First, the Bush administration went into Afghanistan with the aim of overthrowing the Taleban regime and capturing “dead or alive” Al-Qaeda mastermind Osama Bin Laden. But where is Osama Bin Laden now? US president George W. Bush has not mentioned his name in public since last October, and it seems that he placed his bets correctly in supposing that the American people have short-term memories when it comes to such important matters.
The picture of Bin Laden as the epitome of evil standing against everything the Americans hold dear, indeed permanently threatening their very security, was soon replaced by the new demon, Saddam Hussein. And it was the same kind of “dead or alive” mentality of the Wild West that came into play when Bush told Saddam he had 48 hours to leave town. Saddam was in every headline, was the subject of Bush’s every speech.
But where is Saddam Hussein now? Nobody — not the Bush administration, not the Western media, not the American people themselves — appear to give much of a damn. Less than a week after the fall of Baghdad, Saddam is already largely forgotten. Bush has stopped mentioning him, as he stopped mentioning Osama.
When one looks at the history of the relationship between various US administrations and Saddam Hussein, it is hardly surprising that the Bush administration could be so certain that Saddam’s sudden disappearance would not cause much of a ruckus. After all, that history is a record of US support for his brutal regime, which has also been forgotten. Saddam has a great deal to thank the CIA for, including bringing the Baath Party to power, helping his personal ascent through its ranks, providing him and it with financial aid during the war with Iran, and constantly protecting him against internal coups.
Until he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Saddam got everything he wanted from the US. When then Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly visited Baghdad, he told Saddam: “You are a force for moderation in the region, and the US wants to broaden her relationship with Iraq.” And when human rights groups presented evidence that Saddam had used mustard gas against Iranian soldiers and Kurdish civilians, the US State Department refused to condemn him. Given this sordid history — which finds its parallel in the initial unconditional support from the US for Osama Bin Laden and the Taleban — the latest stories going around about the mysterious disappearance of Saddam Hussein from Baghdad just before US Marines entered the city almost unopposed are perhaps not so much wild conspiracy theories as logical deductions given the US’s Wild West mentality.
Many have long thought that Osama was allowed to get away because his capture would have put a premature end to the so-called “war on terror”. Perhaps, if a deal was done with Saddam through his old pals in the CIA, as is widely believed in the Middle East, part of the reason was that Saddam could not then reveal the documents and other evidence which could bring home to the American people in any subsequent trial the blatant hypocrisy of successive US governments’ foreign policy in the Middle East.
News has a notoriously short shelf-life in the US, where the media often appear — to the rest of the world at least — to work on the understanding that the average American viewer has a concentration span only marginally longer than that of a goldfish.
Considering that the progressive talents of the American people ushered in the IT age, it is extraordinary that they process information so lethargically and naively, falling victim to every misinformation campaign their government concocts.
