A rchive Date
[ 30-03-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/goldstein_mar30.html
Saddam may get his wish - martyrdom
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN -- Toronto Sun
March 30, 2003
The longer Saddam Hussein holds out, the more he'll become a martyr to much of the Arab, Muslim and Islamic world. The tragedy is that it doesn't matter that he's a tyrant who has murdered, killed, raped, tortured and terrorized millions of innocents inside his own country and in others.
All that matters right now is that he's giving the hated Americans a bloody nose. In recent times, the Arab world has had few victories and victors such as Saladin, who re-conquered Jerusalem and drove out the Crusaders in 1187.
In that context, losing gloriously can be good enough - so Saddam may get his wish, if what's often said about him is true - that he hopes to die as an Arab martyr. That is, if he dies at all, because while he may be a tyrant, he's not a fool.
Similarly, while we often hear many dire predictions about what the "Arab street" will do in any given conflict in the Mideast, the reality is that the Arab street - ordinary Arabs - tends pretty much just to try and stay alive, given that most of it lives in some of the world's most brutal dictatorships.
Dictatorships which, while they have made perfunctory calls for peace in the war with Iraq, are in fact tacit allies of the American/British coalition, in that they want to see Saddam and his military eliminated as a regional threat - to them.
So, of course, does Israel, which gets blamed by much of the Arab world for everything in the Mideast anyway, a perception constantly fed by Arab dictatorships, lest their people ever actually realize that even if Israel was blown to kingdom come tomorrow, their lives would still be miserable because of the awful dictators and regimes they live under.
On the other hand, we in the West need to understand our concept of "fighting fair" isn't going to carry much weight with ordinary Arabs and Muslims who see coalition forces bombing the daylights out of Baghdad.
While the coalition could obviously end this war with one or two "mother of all bombs" (conventional, not nuclear) dropped on the capital, they are instead going to what would be seen in past wars as absurd lengths to protect civilians. Indeed, by trying to be so careful to take out only military targets (and, yes, mistakes have happened) the coalition has deprived itself of one of the most obvious ways of winning a war - demoralizing the civilian population.
Of course, it's a given to those of us who support this war that "our" side fights fair while the Iraqis don't.
Coalition soldiers don't hide among civilians or shoot at them as they try to flee the fighting. They don't force them to fight on their behalf on pain of killing their families. They don't pretend to surrender and then ambush their enemies, or send homicide bombers out to kill them.
But to many in the Arab and Muslim world, it's absurd to talk about fighting "fairly" or by "rules of war" when on one side you have the only superpower, which has total dominance of the skies plus the world's most powerful military.
We also shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking that every Iraqi fighting to defend his country is either: a) a "dead-ender" - someone who knows he will be killed by his fellow Iraqis once Saddam's time is up; or b) a civilian forced to fight. Even those who hate Saddam may dislike their ostensible liberator even more - particularly if it's the U.S., which is widely hated in the Arab world for backing Israel and for supporting any number of Arab dictators in the Mideast, including Saddam in his war against Iran in the 1980s.
Even the democratic traditions we take for granted in the West work against the interests of the coalition. In the U.S. and Great Britain, political opponents of the government are free to protest the war along with demonstrators. Obviously, this is not a luxury Iraqis have in a country where state terrorism is a national policy.
The bottom line remains that the world is best rid of Saddam - particularly post 9/11 - when the combination of rogue states pursuing weapons of mass destruction and terrorists ready to use them is not something you want the rogue states and terrorists to think they can get away with.
Thank heavens the Americans and Brits are ready to do the heaving lifting on this. Contrary to prevailing opinion in Canada, you cannot simply be nice to terrorists and hope they'll leave you alone. That's not how terrorists are wired.
But let's not kid the troops. While this war may be called "Operation Iraqi Freedom" - and is in part the reason why coalition forces are being so careful in trying to minimize civilian casualties - Iraqi freedom is not the primary goal.
Not revenge
Then again, neither is it oil or George Bush Jr. trying to avenge his daddy. It's about trying to prevent another 9/11 by terrorists armed with chemical or biological weapons - which does not require the U.S. to "prove" a direct link between Saddam and al-Qaida. We know Saddam has pursued weapons of mass destruction, and we know he has supported terrorists and terrorism in general. That's enough.
While we used to think Islamic terrorists would never dare strike North America, 9/11 changed all that. (Apparently the first attempt - the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 - wasn't big enough to get our attention.)
The next logical step is clearly for terrorists, armed by a rogue state, to use weapons of mass destruction. Something for all those baby boomer peace activists to think about as they drive home from the latest "anti-war" protest in their SUVs.
Then again, life, for them, is always an irony-free zone.
Lorrie can be reached at (416) 947-2212, by fax at (416) 947-3228 or by e-mail at Lorrie.goldstein@tor.sunpub.com. Or visit his home page. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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