The Arab Alternative.

A few weeks ago, Hassan Yassin had a bright idea. The well-connected former Saudi official often sends up trial balloons in the Western press. They fly, or get blasted out of the sky, and the princes in Riyadh duly note the results. In an artfully crafted memo sent to several publications just after the New Year, Yassin suggested President George W. Bush has already won the war in Iraq: Saddam Hussein is contained, inspected, constrained, unable to use and about to lose any weapons of mass destruction he ever had. "In the face of resistance from most Arab, Muslim and Western governments," Yassin conceded, "the U.S. president has been single-minded and successful in his determination to prevent Saddam from becoming a danger to his own people, his neighbors or his enemies worldwide."

In other words, "Congratulations, Dubya, it's all over but the shooting." Yassin went further: Saddam and his ruthless little clique should step down now, accept a U.N. amnesty and end the crisis altogether. "Saddam," said Yassin, "this is your last chance." Last week those ideas were developing into a last-ditch initiative by Saudi Arabia and a clutch of other Arab countries--with the added threat that they'll back an anti-Saddam coup. Wishful as this approach seems, with U.S. troops pouring into the region and Saddam defiantly telling the world that Americans will be slaughtered at the gates of Baghdad, Yassin has a point. He may even have the beginnings of a plan. Call it the Arab Alternative to all-out war.

That's what Iraq's neighbors and Europe have wanted all along. (And possibly Washington as well.) They all fear that a bloody fight, however brief, will undermine every regime in the region and threaten the world's economy with wildly fluctuating oil prices. But they've also concluded it's not enough just to say "Stop the war." Today, according to Arab government sources, they're actively looking for less bloody ways to eliminate Saddam, and they're letting him know--less publicly than Yassin, but even more forcefully--that they want him to go.

Nobody will mourn the Butcher of Baghdad's passing. Twelve years ago, when the Iraqi dictator faced a huge coalition of American, European and Arab armies forcing him out of Kuwait, he nevertheless had plenty of fans rooting for him to attack Israel and stand tall against the U.S.A. Now Saddam's a has-been. From Jordan to Morocco, no ruler supports him and the streets have abandoned him. "During the first gulf war, hundreds of thousands of people protested in Morocco," says one senior official in Rabat. "Now it's barely thousands."

But all that will change if satellite television starts sending pictures of "collateral damage"--civilians slaughtered by errant American bombs; refugees huddled on Iraq's ...