This article hints at the tremendous spin applied to the events of the past weeks in the Arab media. It will be interesting to see what happens next, as some of the facts begin to leak through:

"It's like a movie. I can't believe what I'm seeing," said Adel, a lawyer in Beirut. "Why didn't he just give up to start with if this was all the resistance he could muster? Instead of wasting all those lives for nothing."
"It seemed that Iraqis were all with Saddam, now it looks like many didn't like him. Maybe those destroying the statue are rebels against Saddam's rule," engineer Magdy Tawfiq said as he watched Saddam's statue being toppled by a U.S. tank.
"Saddam Hussein is proving for the thousandth time that he is stubborn, stupid, idiotic and a terrorist. He is more like the head of a gang and not the president of a respectable state like Iraq," said Sultan Nasser, 49-year-old Saudi bank employee.

The article also cites several people who continue to support Saddam despite the celebrations in Iraq, but those sentiments certainly seem to be far less pervasive than previously indicated.