The coalition bombing had taken its ghastly toll.
Where the bombs fell and dug huge craters, once tall and handsome buildings were asprawl like a huge jigsaw litter on a faraway planet just mauled by a natural disaster. In another section of the city, men and teenage boys were whooping it up, shouting probably slogans and catch-phrases. Curiously there were no smiles on their faces. They looked like refugees but they were not. They were Baghdadis taking on air in the open, fully, but they just didn’t know what to do. But where were the women, the girls? They were probably in their own Arab cocoon, seeking to put order in hearth and home.
But there was no TV footage of Iraqis surging into the streets to welcome US and British troops of this "coalition of the willing". There were no streamers, posters hailing their arrival as saviors and liberators. There was some dancing, blaring of vehicle horns, tearing off pictures of Saddam. This time, there was the voice of a female commentator. She said that while the ouster of Saddam was largely welcome, this didn’t translate into any kind of jubilation for the allied soldiers. In sum, the Iraqi crowds on this matter were withdrawn, uncertain, afraid perhaps where their future was concerned. Would Saddam and his hated Ba’ath jackboot be replaced by an occupying foreign power in the shadows dictating orders to a puppet Iraqi government?
Were they really freed? Liberated? Their culture preserved? Their institutions respected?
What seemed to be certain was that Saddam and his dictatorship were being chopped into snake pieces, no longer able to curl around the body politic and squeeze like a boa constrictor. And spit out venom. Where was Saddam? Nobody knew. There was no proof he and his sons died in the latest bombing. A whopper that brought down several buildings like cardboard filaments. Was he defly hiding somewhere? Had he fled the country through an underground tunnel or by bullcart dressed as dowdy peasant farmer shorn of his moustache? Or was he planning to commit suicide with orders for cremation, ashes to be strewn on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers?
And, by golly, where were the chemical weapons of mass destruction?
It was for this that the "coalition of the willing" had gone to war. It was for this that George W. Bush defied virtually the rest of the world which turned thumbs down on the war. It was for this that the US leadership designed "preventive war" to seek justice for the 3,000 innocent victims of 9/11. Nobody ever again would dare touch a hair on America’s head. Terrorism was an Anaconda with two heads. The head of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda. The head of Saddam Hussein and his deadly Ba’ath Party which slit tens of thousands of throats in the middle of the night. But again, where were the weapons of mass destruction?
Three weeks. At the end of three weeks, central authority in Baghdad had seemingly collapsed.
There was little likelihood the Battle of Stalingrad would be replicated in Baghdad. Or the guerrilla clashes in Vietnam. There the hordes of Gen. Nguyen Vo Giap would spin from almost nowhere like black kites moaning with the wind with their funny peasant black hats and slash open the stomachs of young GIs crying "Mommie" as they died. This time, America’s war machine had mastered the technology of war. Kill from afar. They would show’em with bombs, awe’em with bombs. They had spy satellites, warships, aircraft carriers, Apache helicopters and Cobra helicopters, B-1s and B-21s with payloads that could demolish entire cities, awesome firepower that could even frighten Mephistopheles in hell.
Saddam Hussein and his elite Republican Guards, his fedayeen led by son Qusay had no chance from the very beginning. It as like setting up defenses against an invasion from Mars. Or bringing down Mike Tyson with a flyswatter.
So the American war against Iraq has been virtually won in three weeks. What has been deliberately toned down or out by American or Western TV networks – like CNN, ABC and BBC – are the civilian casualties. Notice that the human wreck of war hardly shows at all. Children and babies decapitated from their mothers’ wombs, fragments of bodies strewn like castaway meat in slaughterhouses, men and women with open eyes like zombies put aboard stretchers, the constant shriek of ambulances, hospitals crowded to the nines, whole families in pain, in agony, in tears.
Collateral damage, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld calls them. Again this is the new language of war. The winning side blinking its conscience aside with the expression "collateral damage" while the world watches in utter shock. Again we must quote Mahatma Gandhi: "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?" And Thomas Paine: "He who is the author of war lets loose the contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death." And George Santayana: "To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."
The war was easy. It was one-sided. It was a Patton tank mobilized to immobilize a carretela horse. The political, diplomatic, cross-continental struggle to win the peace in Iraq will be long, prickly, arduous. America is now recoiling from charge or innuendo it will be an occupying power, nothing short of a colonial power out to set up a puppet government in Iraq. That will blow its missionary cover of liberation, democratization. And yet America it was who shed blood, with the assistance of Britain. Will America now surrender to the United Nations the power and authority to impose its peace terms on Iraq? And allow Jacques Chirac of France and Gerhard Shroeder of Germany to scowl at Washington and muscle America out of the massive task of reconstruction and reconstitution?
George W. Bush, under tremendous diplomatic pressure, now says he will allow the United Nations to play a "vital role" in all this hullabaloo?
How vital is vital? UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan is no pushover. So are the key nations of the UN and this includes Russia and China. At all costs, they want the UN extricated from what they have often depicted as the jackboot of America. The world cannot live with this jackboot, they say. The world can only live and prosper with the UN. They say this is a multilateral not a unilateral world and the wisdom of many is much better than the wisdom of one. The whole culture and civilization of Europe was built on this humanist philosophy. No more the Aryan superiority of Hitler. No more the fascist blackshirt bayonet cluster of Mussolini.
But America is up against international terror.
After Iraq, surely, it will bolt further east. There lies the rogue state more dangerous than Iraq – North Korea. There looms a man like no other man today, Kim Jong-il, he with the nuclear itch and the nuclear trigger. He who is not seemingly afraid of America, and crazy enough to provoke "total war" whenever this may take him. Then there is China, powered by history, powered by a clutch of dynasties, now powered by what could be the world’s second largest economy in less than 20 years. And soon, a nuclear arsenal of prodigious proportions.
Will America take on North Korea and Kim Jong-il as it took on Iraq and Saddam Hussein?
If there is one man in the West structured in political ferroconcrete and with a castiron mind, it is George W. Bush. No other man could have summoned America to war against Iraq. No other man could have stood up to the United Nations and told it to go jump in the river. No other man could have willed himself to this position – insane, his critics call it – bestride the mountaintop and arm himself with lightning. Bush’s whole face is a slab of granite and so are his brains. No, it’s not the Texas cowboy. It‘s the imperium writ large on the brow of the Caesars.
Pax Americana cannot be denied. It makes our world very interesting and very dangerous.