Run, Saddam, Run. Write, Saddam, Write.

Not all the news from the Middle East is full of despair. Here, for example, is a bit of welcome comic relief from the BBC: Iraqi state radio announced Thursday that the nation will hold a referendum later this year to decide whether President Saddam Hussein should remain in office for another 7-year term. As if that were not enough to put a smile on every face along the Tigris, the Beeb added that the vice-chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council of Iraq, Ezzat Ibrahim, will chair a committee to ensure a "successful result" in the ballot.

This committee no doubt has its work cut out for it, though there is every reason to believe that it will eventually devise a winning strategy for the President. The fact is, Saddam has had to solve other popularity challenges in recent months, because not everything has been going his way lately. Among the signs of voter restiveness: Saddam's most recent novel, The Impregnable Fortress, a tale of love and war, has been selling poorly. This despite the fact that Iraq had printed 2 million copies of the book, had issued purchasing quotas for each Iraqi province, and had declared the work to be the best-selling novel in Iraqi history even before the book was released.

In the tradition of modest literary genius, Saddam publishes his fiction anonymously; Fortress, like Saddam's first great novel, Zabibah and the King (a 2001 parable about his love affair with the Iraqi people), appeared as "a novel by its author." When not enough Iraqis bought this year's Fortress, reports the London-based paper Al-Hayat, the nation's literary establishment went into action. According to the paper (as translated by World Press Review), "Never in the history of modern Arabic literature has any book been the subject of so many favorable reviews, and never has an author, anonymous or named, been so highly lauded."

At a well-attended Baghdad conference called to examine the profound importance of this work, the writer Amjad Tawfiq said that "what distinguishes this novel from others is its ability to weave a string of pearls on which love and war are strung together. And the way it celebrates the fundamental human qualities that refuse to allow war to be an interruption of the affairs of daily life, bespeak an author with a sensitive heart and mind. As for the author's treatment of love in the novel, it is depicted as a spiritual strength which was bestowed to increase and support the ability of the [protagonist] warrior, who gives of himself in selfless sacrifice in order to perform his duties with distinction and bravery in war."

Poet Muhammad Radi Jafar was particularly insightful. The Impregnable Fortress, he observed, "is built upon a confirmation of the individual by providing an example [of a protagonist] who is conscious of the world… and we arrive at the underlying moral by doing the same thing—being conscious…"

Jafar's observation is probably the key to victory in the upcoming referendum: Saddam will sweep to another term by "being conscious," though that is not an absolute requirement. Meanwhile, Zabibah, Saddam's first work, is being staged as a musical, and he is reportedly hard at work on his third best-seller.