[A-List] US imperialism: clueless

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Meet Saddolf, Enemy No 1
 
They used to be pals, now the US government says it's official: Saddam is the 21st century's answer to Hitler, writes Ian Bell
The Sunday Herald, 1 September 2002
 
WHAT would you call people who spent years promoting, supporting and arming the 21st century's answer to Adolf Hitler? Would you define them as dupes at best, cynical fools at worst, or just common or garden fascists? Would you also recognise them as the government of the United States of America?

It is the plain truth, in a world fast losing sight of that commodity, that Saddam Hussein was a bosom pal of the White House not so very long ago. His psychopathic tendencies were overlooked -- what's 5000 gassed Kurds between friends? -- and his distaste for democracy tolerated. Saddam was just the boy, in Washington's eyes, to tie down Iran's ayatollahs when those gentlemen were Enemies of the Month. If that meant the deaths of a million young men on both sides in an utterly pointless war it was a price America was willing to pay.

Times change. You can tell by the fact that the old fruitcakes of the Republican right are now worrying over the sanity of the new fruitcakes. One after another the hawks from the first Bush administration and before have been stepping forward to suggest that George W hasn't a clue. James Baker (the man who fixed Florida), Brent Scowcroft, Lawrence Eagleburger, Norman Schwarzkopf: each has muttered polite scorn. Even Henry Kissinger, a man who knows a thing or two about genocide, has expressed scepticism.

It has been something of a one-sided conversation, not least because the breadth of the White House's rebuttal can be summarised in a single word: 'Dunno.' Where is the evidence that Saddam actually possesses weapons of mass destruction? Where is the proof that he presently threatens any of his neighbours? What connection does he have with terrorist threats to America? How many innocent Iraqis would die in a war? Who would take charge of the country if Saddam was toppled? What impact would a conflict have on the wider Middle East? Dunno.

This stirring call to arms is issued, mark you, without a hint of Congressional approval, United Nations support, or the endorsement of any major country save the one whose prime minister prefers not to discuss the matter with his parliament. It is voiced over the objections of the generals who would actually have to put young men in harm's way. It is sounded -- and there may be a connection here -- amid the continuing, dismal failure to nail Osama bin Laden or any of his senior henchmen. This is not America's finest hour.

Donald Rumsfeld, Bush's defence secretary, thinks otherwise, of course. He has taken to invoking Churchill's percipience in the face of Hitler as the sole strategic justification for a 'regime change' in Iraq. Winston was right about Adolf, he says, when everyone else was wrong -- not counting assorted socialists, Communists and Spanish War veterans -- therefore there is a very clear chance, apparently, that George W might be right this time. Rumsfeld, it appears, is a strong believer in the law of averages.

Rumsfeld flatters Saddam, it almost goes without saying, and does not care to remind his American audience that the self-same vicious dictator was one of their allies a few years back. He also appears to possess only a dim knowledge of Churchill's erratic career. A war on Iraq might well be depicted as something akin to the liberation of France; it might just as easily wind up looking like the Dardanelles expedition. That isn't the point. Rumsfeld needs the biggest bogeyman he can find in order to attach the illusion of decency to the Iraq adventure. Who was bigger, more terrible, than Hitler? Saddam, lucky little thug, just got promoted.

This isn't to say that the beast of Baghdad is a candidate for compassion, of course. There is an old, persistent tendency among the European left to confuse justified criticism of America with sympathy for its enemies, as though the failures of one somehow vindicate the other. Saddam earned a bullet in the head many years ago. You cannot condemn him for the gassing of the Kurds -- as most of the left did when America did not -- and then treat him as the heroic victim of American imperialism. The man is a plague spore.

The fact remains, nevertheless, that the US has no right in international law to start a war, nor does it have any sort of moral right to kill innumerable Iraqis simply because it has taken against their dictator. That is not the sort of liberation the people of Iraq are hoping for, and you sense Rumsfeld knows it when he begins to talk wistfully of Churchill and Hitler. If morality and democracy are at issue, in any case, the defence secretary needs to remember the salient fact about the second world war: Hitler started it.

That said, it is entirely possible that Rumsfeld and his boss are as stupid as they appear to be. Perhaps they really do believe, as they claim, that the extirpation of Saddam will somehow stabilise the Middle East. If so, we are in for a bumpy ride as the White House fiddles with its moral compass. Should the charge sheet against Saddam merit the final sanction, then logically there are several other regimes in the region overdue for change, Saudi Arabia above all. And would that calm things down?

The barbaric kingdom supplied the great majority of the September 11 assassins. It is the fount of the perversion of Islam that motivated them. Most of the funding for bin Laden and his crew came from Saudi. The regime itself is scarcely democratic; the society wallows in anti-Semitism; and it doesn't much care for Western ways. By the by, it is also doing its level best to obstruct America's attempts to wage war on Saddam. So why does Saudi Arabia remain a valued friend, exempt from White House criticism?

Oil, of course. The Saudis have more of the stuff than anyone else and are only too happy to throw their weight around in consequence. Saddam has oil, too, and the group of former oilmen in the White House have not forgotten the fact, any more than they forgot Afghanistan's proximity to other, potentially crucial mineral reserves and pipelines. Oil is the name of the game. If Bush and Rumsfeld have their way, Iraq will shortly be secured for democracy as America's latest friendly gas station.

Hence the need to dramatise a squalid adventure as a contest between the forces of light and darkness. Hence the refusal, now, even to consider the return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq. Hence the casting of Saddam as a new Hitler. From here on every genocidal despot on the planet will have to audition for the Adolf Award. Hyperbole is exhausted.

But attempt, for all that, a small experiment in strategic thinking. Assume, for once, that Bush and Rumsfeld are telling the absolute, unadorned truth. Take them at their word and believe that Saddam is as close as can be to acquiring weapons of mass destruction, or to using those he supposedly already has. Now put yourself in the dictator's shoes. You're not in the best of moods; it's been a rough week. All those little paranoid daydreams have been borne out: everyone really is attempting to do you in. And what's this? The Americans are coming, tens of thousands of them, knowing as well as you do that your army is even less well equipped to wage a war than it was last time around. So what are those massively destructive weapons for, and why did you acquire them in the first place?

Churchill and Hitler, with unmatched experience, respectively, in imperialism and botching wars, could have written the script. The Americans come calling; Saddam lobs some disgusting stuff in Israel's direction; the Israelis retaliate massively (their declared policy); and everyone in the Middle East with a rifle or a rock to hand joins in. Finally, Ariel Sharon's government gets the chance to use a couple of its nuclear devices -- purely in self-defence, you understand. And after the smoke clears George W has to explain just why he put so many American boys in the middle of it all.

This, needless to say, is only what the Pentagon would call a worst-case scenario. It may equally well transpire that the US will launch an attack on Iraq without facing any weapons of mass destruction. But what, precisely, will then become of the sole American excuse for starting a war in the first place?

Churchill knew that Hitler could not be contained: that was the burden of his every warning during the 1930s. Saddam has been and is being contained. Rumsfeld is dropping the wrong names, for the wrong reasons, in the wrong cause. Business, in other words, as usual.