe as a “puppet” of “American occupiers”. He also argues, persuasively to eager ears of adulatory audiences watching broadcasts in public places and private homes, that he stands as the defender of Arab honor and is prepared to die for it.

In an Arab world, where America’s standing is at a historical low, Saddam’s words are music to the ears. He knows it. He plays it. He is good at it.

In the end, when he dies, as he will, there is not a doubt he will go as a hero, mourned and honored. Already folks in Iraq say they wish he were back. If the trial is designed to disgrace him, his dictatorial methods and the whole notion of brutal, corrupt Arab governments, the message is stuck somewhere in the tube. What comes out of that tube is a celebration of defiance to America and its whole Arab project.

In Dubai where I live, I seldom pass a coffee shop while the Saddam show is on without noticing television sets affixed to him. Silence reigns with occasional sighs of approval. The message is sinking, all right, and it is the one America intended by staging the trial.

Make no mistake about it. Saddam is still recruiting. His speech is fiery. His defiance admired. His adherents reassured by the steadfastness of the hero. Inside Iraq, insurgents are getting his message, which is explicit: if you kill Americans you are heroes.

Outside Iraq, the message is, join the resistance to America, fight foreigners, kill infidels. Even with the electronic delay, enough such slogans float out of Saddam’s trial in so many words.

In this he is helped by some of our best friends: the Emir of Qatar, the owner of Al Jazeera, the most influential Arabic language broadcasting weapon in a decade and a half, and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, whose royal family owns Al Arabia. The broadcasts also branch out onto Jordanian, Egyptian, Yemeni, United Arab Emirates and Bahraini local stations.

Why are they doing it? Deep down those friends like to put American feet to the fire by flaunting a defiant, irreverent, unrepentant Saddam. In many ways he says what they cannot say. America is appreciated for the military and security umbrella it extends to failing regimes against their own Muslim fundamentalists and looming Iran, but it is deeply resented for its recurring calls for democratic reforms and its frequent human rights denunciations of Arab dictatorial regimes – our friends.

The Saddam tapes and the big play they are given by those Arab regimes are their own peculiar way of biting the hand that feeds them. Granted, it is not a rational policy, but logic is not the strong point of failing states, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

In effect, Saddam in prime time promotes adherents of Islamic Fundamentalists, Arab nationalists, and assorted revolutionaries who want nothing more than the overthrow of the very same governments of their royal highnesses in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, as well as those of all other Middle East potentates.

What of America? Should it ban the tapes, slash their contents, stop the trial? It is too late for this.

Indeed, American military psych-ops specialists at the Doha, Qatar Southern Command are aware of the eroding impact of the Saddam tapes. They are coming up with halting steps. What are absent are dormant stewards of image-building in the State Department. Hello, Kathleen Hughes.