Posted on 04/17/2003 11:45:53 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
While the U.S.-led coalition forces were tightening their lasso around Baghdad, a committee of Ba'athist dignitaries was putting final touches to what it hoped would be "the mother of all feasts."
Scheduled to start on 23 April for 10 days, the feast was to mark Saddam Hussein's 66th birthday.
Uday, Saddam's eldest son and commander-in-chief of his Fedayeen, headed the committee.
The festivities were to include a football tournament, the first round of which was held in Baghdad on 8 March, for the coveted Saddam Cup. Professional and amateur artists were due to produce tens of thousands of paintings depicting various aspects of Saddam's life. A new opera, relating Saddam's "years of struggle" before his party seized power in 1968 was to be presented in Baghdad on 24 April. Hundreds of poets were expected to come out with odes, sonnets and rubaiyat in praise of "The Greatest Warrior of All Times." Hundreds of new busts of the leader were to be unveiled in dozens of cities and towns across Iraq.
The program included a seminar on "The Arab World and Globalization." More than 200 Arab and foreign scholars, including many Europeans in the pay of the regime for years, had been invited.
Two British Labour Party members, five members of Jacques Chirac's neo-Gaullist coalition, several Russian dignitaries, and two-dozen other members of the Don't-Touch-Saddam lobby in Europe and the United States, were to be guests of honor at a banquet planned by Uday.
Some Western reporters in Baghdad, secretly hoping for Saddam's victory, saw the preparations for the " mother of all feasts" as a "sign of confidence" on the part of the doomed regime.
Saddam's Information Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf claimed that the festivities would "crescendo into the greatest Arab military victory in centuries."
Things did not happen that way. And the French company that was to organize the fireworks display for Saddam's birthday was left with unpaid bills.
The birthday boy himself is either dead or hiding in a hole somewhere.
I wonder what will happen to the hundreds of poems written for Saddam this year. Since Iraq is to become a democracy, the poets won't be able to recycle their panegyrics for offer to another despot.
But Iraq's tyrants were not the only ones to have drugged themselves dumb with illusion.
Anyone who followed the war via the Arab media might have formed the impression that Saddam had achieved a series of spectacular battlefield victories and was heading for total triumph over "the invaders."
One typical headline in the Arab papers read: "U.S. Forces Face Surrender Or Death In Baghdad!"
And here is another headline: "Iraqis Score Victories on All Fronts Against the Aggressors!"
Such illusions were reinforced by much of the Arab television reporting, especially by the Qatari satellite channel Al-Jazeera. They presented the war as a series of deliberate massacres of the civilians by the U.S. and British forces, provoking heroic Iraqi attacks on the "murderers." According to these reports, while the Iraqis were fighting a regular war heroically, the coalition was trying to terrorize Iraqi civilians so that they would rise against their government.
More cautious Arab pundits did not forecast victory for Saddam. But they insisted that Iraq would become "the Arab Vietnam."
"Saddam may have died," said Iyad Abuchaqra, a Lebanese columnist. "But most Arabs believe that the cause that he espoused would win eventually."
The truth, of course, is that the Iraqis did not become involved in any organized fighting throughout the war. Even their larger operations, pinpricks in military terms, ended as suicide missions against the better armed and trained U.S. and British forces.
The illusion that Iraq was winning suited some Arab regimes that secretly hoped for Saddam's speedy demise. Convinced by the media that the Iraqis were on the offensive, the average Arab saw no need to take to the streets to show anger.
This was, perhaps, one reason why the promised "explosion" on the proverbial "Arab street" failed to materialize. And that was good news for some Arab regimes.
Throughout the 3-week war, only 17 demonstrations took place in six Arab countries. The largest attracted 12,000 people.
Radical forces tried to take credit for the imaginary victories scored by the Iraqis. In the first week of the war, praise for the imaginary heroism of the Iraqis was often accompanied with mild rebuke for Saddam Hussein. Later, some commentators either ignored the Butcher of Baghdad or praised him in roundabout ways.
The illusionists, of course, were not interested in what the Iraqis had to say. Anti-Saddam Iraqis were seldom heard in the Arab media.
Instead, Arab newspapers and television networks amplified the voice of the Don't-Touch-Saddam lobby in Europe and the United States. Some Arab papers used up to 10 articles from British anti-war newspapers such as the London Independent and the London Guardian each day.
The sudden Saddamomania may well be an affliction of the Arab elites rather than the masses.
With notable exceptions, such as columnists Turki al-Hamad, Ahmad al-Rubee, Bakr Oweida and Abdulrahman al-Rashid, Arab commentators were either fanning the fires of illusion or casting Saddam in the role of the new Arab champion.
There is, however, no evidence that the Arab masses ever warmed up to Saddam. In visits to many Arab countries, this reporter has found little evidence of support for the Iraqi despot.
Baghdad's claim that more than 5,000 non-Iraqi Arabs came to fight as "suicide-fighters" was a lie.
The Iraqi media published the names of only 13 such volunteers, all of whom spent the war in a Baghdad hotel while their credentials were being checked by the secret service. All but four of those named are Arabs who live in various western European countries and Canada. They are now begging Western journalists for money to get out of Iraq as fast as they can.
"H'mm," the poet mused (sorry), "There has to be another egotistical, genocidal maniac whose name rhymes with Saddam around, doesn't there?"
As far as I can tell, Saddam's only "cause" was to butcher and terrorize as many Arabs as necessary to remain in power to plunder Iraq's riches for his personal gain. If "most Arabs" believe in that cause, it's the most pathetic culture ever known to mankind.
Hundreds of poets were expected to come out with odes, sonnets and rubaiyat in praise of "The Greatest Warrior of All Times."
They were going to praise Tommy Franks?
Happy Birthday, Saddam!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.