The Wartime
Deceptions
Saddam Is Hitler And It's Not About Oil
by Robert Fisk
Dissident Voice
January 27, 2003
The Israeli
writer Uri Avnery once delivered a wickedly sharp open letter to Menachem
Begin, the Israeli prime minister who sent his army to defeat in Lebanon.
Enraged by Begin's constant evocation of the Second World War likening Yasser
Arafat in Beirut to Hitler in his Berlin bunker in 1945 Avnery entitled his
letter: "Mr Prime Minister, Hitler is Dead."
How often I have
wanted to repeat his advice to Bush and Blair. Obsessed with their own
demonisation of Saddam Hussein, both are now reminding us of the price of
appeasement. Bush thinks that he is the Churchill of America, refusing the
appeasement of Saddam. Now the US ambassador to the European Union, Rockwell
Schnabel, has compared Saddam to Hitler. "You had Hitler in Europe and no
one really did anything about him," Schnabel lectured the Europeans in
Brussels a week ago: "We knew he could be dangerous but nothing was done.
The same type of person [is in Baghdad] and it's there that our concern
lies." Mr Schnabel ended this infantile parallel by adding unconvincingly
that "this has nothing to do with oil".
How can the sane
human being react to this pitiful stuff? One of the principal nations which
"did nothing about Hitler" was the US, which enjoyed a profitable
period of neutrality in 1939 and 1940 and most of 1941 until it was attacked by
the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. And when the Churchill-Roosevelt alliance decided
that it would only accept Germany's unconditional surrender a demand that
shocked even Churchill when Roosevelt suddenly announced the terms at
Casablanca Hitler was doomed.
Not so Saddam it
seems. For last week Donald Rumsfeld offered the Hitler of Baghdad a way out:
exile, with a suitcase full of cash and an armful of family members if that is
what he wished. Funny, but I don't recall Churchill or Roosevelt ever
suggesting that the Nazi fόhrer should be allowed to escape. Saddam is Hitler
but then suddenly, he's not Hitler after all. He is said TheNew York Times
to be put before a war crimes tribunal. But then he's not. He can scoot off to
Saudi Arabia or Latin America. In other words, he's not Hitler.
But even if he
were, are we prepared to pay the price of so promiscuous a war? Arabs who
admire Saddam and there are plenty in Jordan believe Iraq cannot hold out
for more than a week. Some are convinced the US 3rd Infantry Division will be
in Baghdad in three days, the British with them. It's a fair bet that hundreds,
if not thousands, of Iraqis will die. But in the civil unrest that follows,
what are we going to do? Are American and British troops to defend the homes of
Baath party officials whom the mobs want to hang?
Far more
seriously, what happens after that? What do we do when Iraqis not
ex-Baathists but anti-Saddam Iraqis demand our withdrawal? For be sure this will
happen. In the Shia mosques of Kerbala and An Najaf, they are not going to
welcome Anglo-American forces. The Kurds will want a price for their
co-operation. A state perhaps? A federation? The Sunnis will need our
protection. They will also, in due time, demand our withdrawal. Iraq is a
tough, violent state and General Tommy Franks is no General MacArthur.
For we will be
in occupation of a foreign land. We will be in occupation of Iraq as surely as
Israel is in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And with Saddam gone, the
way is open for Osama bin Laden to demand the liberation of Iraq as another of
his objectives. How easily he will be able to slot Iraq into the fabric of
American occupation across the Gulf. Are we then ready to fight al-Qa'ida in Iraq
as well as in Afghanistan and Pakistan and countless other countries? It seems
that the peoples of the Middle East and the West realise these dangers, but
that their leaders do not, or do not want to.
Travelling to
the US more than once a month, visiting Britain at the weekend, moving around
the Middle East, I have never been so struck by the absolute, unwavering
determination of so many Arabs and Europeans and Americans to oppose a war. Did
Tony Blair really need that gloriously pertinacious student at the Labour Party
meeting on Friday to prove to him what so many Britons feel: that this proposed
Iraqi war is a lie, that the reasons for this conflict have nothing to do with
weapons of mass destruction, that Blair has no business following Bush into the
America-Israeli war? Never before have I received so many readers' letters
expressing exactly the same sentiment: that somehow because of Labour's huge
majority, because of the Tory party's effective disappearance as an opposition,
because of parliamentary cynicism British democracy is not permitting British
people to stop a war for which most of them have nothing but contempt. From
Washington's pathetic attempt to link Saddam to al-Qa'ida, to Blair's childish
"dossier" on weapons of mass destruction, to the whole tragic farce
of UN inspections, people are just no longer fooled.
The denials that
this war has anything to do with oil are as unconvincing as Colin Powell's
claim last week that Iraq's oil would be held in trusteeship for the Iraqi people.
Trusteeship was exactly what the League of Nations offered the Levant when it
allowed Britain and France to adopt mandates in Palestine and Transjordan and
Syria and Lebanon after the First World War. Who will run the oil wells and
explore Iraqi oil reserves during this generous period of trusteeship? American
companies, perhaps? No, people are not fooled.
Take the
inspectors. George Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and now, alas,
Colin Powell don't want to give the inspectors more time. Why not, for God's
sake? Let's just go back to 12 September last year when Bush, wallowing in the
nostalgia of the 11 September 2001 crimes against humanity, demanded that the
UN act. It must send its inspectors back to Iraq. They must resume their work.
They must complete their work. Bush, of course, was hoping that Iraq would
refuse to let the inspectors return. Horrifically, Iraq welcomed the UN. Bush
was waiting for the inspectors to find hidden weapons. Terrifyingly, they found
none. They are still looking. And that is the last thing Bush wants. Bush said
he was "sick and tired" of Saddam's trickery when what he meant was
that he was sick and tired of waiting for the UN inspectors to find the weapons
that will allow America to go to war. He who wanted so much to get the
inspectors back to work now doesn't want them to work. "Time is running
out," Bush said last week. He was talking about Saddam but he was actually
referring to the UN inspectors, in fact to the whole UN institution so
laboriously established after the Second World War by his own country.
The only other
nation pushing for war save for the ever-grateful Kuwait is Israel. Listen
to the words of Zalman Shoval, Israeli Prime Minster Ariel Sharon's foreign
affairs adviser, last week. Israel, he said, would "pay dearly" for a
"long deferral" of an American strike on Iraq. "If the attack
were to be postponed on political rather than military grounds," he said,
"we will have every reason in Israel to fear that Saddam Hussein uses this
delay to develop non-conventional weapons." As long as Saddam was not
sidelined, it would be difficult to convince the Palestinian leadership that
violence didn't pay and that it should be replaced by a new administration;
Arafat would use such a delay "to intensify terrorist attacks".
Note how the
savage Israeli-Palestinian war can only according to the Shoval thesis be
resolved if America invades Iraq; how terrorism cannot be ended in Israel until
the US destroys Saddam. There can be no regime change for the Palestinians
until there is regime change in Baghdad. By going along with the Bush drive to
war, Blair is, indirectly, supporting Israel's occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza (since Israel still claims to be fighting America's "war on
terror" against Arafat). Does Blair believe Britons haven't grasped this?
Does he think Britons are stupid? A quarter of the British Army is sent to
fight in a war that 80 per cent of Britons oppose. How soon before we see real
people power 500,000 protesters or more in London, Manchester and other
cities to oppose this folly?
Yes an
essential part of any such argument Saddam is a cruel, ruthless dictator, not
unlike the Dear Leader of North Korea, the nuclear megalomaniac with whom the
Americans have been having "excellent" discussions but who doesn't
have oil. How typical of Saddam to send Ali "Chemical" Majid the
war criminal who gassed the Kurds of Halabja to tour Arab capitals last week,
to sit with President Bashar Assad of Syria and President Emile Lahoud of
Lebanon as if he never ordered the slaughter of women and children. But Bush
and Blair said nothing about Majid's tour either so as not to offend the Arab
leaders who met him or because the link between gas, war crimes and
Washington's original support for Saddam is a sensitive issue.
Instead, we are
deluged with more threats from Washington about "states that sponsor
terror". Western journalists play a leading role in this propaganda. Take
Eric Schmitt in TheNew York Times a week ago. He wrote a story about America's
decision to "confront countries that sponsor terrorism". And his
sources? "Senior defence officials", "administration
officials", "some American intelligence officials", "the
officials", "officials", "military officials",
"terrorist experts" and "defence officials". Why not just
let the Pentagon write its own reports in TheNew York Times?
But that is what
is changing. More and more Americans aware that their President declined to
serve his country in Vietnam realise that their newspapers are lying to them
and acting as a conduit for the US government alone. More and more Britons are
tired of being told to go to war by their newspapers and television stations
and politicians. Indeed, I'd guess that far more Britons are represented today
by the policies of President Chirac of France than Prime Minister Blair of
Britain.
Robert Fisk is an award winning foreign correspondent for The Independent (UK), where this
article first appeared. He is the author of Pity Thy Nation: The Abduction
of Lebanon (The Nation Books, 2002 edition)