Give me a war, please

The United States has quite a few missiles to spare. Iraq has millions of people, though Saddam Hussein or other worthies of the Revolutionary Command Council will not be among them. The US has a mission in Iraq: disarm the dictator. The dictator too has a mission: invite another imperial aggression. This script is so familiar that whenever Bill Clinton or Madeleine Albright does not rule out a military option (bombing of select Iraqi targets) even Saddam Hussein sounds repetitive. After all, for a dictator under siege, the idea of a permanent war with the enemy is such a self-serving diversion. It allows him to play with national frenzy, to export victimhood. Take this, for instance: “If the devil pushes these enemies into evil and aggression and they attack us, we will be forced to fight them with all our capabilities”. Reports from Baghdad say Iraq has already started mobilisation for a `holy war’. And it seems, President Clinton may even oblige Saddam. He may even do it alone, for as Albright realises,it is not everybody’s idea — not certainly Russia’s — to bomb Iraq in the name of disarmament.

Then, what are you going to do with Iraq? Talk, negotiate, persuade, indulge … Saddam will have no problem with any of these options, as long as he is not inspected by those Anglo-Saxon intelligence men masquerading as weapons inspectors. Such options give him enough space for manipulation; in the process he may even qualify for a good certificate, with all those `sensitive sites’ intact. Last time he had a problem with the inspection team, he was hoping to manipulate the UN as well as the perceived disarray in the alliance that fought against Iraq in the Gulf War. Confusing the UN with the US was his bluff then, and it was aptly called. Perhaps Saddam never learns. Going by the unconvincing arguments of his deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, the bottomline of the Iraqi position is this: lift the sanctions irrespective of the incomplete status of the inspection. The present crisis is purely a creation of Iraqidefiance. Inspectors have been denied access to sites labelled by Iraqi authorities as `presidential properties’ or `sensitive’. Even the Anglo-Saxon nationality of certain inspectors is seen as a threat to Iraqi sovereignty! How are you expected to complete the job in time when you are not allowed to do your job?

Of cours6e, despite all, you can indulge — or sloganise in anti-imperial words — Saddam with third-world sentimentality. This idealisation intends to be an expression of solidarity with the suffering, starving people of Iraq. If Iraqis are suffering, the name of that suffering is Saddam Hussein. He has literally created on the wreckage of Ba’athist romance what an Iraqi scholar in exile calls the Republic of Fear. Under Saddam, the Iraqis have never had the freedom to dissent. Saddam’s republic is kept alive by the ruler’s paranoia. And the internal terror is directly proportional to the extra-territorial ambition of this regime, which has never shown any respect for international opinion orcivilised diplomacy. Today Saddam is provoking another military response from the US. The dictator requires another national celebration of martyrdom, and he has millions to spare.