Posted on 12/15/2003 4:30:31 PM PST by Pokey78
Some people are never satisfied. Yesterday, Americans, Britons and Iraqis were celebrating the news of Saddam's capture. Today, some Western commentators are anticipating more trouble as a result.
Robert Fisk, the Independent's celebrated Middle East correspondent, writes that "the nightmare is over – and the nightmare is about to begin". His reasoning is a little difficult to follow but seems to run like this. The circumstances of the capture of Saddam, as a troglodyte fugitive, dispose of the idea that he was co-ordinating the Iraqi resistance to Western occupation of the country of which he was recently president. Most of Saddam's former subjects would not, however, join the fight against him because, while he was at liberty, they feared he might return to power.
Yet all Iraqis agreed yesterday, according to Fisk's hasty soundings, that internal disorder would continue. The responsibility for that is the West's, because, in his heyday, Saddam was courted by Western statesmen. The French sent doctors to treat him. Chirac fawned on him. Donald Rumsfeld led a diplomatic mission to his capital. It is the West, therefore, which has destabilised the politics of the country it is now attempting to turn into a democracy and the West will therefore have to pay the price of the instability it has caused.
There is a tiny kernel of sense in what Fisk alleges. Saddam was indeed once courted by the West, at a time when the real menace in the Middle East was seen to be the fundamentalist ayatollah regime in Iran. The ayatollahs preached holy war against the Great Satan, the United States, and openly sponsored anti-American terrorism. They violated the most ancient rules governing relations between states, by invading the American Embassy in Teheran and imprisoning its staff.
Saddam, at that time, seemed a desirable ally. He was fervently anti-Iranian in his foreign policies. In his domestic politics he was all that any Western country sought of a Middle Eastern ruler. He was a genuine secularist, dedicated to keeping Islamic clerics safely in their mosques. He encouraged the education of his population, the emancipation of women and the economic development of his country and spent his vast oil revenues to achieve such ends. He was not, at the time, obviously anti-Western.
Little wonder that the leaders of the West flocked to Baghdad. If the Middle East were to be modernised, as had been the Western dream ever since Napoleon led his expedition to Egypt in 1798, it would be through the leadership of men like Saddam, apparently genuine patriots with enlightened development programmes. The West had reposed hopes in other Middle Eastern rulers before, notably Nasser of Egypt and the Shah of Iran. The Shah, however, though a genuine moderniser, had insisted on ruling from too narrow a political base and on being too brutal towards the Iranian Islamic establishment. He had provoked an internal religious revolution which brought his project down. Nasser, also a genuine moderniser, had combined his ambition for domestic reform with that for leadership of the Arab world, which required him to attack Western financial interests and fight Israel. He had thereby provoked the West's hostility and isolated himself from fruitful Western contacts. Sadat, Nasser's successor, proved too pro-Western and suffered an all too frequent Middle Eastern fate: assassination at the hands of anti-Western fanatics.
The expulsion of the Shah and the deaths of Nasser and Sadat left only one hopeful candidate for Western favour in the Middle East, Saddam Hussein. Many then felt, and some still do, that correct Western policy was to cultivate Saddam and draw him into the Western system. He was certainly given encouragement in plenty. Western policy could not, however, accommodate the irrational side of Saddam's character. He did not want to be the junior partner in any foreign scheme, nor a subordinate of the Syrian-led Ba'ath Party, Ba'athist though he was, nor a protégé of the Egyptian free officers, certainly not a Western place man. He had formed the aim of himself becoming the leading statesman of the Arab world and, greatly overestimating the power that his oil wealth gave him, set out to achieve his ambition.
It was from that misconceived policy that after 1980 all his troubles flowed. First he decided to defeat Iran, over a trifling frontier difference. The eight-year war cost him so much that he became indebted to his Arab supporters, who like him feared the ayatollahs' influence over the Islamic masses. When he annexed Kuwait in 1990, to wipe out his debt, he outraged the world but fatally also Western opinion and suffered a crushing defeat in the war that followed. Even after his humiliation, he persisted in seeking ways to restore his prestige, pursuing the development of weapons of mass destruction as a cheap means of achieving revenge.
The consequences we know. It is difficult to see why the West should be blamed for the outcome. The West has been here before. Time and again in modern history a leader, party or power whose policy seemed at the time the least bad option for democracy's support has been revealed, through the course of events, as a shaming ally. Mussolini, in the 1930s, was thought to be a useful counterweight against Hitler, even though he was a flagrant imperialist. Hitler, himself, at a time when Bolshevism seemed the great threat to the West, was given the benefit of the doubt. It was with expressed reluctance that, in June 1941, Winston Churchill brought himself to promise support to Stalin after Hitler's invasion of Russia. And so it goes on. The roll call of unworthy beneficiaries of democratic support is almost endless. Noriega in Panama, Pinochet against Allende, the Diems in Vietnam, Ceausescu when he seemed anti-Soviet, Bokassa, the cannibal emperor of Central Africa, even Idi Amin, who may have been a cannibal also.
Citizens of democracies do not like to be reminded of the bad friendships their rulers have made. We think our countries should behave as if they had moral characters. Robin Cook, indeed, began as New Labour's Foreign Secretary by announcing the inauguration of an "ethical foreign policy". But countries do not have moral characters. They only have interests. Sometimes the pursuit of interests leads us in directions that are difficult to defend. Our former involvement with Saddam the secularist was just such an interest. It should not be held against our rulers now.
The author goes through a nice explanation of why this statement is false. What do you want to bet that the original statement was made by someone who simply wants to blame America and root against us?
OMG! LOL!
OK I'll keep reading.
When a lie is repeated long enough, it seems that even those who should know better start to believe it. In this case, it is a slander to use the word "West" when describing those who supported Saddam Hussein's Iraq. For those of you who insist upon remaining clueless, there is little that can be done.
But for the rest of you, please go get copies of Janes from the late 1980s. Take a look at Iraq's inventory of military weapons. You will find that it was not the "West" that aided Iraq; it was France. Nearly all of Iraq's weapons came from France, Russia, and Communist China. About the only thing made in Britain was a few battlefield radars. Not a single weapon system came from the United States (note that Iraq did have some unarmed helicopters, but these weren't used in a combat role. They were mostly Bell 212/214s sold to the civilian government in the late 70s / early 80s and later approprated by Hussein for VIP military transports in the 1980s).
The lie has been repeated on and on that somehow the U.S. armed Iraq. But regardless of how many times that lie is repeated, and regardless of the fact that it now seems the majority of the people (even those on this site) believe it, it does not change the fact that it is a lie. The information to prove that it is a lie is available in any decent library, but unfortunately it appears that it is just more convenient for everyone, even so-called conservatives, to just believe whatever slander is said about the United States rather than finding out the facts for themselves.
Fisk seems to live in his own perpetual dreamworld, and it a nightmare.
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