I’m certainly no fan of this unelected president currently residing in the White House, but I’ll confess to feeling a rush of happy gratitude and admiration when I saw those pictures of Bush serving turkey to the troops. What a surprise, what a thrill to the men and women in that mess hall, what a daring and magnanimous gesture.
But also…what a stunt. Because in the end, that’s all it was: a stunt. I truly believe that Bush went to Baghdad in part out of a true goodness, a desire to show his support and appreciation to those soldiers he has asked such sacrifice from. But I also feel that an even stronger motivation was pure political calculation…his political team was looking for visuals that would really wow the voters, razzle-dazzle ‘em and make them forget their increasing discontent. After all, the video footage of his prior stunt, flying onto that aircraft carrier in his flight suit and addressing a crowd of cheering sailors before a huge banner announcing “Mission Accomplished” after the fall of Baghdad, had become largely unusable, what with the hundreds of slain and wounded soldiers and the continuing chaos and violence in Iraq showing that, well, maybe that ‘mission accomplished’ had been a little premature. (And will the flight-suited George W. Bush action figure inspired by that stunt now be joined by a second, this time in army fatigues with a roast turkey in his arms?)
Yes, Mr. Bush. It was very nice of you to spend Thanksgiving in Baghdad (foolhardy too, perhaps…I have to question the judgment of a President who flies to a war zone for a publicity stunt.) But I can’t help thinking that those soldiers you dined with would not have rather been home enjoying Thanksgiving with their own families. And I can’t help thinking that the families of the soldiers who have died in your little war would not have rather had their sons and daughters at the dining table rather than in a casket.
Nor can this stunt obscure the fact that this war in Iraq is bad policy, a forfeit of hundreds of young lives and a waste of hundreds of billions of dollars in pursuit of a policy that has little to do with justice or with lessening the threat of terror, and much more to do with oil money, defense contracts, and the worldview of a few rightwing zealots who believe that America’s greatest destiny lies in bullying the world and ignoring global cooperation.
And finally, (because Americans love to dwell on gossip more than issues of substance), what kind of son invites his parents and children to the ranch for Thanksgiving dinner, but then at the last minute flies off to have turkey with the guys instead, without even telling anyone? Sheesh. My parents woulda killed me….
Bush’s other great publicity coup is, of course, the capture of Saddam Hussein. Here again, I feel some gratitude in seeing one of the world’s tyrants having his goose cooked. This does not mean, however, that I agree with the way it was done.
Removing Saddam Hussein from power was not the job of the United States nor should it in any way have been a priority of our foreign policy. Iraq was not an immediate and direct threat to the United States. He had no connection to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. His weapons of mass destruction program was largely contained by UN sanctions and inspections. This was still an unnecessary war undertaken for ill-considered if not corrupt reasons. Hundreds of US soldiers have died, thousands have been wounded, thousands of families have been disrupted, hundreds of billions of dollars squandered. The Bush administration flat-out lied to the American people about its reasons for waging war. We have alienated our allies, lost the respect of much of the world. And we have, through arrogance and poor planning, fostered a chaotic situation in post-war Iraq that may very well give rise to a worse nightmare than Saddam.
To the American audience, seeing the humbled, humiliated and cowardly Saddam crawl out of his hole was a cinematic moment worthy of Hollywood. His haggard appearance was shocking (the jokes have already begun…Santa Claus goes Goth, he had a suitcase full of $750,000 and he couldn’t afford a haircut….) Seeing his head checked for lice and his mouth checked for sores was humiliating. Yes, the good guys had won and the bad guy had gotten his due.
But those same visuals that play so well to the American cowboy mentality don’t play so well in the Arab world. There, they see an Arab leader being humiliated by the United States, and that just feeds into the simmering resentment and suspicion. Anti-Western sentiment in the Arab world found voice in two major political philosophies in the 20th Century. One was the secular nationalists who came to power in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, people like Gamal Abdul-Nasser of Egypt and Saddam Hussein. The second political philosophy was the fundamentalist Islam that has steadily increased power since the 1980s. The fall of Saddam represents the fall of the last of the powerful secular Arab nationalists, and thus increases radical Islamic fundamentalism as a home for those who seek an outlet for their resentments.
After all, that is why the United States supported Saddam Hussein throughout the Reagan administration. Yes, it’s true: Saddam was our boy, and many of the very acts that Bush has cited as justification for overthrowing him were, in fact, done with US complicity in the 1980s. Sure, we knew he was a devil, but when the choice was between him and the other devil as represented by the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini, we threw in with Saddam. We sold him weapons, sold him technology which could be used in his nuclear weapons program, offered him intelligence which he in turn used to gas his own people, and we even sold him anthrax, bubonic plague and other biological horrors. I’m sure all this will come out when Saddam goes on trial, a trial I suspect will bring more embarrassment than satisfaction to our government. But until then, you can read up on it all at the following links:
From the National Security Archive comes the tale of US support for Saddam in the 1980s, and from testimony in the Congressional Record by Senator Robert Byrd (D-Va) comes the story of our furnishing Saddam with all he needed to make those biological weapons
And finally, there is that wonderful picture of our current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld making nice with Saddam in Baghdad back in 1983…
