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June
20, 2003
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June
21, 2003
The Iraq War as Danse
Macabre
Saddam
and the WMD Mystery
By HAROLD A. GOULD
The great question that lingers in the aftermath
of the war America waged against Iraq is: Where are the weapons
of mass destruction over which the war was allegedly fought?
This is clearly the topic of the moment. A recent Washington
Post article (June 13th) is the latest of numerous articles and
commentaries which suggest that hard evidence for the existence
of WMDs was at best meager and at worst mostly speculative. In
the end, the most that has been found are two tractor trailers
that might have been mobile chemical laboratories (although a
recent Guardian article says they were for inflating hydrogen
balloons used for artillery deployments), and a scattering of
rusty barrels that might have or may not have contained weaponizable
substances. Such slim pickings do not a massive stockpile of
WMDs make! Especially when none of the bulky and hard to conceal
delivery systems needed to launch toxic or nuclear attacks have
ever been found. If subsequent investigations fail to reveal
anything more tangible than this--i.e., if it turns out that
the UN inspectors whose judgements the Bush administration so
cavalierly dismissed were in fact accurate, and that Saddam's
assertions that Iraq no longer possessed WMDs were true--then
Mr. Bush and his neoconservative entourage will have much to
answer for down the road.
The Bush administration clearly knows
in private that their original rationale for waging preemptive
war on such a massive scale was based upon enhanced intelligence
data. So much so that revelations of its extent may yet bring
down Tony Blair's prime-ministership in England. This is attested
by the fact that the White House spin-doctors, including Mr.
Bush himself, are subtly--or not so subtly?--altering the premises
of their original scenario. They are now flooding the airways
and the printways with a torrent of claims that, after all, it
doesn't really matter if the smoking gun (or should we say, the
noxious odors!) which was their original justification for undertaking
a war adamantly opposed. by the international community has never
been found. It is sufficient, they are asserting, that Saddam
Hussain was a bad guy who constituted a "threat" to
his neighbors and a menace to his own people.
This is a point with which some us can
agree. One devoutly wishes that if preemptive war were going
to be waged its primary motivation was to liberate an oppressed
people rather than this being a retrospective byproduct of a
war which its perpetrators themselves had little intention of
waging for any sort of humane or compassionate reasons. Obviously,
there is no country in today's world, superpower or not, that
will blanketly employ this criterion for determining who's good
and who's bad, and who is deserving of a preemptive American
strike and who is not. It could be after all just as well be
applied to dozens of countries in every part of the globe! Why
not North Korea? Why not Iran? Why not Venezuela? Why not even
China, for that matter, considering their human rights record?
The answer, of course, is self-evident. In international politics,
idealism has precious little to do with who gets singled out
for the moral retribution over their human rights record! The
decision to wage war is rarely by shimmering morality; it is
determined by naked self-interest and by what you think you can
get away with. Certainly this was the case with Iraq.
Apart from the apparently wide gap between
truth and wishful thinking which fueled the Iraq campaign, there
is, however, a further, greater irony in all this. It is: Why
Saddam, if indeed he no longer possessed the stores of WMDs which
the Bushies said he did, was he willing to prevent this fact
from becoming known to the satisfaction of Washington and the
UN and thus avoid reaping the wild wind? Why, in short, was Saddam
willing to risk the destruction of his regime and his country
essentially in the name of a quixotic bluff?
The answer probably lies in a mixture
of factors, and may contain some insights into other, similar
crises that may come down the road.
One factor that might be taken into consideration
is Saddam Hussein's personal mind set. He was always a political
gambler who had enjoyed a remarkable run of luck. "The strongest
suggestion that Hussein had a substantial WMD program,"
notes Richard Cohen (Washington Post, June 17th) was his refusal
to come clean. But it is also possible that he wanted the world
-- particularly his neighbors (Iran) and his domestic opposition
(Shiites, Kurds, etc.) [not to mention the United States] to
think that he did." He had survived the onslaught mounted
against him in 1991 by President Bush's father when nothing seemed
more improbable. In the intervening decade, Saddam adroitly held
UN inspectors at bay; endured a missile strike ordered by President
Clinton in 1998 after he kicked the inspectors out of the country,
successfully circumvented economic sanctions, and sustained his
image on the Arab street as a revolutionary Islamic hero. In
the face of the major divisions that emerged among the great
powers over the American call for an Iraq crusade, it would not
be surprising if Saddam believed that he could remain intransigent,
dodge the bullet one more time, and retain his military-economic
apparatus intact. Such are the instincts of dedicated gamblers,
especially when driven by ideological certitudes!
Another related factor which addresses
Saddam's staying power was his apparent belief that history if
not the gods were in his corner. He depicted himself as the modern
incarnation of Saladin, the great medieval warrior whose military
victories over the Christian world laid the foundations of an
Arab imperium that eventually stretched from India to the Atlantic
Ocean, from Central Asia to North Africa, and the Balkans. One
must never dismiss the power of apocalyptic fantasies in the
hands of charismatic political dreamers. History is littered
with their exploits, and their tragedies, ranging from the Mahdi
in the Sudan to Wovoka among the American Plains Indians. In
Saddam's case his imageries and his short-term successes won
him a wide following in the Arab world and fed his illusions
of omnipotence and invincibility. This illusion of political
omnipotence undoubtedly contributed to what can only be characterized
as a fool-hardy gamble that he could somehow survive even if
he could not avoid a direct military confrontation with the world's
only superpower.
It is in this context that some observations
which American CIA Director, George Tenet, made in a 2000 public
briefing. He spoke of what he believed to be the driving force
behind Saddam's pursuit of chemical weapons. Iraq, he said, sought
a bioweapons capacity "both for credibility and because
every other strong regime in the region either has it or is pursuing
it."
If the WMDs are never found, then what
has taken place must be understood as one of the more bizarre
manifestations ever witnessed of mutual deceit being pursued
on a truly international scale. On one side we have the Bush
administration, determined to wage war upon Iraq and Saddam Hussein
for a host of genuine and spurious reasons, willing to distort
and embellish the intelligence data to whatever degree necessary
to justify it, and prepared to take whatever sweat might follow
once the dimensions of the deception become public in the aftermath.
On the other side we have the Saddam
Hussein regime, willing to risk everything for the sole purpose
of clinging to a mythologized political image of itself as the
premier radical Arab power with the capacity and the guile to
successfully defy the authority both of the American superpower
and the United Nations.
If the facts as we currently know them
hold up, the Iraq war will undoubtedly take its place as a classic
case of a symbiotically intertwined danse macabre between two
nation-states whose addiction to the trappings of political power
and jingoistically driven self-importance outweighed all considerations
of measured reflection on the costs and consequences of impulsive
political behavior. Thousands of dead and wounded innocents and
billions of dollars worth of ruined infrastructure are the price
that has been paid for the free play of this dueling exercise
in over-inflated national egos.
Harold Gould
is a Visiting Scholar in the Center for South Asian Studies at
the University of Virginia. Email: 102062.477@compuserve.com.
Today's Features
Elaine
Cassel
Bush Plays the Racial Profiling Card:
It's a Smokescreen
Brian
Cloughley
Punch-and-Judy in the West Wing:
The Powell-Rice Show
David Lindorff
What's Next?
Mark
Jacobs
A Serious Conversation: a Former Foreign Service Officer on Diplomacy
in the Age of Bush
Alfredo
Castro
Bloodbath in Colombia: The Army and the Death Squads
Saul
Landau
Lying, Flag Waving and Redefining
Conservative Values
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log, 6/19
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