When Crown Prince Abdullah addressed the Saudi people last night, he spoke on behalf of the civilized world. He said that Saudi Arabia would accept a US-led war on Iraq only as long as it stays strictly within the remit of UN resolution 1441, and would expect the war to end as soon as that resolution’s objectives are achieved.
The emphasis of the efforts of the civilized world has now shifted: Away from preventing a war on Iraq toward trying to contain it. If the United States is sincere in its assurance that all it wants is the destruction of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, it will have no difficulty in living up to the world’s much reduced expectations.
However, only the ignorant or foolish believe in any of that anyway. America has more far-reaching goals in Iraq.
It will not be content to stop at destroying Saddam’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, if indeed such an arsenal exists. Nor will it be content to depose Saddam himself and then install a civilian government in his place. Nor will it rest once the mechanisms for a democratic future in Iraq are a reality, if in fact they are really a part of the vision.
Rather, US ambitions are for nothing less than complete control of Iraq and its oil reserves, and for a redrawing of the map of the entire region according to its own — and crucially, Israel’s — agenda. On its way toward achieving that goal, the US has amassed the most terrifying arsenal of weaponry ever dispatched from its soil into the Gulf, ready to pounce as soon as the last-minute ultimatum expires.
That there is no hope of Saddam meeting these eleventh-hour conditions is now beyond doubt.
The weapons themselves — awesome though they may be in their destructive power and technical sophistication — are of course not foolproof. Just how smart are the famed “smart bombs” the US are proposing to unleash on Iraq? Previous conflicts — in Kosovo, for instance — revealed that a large percentage of them go horribly astray. They have even landed in the wrong country on occasion. How safe will Iraq’s civilians be when all hell comes raining down on them?
The prospect of a bombardment, the extent of which can barely be imagined, is terrifying. How can such a force fail to cause significant “collateral damage” — the Pentagon’s deceptive euphemism for blowing into pieces men, women and children, whose misfortune it is to have been born citizens of Iraq?
As the region braces itself for war, two images crystallize in the mind.
On is of Saddam Hussein — isolated and perhaps long out of touch with reality in the identical bunkers between which he moves, all the time contemplating his lack of a future. We must not forget, after all, that he has ultimately brought this fate upon himself and upon the Iraqi people, whom he has for so long terrorized.
The second image is of an Iraqi mother with her small children in a small house which has had only intermittent power supplies for the 12 years of sanctions, her children robbed of an education. They are caught in a situation for which she was never even given a chance of bearing responsibility, but for which they will pay the ultimate price.
