The headless Iraqi leadership
Mark Steyn
National Post
nationalpost.com
Monday, March 24, 2003
According to the Iraqi News Agency, yesterday President Saddam Hussein held a meeting with his son Qusay and Defence Minister Sultan Hashid Ahmad.
No word on where the meeting took place. The Intensive Care Unit? The Virgin Allocation Customer Complaints Centre in Paradise? ("Look, I'm sorry you have to make do with the older, heavy-set ones, but frankly our inventory never recovered from the big Osama group-booking 15 months ago.")
So is he dead? No, not Saddam. We'll come to him later. I'm thinking of Tariq Aziz. Iraq's Deputy Prime Minister is a Christian and, even though he's a Scud-lobbing Kurd-gassing Christian, that's what passes for pluralism in the Middle East, and Baghdad is savvy enough to use him as their chief Western media spokesperson. So why isn't Tariq on CNN and the BBC right now? Why isn't he claiming that the imperialist aggressors have slaughtered thousands of innocent women and children?
That's what he was doing on the first weekend of the last Gulf War. Everywhere you looked he was busy accusing "the imperialist American-Atlantic-Zionist alliance and its traitor followers" of carrying out "aggressive, indiscriminate and deliberate raids" on food factories, a sports stadium, a museum, a church, a textile plant, a health centre, a passenger train, a sugar factory, a baby-milk factory and a water-purification plant. Hundreds of civilians had died, he insisted. Mr. Aziz didn't expect to get anywhere with the American-Atlantic-Zionist crowd but he'd issued a stirring call to the Non-Aligned Movement to help support Iraq in its struggle to build "a new world order."
Isn't this just the sort of stuff to cheer the hearts of Svend Robinson and Harold Pinter and the other Western Saddamites marching for "peace"?
But on the opening weekend of Gulf War II Tariq Aziz was silent. Even though perking up Svend and Co. is far more critical to Baghdad's strategy this time round, Iraq's Mister Available isn't returning his messages. He hasn't been seen since last Wednesday when some curiously timed rumours were floated that he'd either defected or been shot in the attempt. Saddam ordered him to go on TV and deny it. He did, and then left the studios to go to a meeting of the inner council. The meeting was broken up in the early hours of Thursday morning when the Pentagon dropped a bunker-buster on it.
We don't know for sure who was inside and who got out. But an awful lot of Baghdad's A-list crazies seem to have cut back on their personal appearances since, oh, Thursday a.m. It could be that the marked lack of command-and-control coming from the Iraqi capital is due to technical problems. But, on the other hand, look at the depraved video al-Jazeera was airing all weekend of Iraqi captors flaunting their American prisoners -- some alive, some dead and bearing marks of execution rather than war wounds. Saddam's hardcore thugs were able to round up their POWs, get out the camcorder, murder them, defile their corpses and get the footage from a relatively remote part of the country to the studio while the blood was still warm on the dungeon floor. As with the Daniel Pearl execution tape vis-à-vis Osama, it invites the question: If they can do this, where's the boss? The speed of this revolting production suggests that, if the Iraqi leadership aren't making video appearances, it's not because of technical difficulties, it's because they're not in a condition to be filmed.
And, while we're on the subject, what about that new Osama video he was supposed to release for the start of the Iraq war? It couldn't be that both he and Saddam are in the hospitality suite waiting to go live on "Good Morning, Hell," could it?
To be sure, Iraqi TV ran some footage of Saddam meeting with his most trusted psychos. But there was no sound on the tape. Could have been recorded anytime. There are reports that he was seen being removed from the rubble on a stretcher. Tony Blair told his war Cabinet that Saddam required a blood transfusion. Fortunately he keeps a good supply of chaps on hand for just that eventuality. Has he been so mentally incapacitated that he's no longer capable of discharging his duties as an insane psychotic lunatic madman and has had to hand over to a still functioning nutcase? Ah, but the Iranians reported that on Thursday Saddam's craziest boy Uday suffered a massive "brain hemorrhage," even though he never had that massive a brain to hemorrhage in the first place. That leaves his younger son Qusay, who was also in that building when the faint whirring sound was heard: Qusay, can you see by the dawn's early light ...?
If ever there were a time for a "mother of all battles" speech, this is it. But there seems to be a noticeable lack of folks around to give it. Whether or not Saddam is dead or dying or hideously disfigured or lightly bruised or looking as relaxed and roguish as Jack Nicholson picking up a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, the rumours of his death have spread quickly around Iraq and the regime seems to be incapable of restoring the appearance of authority. Whether or not Washington succeeded in its aim of "decapitating" the regime, the Iraqis are doing an awfully good impression of behaving as if they're headless. The significant indicator is not the units that are surrendering, but the ones that are disbanding -- they've concluded they don't need the protection of the British and Americans to keep them safe from the regime's wrath, because the regime is no longer in a condition to enforce its wrath.
Meanwhile, the visible face of the Baathist terror lacks a certain je ne sais quoi. After the first night of "Shock & Awe," the Iraqi Information Minister announced a civilian death of ... four. C'mon, guys! Svend's already anticipating that warmonger Bush will cause "thousands and thousands" of deaths. You'll have to do a bit better than single digits. Meanwhile, the Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri says he'll be attending the Arab League meeting, which he hopes will take a "true Arab stand" mirroring "sentiment on the Arab street." In other words, they'll jump up and down shouting "Death to the Great Satan!" and then go home. You can pretty much bet on that, Naji. But the more interesting question is, if you manage to get out of Baghdad, have you got any plans to return?
We'll know in the coming days just who was in that building and who survived. But, if "America's assassination attempt" (as BBC announcers sneeringly call it) was even partially successful, Washington will have changed the dynamic of rogue-state relations. When Jean Chrétien told reporters in Mexico that you can't just go around removing leaders you don't like, one assumes he meant it at least in part as a matter of practical possibility -- the human cost of taking out the butchers is too great, the civilian casualties too high. Dictators from Kim Jong-Il to Robert Mugabe rely on that argument.
But, if it emerges that Washington effectively disabled the entire leadership on Thursday morning, that the first casualty of the war was a Mr. S. Hussein of Baghdad, well, that's an awfully cautionary tale for Kim and Co. America will have invented not the neutron bomb but the neuron bomb: They'll have shown they're capable of disconnecting the regime's nervous system while leaving everything else standing -- bridges, hospitals, men, women, children. If I were M. Chirac or one of those other fellows who think the real threat to the world is American hegemony, I'd be longing for a reassuring call from Saddam. Otherwise, that North Korean crisis is going to go very differently.
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