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Ariadne Thread
:: From the eve of September 11 to
the fall of Saddam Hussein ::
by Hichem Karoui
Even if nobody has so far succeeded
in showing evidence of a direct link between the 9 /11
terrorist operation and the regime of Saddam
Hussein...A link, which the Bush administration might
exploit in its Iraqi projects, as well as in its
ongoing attempt to set up a new regional order in the
Middle-East, many doubts would still remain in the
background of the picture concerning a possible
connexion between the events preceding 9/11 on the one
hand, and the events following it on the other.
We hardly need
to remind the reader that 9/11 was not born out
of the nothingness, but rather out of the chaos:
regional and international chaos following the
destruction of the fragile balances in the
Middle-East. While delivering Kuwait from the
brutal and mortal “fraternal” embrace of the
Iraqi “Big Brother”, “Desert Storm” – when it
calmed down- not only left all the thorny
questions raised by the invasion of Kuwait,
without answers, but even –somehow- heightened
the tensions to an unprecedented level. If
Kuwait was liberated, the 23 million Iraqis were
actually hijacked, because they have been taken
between Saddam’s unyielding anvil, and the
hammer of the UN sanctions.
On
another side of the picture, the two most important accords between Arabs
and Israelis – after Sadat/Begin/Carter’s Camp David’s peace- reached an
unsaid –because unacknowledged - deadlock. Neither Jordan nor the
Palestinian Authority succeeded in selling their peace with Israel to the
other Arabs. How would they? Peace actually resembled to anything but
peace. President Clinton, who probably was attracted by the perspective of
entering American and world history as the man who achieved peace between
Arabs and Israelis, did not hide his bitterness when and after the
negotiations failed. He will not outdo Carter’s achievement. He certainly
passed by so close to the Nobel Prize. He would not fill his golden
retirement with the souvenirs of such a glory. Instead of that, he would
pass in history as the Don Juan of the White House, which is not really a
thin achievement.
Anyway, when his successor came to the White House, almost everything in
the Middle East was to be re-settled.
The
Israelis and the Palestinians resumed their interminable war. The Iraqis
were suffering a thousand pains under the embargo. The Syrians were still
recalcitrant and doubtful. The Lebaneses found another reason to continue
the struggle in Shabaa. The Jordanians and the Egyptians were jammed with
their peace accords: on the one hand they could not deny them, and on the
other their hearts were bleeding because Israel has not changed. And all
those people along with their Arab and Muslim brethren, from the mountains
of Afghanistan eastward, to the confines of the Great African Sahara
westward, were living “the time of the assassins”, to use a well known
expression of Henry Miller.
In
effect, never before that time the Islamic radicalism attained such an
authority in those surroundings. The
New Assassins were not the direct descendants of Hassan al
Sabbah’s middle-aged sect, albeit they use similar techniques of terror
against their enemies. They are not doped with
Hashish as their Ismaelite
predecessors, but rather with modern brainwashing techniques, that have
been used – and even gained credit and fame- by the CIA. The Manchurian
candidate of the Cold War has become a remote souvenir, although his
“fathers” have – unwarily - begotten the new robots of the suicide-bombing
mania. A proof – if any- that even in the terrorism business, there is
also a lot of work and a lot of progress.
It was
9/11 operations that will make an evidence of these episodes. Since then,
everything would sound different.
The
friends and the allies are no longer the friends and the allies
we know. It has become
necessary thus to raise the right questions: Who are our allies and
friends in this world? Asked the Americans. Out of the blue, they woke up
in a hostile environment, like someone who after wreckage finds himself
alone in a little island in the ocean. And the questions followed up: Why
do they hate
us? Are
we then so alone? Whenever
they look around them, the Americans saw little sympathy, a lot of
hypocrisy and hate and envy. Whereas they thought of themselves as the
nicest people on earth, they
were dismayed by the fact that this very earth did not send them back the
genuine reflect of their image. So,
what’s wrong?
The
new president who had to tackle the crisis found it easier to resort to
the good old Manichean precepts of good and evil. Henceforth,
we are the good people, and
they are the evil. And like in
the cartoons, the cinema, and the comic strips, the good hero would have
to fight the evil and prevail. That’s –very simplified- the strategy of
nowadays’ superpower.
Once
the strategy settled and adopted, the new administration had to find the
enemy. It was not hard. If Saddam was self-designated, it was Usama bin
Laden who would take on his back the blow. However, to strike at Saddam’s
door first would seem nonsense. Everything happened thereby as if while
cleansing the Afghan caves and destroying the Taliban and al-Qaeda’s
bases, the Bush administration was all that time long preparing the true,
the delicious, and the much attractive, much succulent meal. It was not
the stony Afghanistan that concerned America, but well the wealthy Iraq.
And it was not the shadowy Bin Laden who represented the real weight in
the international balance, but the ruthless Saddam Hussein.
After
all, even if there is not the least connexion between al-Qaeda and
Saddam... Even if 9/11 has nothing to do with the embargo imposed on Iraq,
what could the Americans take from Bin Laden? His life? It is worthless
now. His $300 millions? It is a drop in the ocean. Then, compared to the
real fortunes of American wealthy people, what is Bin Laden? Afghanistan?
That’s easy, but it never belonged to Bin Laden. He was just a refugee out
there. Yet, if Bin Laden seemed so worthless, it was Saddam who appealed –
almost naturally- to the American
Vendetta.
Why a
vendetta? Because 9/11 happened. And behind 9/11, there was a dark
conspiracy where anybody in the Arab-Islamic world could be involved to
some level or another. Maybe this sounds a little paranoid, but there is
no other way the CIA and the folks of the Secret Service think. After all,
what is al-Qaeda if not the international Islamic terrorist network?
Somehow like the International Communist in the Cold War, but with a
different ideology.
Saddam
appealed to the American anger – that had anyway to focus on some party –
not only because he was the model of “evil” decried by president Bush (so
numerous other models continue to live unharmed, though), but most of all
because something valuable could be snatched from him, and if achieved,
such a project could be as rewarding to the USA as punishing to its
enemies.
It is
obvious that the award is Iraq itself.
Snatched from the hands of Saddam, Iraq would help America in settling the
old accounts with its enemies, on the one hand, and in opening the way to
the new regional order so wished by Washington, and so waited by Israel,
on the other hand.
This
is not to mean that Saddam Hussein was an obstacle to America’s plans in
the Middle East. Anybody with a little
présence d’esprit knows that
Saddam actually helped Bush father and son. He helped the father entering
in force in the Gulf, when
he invaded Kuwait, just because ambassador April Glaspie did not object
anything to his plans. He thought that the Americans were encouraging him
to overthrow Al Sabbah House, which would enable him to control more than
50% of the Middle East’s oil. It goes without saying that the previous
American assistance to Saddam during the war against Iran made him believe
that Washington would comply with his wishes if he invaded Kuwait, in
order to pay back the billions he owed to almost everybody. Such
foolishness was unmatchable. Besides, Saddam was ready to sell Iraq and
his own mother to the Bush administration if he was allowed to stay in
power. He would have stayed twenty or thirty other years over the hearts
of the Iraqis, because their pains meant nothing to him. The collective
graves the world is discovering in Iraq would have been nothing compared
to the dark future the sinister dictator was preparing for his people.
Today the veritable question is not whether Bush was right to attack Iraq
or not, but rather whether Saddam was right to cling to the power or not.
As to
the pretension of Saddam to lead the “resistance” against the American
occupation, this is merely a joke. A bad joke indeed. And his “letters” to
the Americans or to the Iraqis or to everybody, relayed by Al Jazeera,
sound to be the concern of the same low brand of humour. We know that the
dictator is –like many of his kind- a humourless person. Yet, who –among
the rational Iraqis – could take him seriously?
Saddam
a resistant? Sure, that was in the fifties of the last century. We are in
2003. And the majority of the Iraqi people cannot be assumed to be so
foolish, so masochistic, and so stupid as to wish the return of a Tyrant.
Finally, there is certainly a link between all those events, if we read
them thoroughly. Neither America is a model of nicety and goodness, nor
the rest of the world is all evil and conspiring against it. From the
period preceding 9/11, we can probably find a lot of indirect reasons for
hatred. After 9/11, the Americans should wonder whether their policy
helped to make the world a better place or not. Some of the questions they
raised are still unanswered. For the true answers are not to be found in
the books and the press, but rather on the field... in all those regions
of the world that have been plagued by varied sicknesses, and that are
still waiting for the good
to come, for their peoples experienced nothing in their lives but
evil.
To be
faithful to their creed, the Americans are not expected to play the
good Samaritans, but just to
follow the Ariadne thread, in order to understand and make themselves
understood.
Hichem Karoui is a writer and journalist living in Paris, France.
by courtesy & © 2003 Hichem Karoui
by the same author:
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