Arm-wrestling
Well, any misgivings the US' foreign allies had about Bush's planned war on Iraq sure-as-hell weren't abated by Dan Rather's interview with Saddam Hussein last night. Hussein came off superficially as a measured, calm, fairly reasonable leader trying to protect his nation's sovereignty -- not the psychopathic dictator he is in real life.
I'm not really anxious to see the US hop into another war with Iraq -- the bill for this one we're gonna foot ourselves, unlike the last war, and our European allies are already pissed off enough at us for our rampant cultural imperialism and other foibles already ... it's clear we don't have their backing this time around. But still, Saddam's talk with Rather didn't impress.
An interview Saddam gave with Diane Sawyer more than a decade ago shows just how out-of-touch with reality this guy is -- he was dumbfounded when Sawyer explained to him that people in the US are allowed to criticize their government and their leaders without fear of being tortured or killed. Things haven't changed that much, though Saddam -- to his credit -- seems moderately more media-savvy than he was back then.
Saddam's suggestion of a television debate with Bush may have made for good copy, but I'm a bit disappointed that Rather spent so much time in his interview obsessing about it -- it's a superfluous suggestion at best, and it doesn't go to the root cause of Bush's complaints against Saddam, which seem to transform on a constant basis.
Bush says that Saddam is an ironfisted dictator, and of that there seems little doubt. Any leader that gets 100 percent of the vote can't be ruling by legitimate means -- dissent is normal human behavior. But I think part of the misgivings that many people have about this aggression towards Iraq is born of Bush's rather weak case that Iraq is a major sponsor of international terrorism.
Sure, Saddam actively supports Palestinian terrorists, and harbors the Abu Nidal Organization, but didn't this start out as retaliation against the 9/11 attacks? By that measure, shouldn't we be bombing Saudi Arabia? After all, that's where most of those hijackers were from.
Then again, that would mean unseating a corrupt middle eastern dictatorship the US *still* supports, instead of one that we've decided is *bad*.
Comments
The Abu Nidal Organization (ABO) has been around since 1973-74. Saddam kicked the ABO out of Iraq in the 1980's as a way to garner US support for his war on Iran, but the ABO was permitted to return afterwards.
Last August, Abu Nidal, the leader of the ABO, was assassinated in Iraq. The authorities tried to pass it off as a suicide because he was supposedly a cancer patient.
Anyway, opinions are mixed on whether the ABO is still a functional terrorist group.
As for Iraq's future: by escalating the invasion chatter, Bush has taken the initiative away from Saddam for a voluntary transfer of power, which is probably good for the people of Iraq. This prediction was from "The Bleat" last July:
Baghdad ladies fear his name
Uday! Uday!
There
Posted by: Capecoder | February 28, 2003 03:09 AM