Mark's first column about Saddam.
ANOTHER SETBACK FOR BUSH
Well, that Vietnam-style quagmire seems to be getting worse, doesn’t it?
Not content with their laughably unconvincing Bush Thanksgiving photo-op, they’ve now stuck Dick Cheney in a false beard and are pathetically trying to pass it off as some kind of “good” “news”.
But assume, for the sake of argument, this is the real Saddam Hussein. What happens now depends on his state of mind. He may say nothing. Or it may be that, after eight months on the lam, bumping around in the back of donkey carts, sleeping in smelly hovels, short of sycophants, deprived of the company of his fellow psychopaths Uday and Qusay, his chums in Moscow and Paris refusing to accept any collect calls, pining for the metaphorical full Monica he used to get from visiting western shills like British leftie MPs Tony Benn and George Galloway, after all that he may be grateful for a chance to yak about this and that to various A-list interrogators. He knows surely that it’s his last chance to play the bigshot, before trial by his former subjects, and then gaol and (I hope) execution.
So he may have some interesting things to say about, for example, Con Coughlin’s remarkable scoop in London’s Sunday Telegraph: Coughlin has seen a memo by the then head of Iraqi Intelligence disclosing that Mohammed Atta, the field commander on 9/11, was trained in Baghdad two months beforehand by Abu Nidal. Mr Nidal died in a not entirely convincing “suicide” last year, which with the benefit of hindsight tends to corroborate that memo. His timely death ensured that Mr Nidal was unavailable to auction his secrets. If Saddam is now headed to the gallows, he may feel it’s time to take credit for some of the things he’s been hitherto sheepish about.
And if he gets real chatty that may cause some embarrassment for M Chirac and the Russians, too, which always adds to the gaiety of the international scene.
But, in a sense, that’s all the past – just footnoting for the archives. Certain columnists, whom modesty prevents me from mentioning by name, have painted an eerily accurate picture of his living conditions these last six months. Even so, there’s something almost exquisitely apt in the circumstances of his capture, pulled up out of a hole he’d dug for himself. The Democrats, the French, the European media and the various other parties who’ve invested in the Bush-quagmire story have also dug a hole for themselves. Al Gore briefly emerged from his own pit of obscurity last week to denounce the Iraqi operation: “My friends,” he said, “this nation has never, in two centuries and more, made a worse foreign policy mistake.” On Sunday morning, the most pitiful of the “serious” candidates, Senator John Kerry, couldn’t resist digging himself in a little deeper: “This is not just about one man,” he complained, urging that now would be an excellent opportunity to hand everything over to the UN, the Hague, the Arab League, the Westchester County League of Women Voters, and other respected bodies.
Kerry doesn’t get it: if it had been left to Kofi Annan, the French, Germans, Russians, Canadians, Arabs and all but two of the nine Democratic Presidential candidates, Saddam Hussein wouldn’t be being inspected for lice by American medics, he’d still be sitting on his solid gold toilet in his palace reading about the latest massive anti-Bush demonstrations in Le Monde. The Iraqi people don’t want to place their future in the hands of an “international community” that found it more convenient to allow Saddam to go on torturing them.
As for this being “not just about one man”, don’t bet on it. In May, I was sitting in a restaurant in Ramadi just west of Baghdad, chewing the fat (very literally, alas) with various Iraqi chaps, all of a Sunni disposition. “Hey, things are gonna be great from now on, right, guys?” I said, by way of an ice breaker.
They shrugged gloomily. “Where is Saddam?” said one, pointing at the BBC News on the TV in the corner. “Where is Saddam? He has money, he has friends. He will be back.” In the months since, he’s been all but irrelevant to any active coordination of the so-called “resistance”. But the fact that he was still on the run, somewhere out there, meant that, in theory, he could be behind it, and that made it easier for the Baathist dead-enders and the imported terrorists to lean on communities in the Sunni Triangle for support and cover. The sight of Saddam looking like a department-store Santa who’s been sleeping off a bender in a sewer for a week will deal a fatal blow to the Baathist thugs’ ability to intimidate local populations. The insurgency will continue for a few weeks yet, but it will peter out, like the dictator, not with a bang but a whimper.
In the honour/shame culture of the Arab world, it will be much harder now to pass him off as the mighty warrior. He had a pistol, but chose not to use it on himself. The Palestinians may be jumping up and down in the street insisting he’s still a great man, but in the end the sugar daddy who put up 25,000 bucks for the family of each suicide bomber had no desire to experience the glory of martyrdom himself: he’s eager for you to strap your teenage daughter into the Semtex belt, but, like Osama and Yasser and the rest of the gang, he’s disinclined to lead by example. For Middle East dictators who’ve enjoyed a wholly undeserved political stability for a quarter-century, the humiliation of Saddam Hussein is a cautionary tale.
As for the western naysayers, let me go back to what I wrote in July, after the killing of Uday and Qusay and the Democratic Party reaction: “If they’re still droning on like this on the day Rummy’s passing out souvenir vials of Saddam’s DNA, they’ll be heading for oblivion.” Well, we’re not yet at the souvenir DNA stage but the inability of a serious political party to resist the siren songs of the Noam Chomsky/Michael Moore/Euro left is showing signs of becoming terminal.
“What happened this week,” I wrote back then, “is a foretaste of what the Party can expect in the next 15 months: reality will keep intruding, and if the Dems keep moving the goalposts ever more frantically pretty soon they’ll be campaigning from Planet Zongo. This week, Tom Daschle insisted that Uday and Qusay were all very well, but where was the Big Guy? Why hadn’t that slacker Bush caught him yet?”
Next question, Tom?
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