The Guns of Baghdad
When they kick at your front door, how you gonna come –
With your hands on your head, or on the trigger of your gun?
– The Clash, “Guns of Brixton”
Maybe Don King is advising the White House, because the big “Showdown with Iraq” was promoted very much along the lines of last year’s heavyweight title fight between Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson: the enormous, physically-intimidating, insufferably arrogant Lewis at the top of his game, against loudmouthed punk Tyson, obviously a shadow of his former self but perhaps still in possession of that dangerous knockout punch-of-mass-destruction. No one thought Tyson had a chance, but people were willing to shell out for pay-per-view just to see him get his butt kicked.
The Tyson-Lewis fight, as ugly and one-sided as it was, was at least a bout between two professionals. The invasion of Iraq is looking more like Lennox Lewis vs. the smelly guy at the end of the bar who accidentally spills his drink on the Champ and decides to tough it out rather than apologize. As much as the guy might have it coming, no one in his right mind would relish the notion of Lewis taking a swing at him.
As an American concerned about the safety of our troops in battle, I am delighted that they are not encountering stiffer resistance. It’s probably just as well for the miserable conscripts of the Iraqi army, too. But it raises a couple of troubling questions, most significantly, where are Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction? There are only three possible answers:
- He never had them in the first place, which is to say that the whole pretext for this war of conquest is a farce (not that Bush and company would care, of course).
- He has them but is afraid to use them. OK, but if he won’t use his most formidable weapons in defense of his country and his regime, knowing he is going down to defeat anyway, then why were we afraid he would use them under much less desperate circumstances? If he was deterrable, then why are we fighting a war when we could have successfully contained him?
- He did not have a chance to use them (or hasn’t used them yet). The military talking heads have been filling CNN airtime with their very convincing doctrine of “use them or lose them.” Bush gave Saddam 48 hours while troops were massed in a very small area of the border near Kuwait. An attack by chemical or biological weapons would have had maximum effect at that time. If he had weapons ready to use, why wait?
There is also a fourth, less convincing explanation, which is that he has the weapons and is choosing not to use them to make a point in principle to embarrass the US. It would be an interesting gambit, but I don’t think Saddam is either that noble or that farsighted.
Whatever the explanation, the result is clear. With neither the means nor the will to put up a credible defense of their homeland, the Iraqis are suffering not just defeat but humiliation. Saddam is a hateful tyrant, but he is their tyrant. America and Britain may be seen as liberators in the short term, but they are viewed overwhelmingly as foreign colonizers, making the world safe for blasphemous American culture and Zionism. The fact that the Iraqi military did not offer even the honorable vestige of token resistance to the conquest will leave a lasting scar on Iraq’s psyche, and that of all Arab regimes. To be a martyr, after all, you must draw your sword in defense of the faith.
Right now, this is all to the good for American and British soldiers doing an ugly job under what must be hellish conditions. But five or ten years down the line, the political parties of the new Iraqi “democracy” will doubtless be in a contest to outdo each other’s promises of revenge against the oppressors and death to the “collaborators,” which is to say the earnest Iraqi defenders of whatever actual freedoms and civil institutions we may have succeeded in creating.
Germany, which produced such noble minds as Goethe and Schiller, could not prevent the rise of Hitler and Nazism in the aftermath of a humiliating defeat. Iraq, with no traditions of liberal thought to offset the deep-seated tradition of shame, pride and revenge, will almost inevitably sink back into belligerence as soon as the backs of the conquerors are turned. After all, even Tyson was begging for a rematch.
12:31:12 PM 
|
|
