LONDON — Why would Washington's closest Arab allies, the countries most threatened by Saddam Hussein, oppose U.S.-based efforts to remove him? Ahmad Chalabi, head of the leading Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, tells me that from Egypt to the Gulf the authoritarian regimes and hereditary monarchies fear democracy in Iraq more than Saddam.

Their economies are stagnant and their population growth is exploding as farmers move into crowded cities. With almost half the population under 15, the young people are more interested in the Internet and the latest Nike shoes than in tired slogans about liberating Palestine. Yet these largely artificial countries justify their very existence in terms of the war against Zionism. And they have used hatred of Israel to distract attention from the repression, corruption and lack of fundamental rights at home.

The tyrannical regime in Baghdad, armed with the nuclear weapons that Saddam Hussein surely will obtain, poses the worst nightmare to the oil-rich region and the industrial world - much worse than how the Jews and Arabs divvy up Palestine, an oil-poor desert half the size of San Bernadino County in California.

Bill Clinton paid lip service to establishing a new government in Iraq, but was not about to go to war to enforce it. His no-ground-troops air war over Kosovo was called Operation Just Cause. An aborted air strike against Saddam was Operation Just Kidding.

The United Nations weapons inspection teams no longer inspect. The "no-fly zones" to protect the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south may soon apply to allied planes themselves.

Sanctions have all but collapsed. And if the policy of containing Saddam has trapped him "in a box," the self-proclaimed protector of the Arab world against the Persians and the Jews, doesn't seem to notice.

The Bush administration has an opportunity to forge a clear, new policy in the Middle East based on the president's vision of remaining engaged in the world while basing America's actions solely on its own interests.

A Middle East without Saddam is clearly in the best interest of the United States. But to succeed, Washington must be serious about supporting the Iraqi insurgents.

Its unlikely ally in such an effort would be Iran, the only neighboring country offering to provide the rebels with a secure base, and whose people despise Saddam and have the will to stand up to him.

In the eight-year war that followed Iraq's invasion of Iran in 1980, Iran suffered 750,000 casualties and endured savage trench warfare, chemical and gas attacks and the bombing of its cities, oil refineries and sacred mosques. Saddam fears a Washington-Tehran common policy against him more than anything else.

Iran is the ideal staging ground for an Iraqi insurgency, having sponsored both Kurdish and Shiite guerillas in the last four decades.

Iran has indicated that it is willing to put aside its differences with the United States in order to work together against Saddam. Some initial steps have already been taken. Iran has allowed the Iraqi National Congress to open an office in Tehran to coordinate operations across the border. Iran will permit the INC set up a radio transmitter to beam its message to the Iraqi people.

Iran is fully aware that the INC is funded by the U.S. State Department. So American government money is being spent openly in Iran for the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

The Iranian-backed opposition to Saddam has announced that it will now work with the United States. During two decades of its existence the Tehran-based Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq refused to deal with Washington. But it recently said: "The protection of the Iraqi people remains the responsibility of the international community, in which the United States is a major element that cannot be ignored."

There are legitimate fears that a post-Saddam Iraq would break up, creating greater instability in the region, so the territorial integrity of Iraq must be guaranteed.

But that concern should not drive the United States to continue its current failed policies while Saddam builds his arsenal of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in order to control the region's oil wealth and blackmail his enemies.

Stanley A. Weiss is founder and chairman of Business Executives for National Security. The views he expresses are his own.