By the ancient rivers of Babylon, another mighty host

Isn’t history repeating itself? Here we are, in a week which reminds us of the Bible Story, yet wars continue to be waged — as they were in ancient times – in the lands of the Bible.

All those cries about "peace" have gone to naught. As in past millenniums, man continues to go to war. Innocents are slaughtered, alongside the antagonists and the guilty. Where the Prince of Peace was crucified to save mankind, there remains almost endless conflict. The new Centurions – the Americans and the Brits are being cursed by the populations they just liberated from a terrible tyrant.

One of the first paintings ripped off the wall of his palace in Baghdad, when American soldiers invested it, was the famous portrait of a heroic Saddam Hussein on horseback "liberating" Jerusalem from the Jews. His oft-repeated pledge to free Jerusalem from Israel's yoke is why Palestinians and Jordanians (who are 60 to 65 percent Palestinian by race) idolize Saddam, and fulminate in fury against the Americans whom they call the "protectors" and "sponsors" of Israel.

I guess old Saddam will never get to "liberate" Jerusalem. Where he is today is anybody’s guess. Perhaps the Americans really got him when they bombed his uncle’s Baghdad restaurant, which reportedly lies over a fortified bunker. (Perhaps his two murderous sons, Uday and Qusay, perished in the same attack – but nobody knows. Like a bad penny, each or both of them could still turn up.)

I wonder whether the bunker which US "intelligence" finally pinpointed is the same one so graphically described by Executive Editor Con Coughlin of the Sunday Telegraph of London (author of the bestseller, Saddam: The Secret Life, also published as The King of Terror). This bunker "close to the Presidential Palace complex" was built by a German firm and was buried three hundred feet beneath the Tigris River. The walls contained six to eight feet of reinforced concrete and the structure rested on huge springs.

You’ve probably seen the reports on television about the capture, when US forces first approached Baghdad a week-and-a-half ago of the Saddam International Airport, now renamed Baghdad International. The TV cameras panned over the Iraqi dictator’s lavish VIP lounge. Saddam had gotten French contractors to bore a 15-kilometer tunnel beneath the VIP lounge as an underground "escape" route to a secret helicopter landing pad out in the desert.

Never got to use that escape route – or did he? If there’s no sign of old Saddam, this may not mean he’s dead. He may already be here in Manila. (He resembles some of our local businessmen – whom you’ll recognize if you scan our society columns and business pages.)

What intrigued me were those local headlines hinting that Saddam’s "billions" may have been transferred to Manila. What? Another charge of money-laundering to be levelled at us by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force? Give us a break.

We had the alleged Yamashita Treasure. We speculated about the Marcos Treasure. There were spurious treasure maps galore, and hundreds of suckers doing digging everywhere, even in Fort Santiago where our real national treasure, the fort itself, was disturbed and desecrated. (We hung General Yamashita for war crimes, but he had the last laugh.) Now, will they be digging around for Saddam's billions? Estimates of his wealth swing wildly from $2 billion to $40 billion.

FORBES Magazine in its March 17, 2003, issue was more specific. On pages 68-69 it ran a line-up under the title of "Kings, Queens & Despots". Saddam came out Number Four in riches among the celebrities. Here’s the ranking: (1) King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, Saudi Arabia, 80, $20 billion; (2) Sultan Haj Hassanal Bolkiah, Sultan, Brunei, 56, $11 billion; (3) Hans Adam II, Prince of Liechtenstein, 58, $2 billion; (4) Saddam Hussein, President, Iraq, 65, $2 billion; and only Number (5) Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, 76, $525 million.

FORBES noted, however: "Valuing these fortunes is a tricky business. We exclude, for example, assets held in trust for a nation – like Buckingham Palace. It belongs not so much to Queen Elizabeth II as to the British state, much as the White House belongs to the US government."

Guess who was Number (6)? Yasir Arafat, President, Palestinian Authority, 73, $300 million! Next (7) Queen Beatrix Wilhelmina Armgard, Queen, the Netherlands, 65, $250 million; and, wow, Fidel Castro, President, Cuba, 76, $110 million. The magazine admitted that "some estimates are fuzzier than others. We calculate Fidel Castro’s wealth as a percentage of Cuba’s GDP."

Yet Compañero Fidel – a product, by the way, of Jesuit schools, Colegio Dolores and Colegio Belen – told us in La Habana in September 1961 that his "salary" was only P500 per month! Which moved me to exclaim to El Lider Maximo (as he was called, believe or not): "But Compañero Presidente, you can sign for everything!"

I think he can still sign. This is better than having Visa, Mastercard or American Express, I’m sure.

* * *

When US marines and the first elements of the 4th Infantry Division waltzed into Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, a couple of days ago, they met not the strong resistance they expected (his Republican Guard had melted away mysteriously), but small, intermittent firefights. They also found the most fantastic of Saddam’s pleasure palaces, with artificial lake, indoor swimming pools, palm trees and acres of river frontage.

The Yanks also encountered hatred. Saddam’s Sunni townmates, on whom he had lavished a plenitude of advantages and favors, really adored the rascal. When American tanks blocked some people from crossing a bridge over the Tigris river, AP reported, the crowd erupted in fury. "Americans are against freedom and democracy!" a man shouted. Another cried out: "Saddam shall return! Victory is coming!" A third hissed:"The Americans are animals – people are sick of this. People are hungry."

Even the other Arabs hated by Saddam’s favored Sunnis, the Shi’ites seem to dislike the poor Americans (wha’ no gratitude? Sanamagan). Some Shi’ite mobs have been chanting: "Yes to Islam! No to Saddam! No to Americans!" Gee whiz. However, even these protesters insist the Americans and Brits should provide them with water, electricity, food, medicines, and security. In short, the Yanks aren’t to be allowed to leave yet, until they’ve supplied these necessities.

"What about democracy," one puzzled US Marine asked an articulate Iraqi on TV. If I remember right, the Iraqi had replied: ". . . uh, democracy . . . yes. But we don’t trust your intentions!"

The truth is that, even before Saddam’s and his Baathist Party’s two and a half decades of cruel totalitarian rule, Iraqis have never known democracy. I saw one expert on Middle East affairs, a very influential Lebanese lady named Baria Alimuddin, being interviewed not once, but several times by CNN. (She had been one of the best friends of our columnist Chit Pedrosa when she and her husband, Ambassador Bert Pedrosa, were living in exile in London.)

The businesswoman cum publishing executive runs a syndicated media office (if I remember correctly) and has been in Iraq often. She said something very perceptive: "Iraqis don’t understand democracy. I’m not sure we can expect them to easily adapt to it, or embrace it." You bet. What’s needed, I suspect, is a strong hand in Iraq: They seem to respect only strength, even cruelty. But who’ll provide it?

Saddam, in his time, provided such tough rule and ruthlessness in spades. His security apparatus employed about 208,000 people, more in numbers than the American and British military forces now emplaced (or "embedded") in Iraq, by the rivers of Babylon.

Saddam was sometimes a do-it-yourselfer, not waiting for his executioners who tortured and killed dissidents and suspects by the thousands. (They had a "Palace of the End", the Qasar al-Nihayah – so-called because when a prisoner was dragged into that "palace" and its torture chambers, he knew it was the end.) In March 1982, for instance, Saddam drew his gun and shot dead one of his own ministers – Health Minister Riyadh Ibrahim Hussein – during the weekly cabinet meeting. The unfortunate minister had said something unhealthy – to risk a sick joke.

In the summer of the same year, when many of Iraq’s Sandhurst-educated officer corps (some of the generals had graduated from the British military academy) criticized Sad-dam’s strategy in the attack on Iran, Saddam had 300 high-ranking officers executed, along with a number of party officials who had supported the officers’ heretical views.

* * *

Since he was born in Tikrit, the same birthplace of Saladin, the great Kurdish king who had reconquered Jerusalem and kicked the Crusaders out of the Holy Land, Saddam tried to portray himself as the reincarnation of that famous Saracen warrior. When he launched his invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980, he also tried to equate himself with Saad ibn-Abi Waqqad, the Arab commander who had defeated the Persians. His propagandists crowed that Saddam was continuing the tradition by which, in the battle of Qadisiya in A.D. 635, a numerically-smaller Arab army had vanquished the Persians and compelled them to embrace Islam.

His greatest fantasy, however, was that he was the "new" King Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who had conquered and levelled Jerusalem and its temple in the year 587 B.C., bringing back thousands of Jews to slavery and humiliation in his kingdom of Babylon.

After the end of the eight years’ travails of the Iran War, Saddam attempted to link himself to his so-called illustrious Babylonian ancestors by orchestrating what Coughlin described as "official burial ceremonies for the remains of the Babylonian kings and building new tombs on their graves".

He directed a massive "reconstruction" of the site of ancient Babylon (about a hundred kilometers from Baghdad). The trouble is that entire sections of the ancient ruins were bulldozed to be replaced by Saddam’s yellow-bricked walls. There was a special inscription proclaiming, "Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar was rebuilt in the era of the leader President Saddam Hussein".

What’s interesting is that hundreds of ancient armies have trod the same paths taken by US and British legions in the current conflict, just wound down, from ancient Mesopotamia, the Assyrian period, and the eras of Babylon and the Persian conquest. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers are, truly, the rivers of Babylon mentioned in the old chronicles.

There are passages in the Bible which recount how King Nebuchadnezzar had the Jewish King Zedekiah’s sons "slaughtered before his eyes, then Zedekiah‘s eyes were put out. He was chained in bronze fetters and brought to Babylon (2 Kings 25:7)." Then the final curtain fell on Jerusalem itself:

"Nebuzaradan, commander of the guard and a member of the king of Babylon’s staff, entered Jerusalem. He burned down the Temple of Yahweh, the royal palace and all the houses of Jerusalem. The Chaldean troops . . . demolished the walls and surrounding Jerusalem (and) deported the remainder of the population left in the city (except) . . . some of the poor country people left behind as vineyard workers and ploughmen" (2 Kings, 25:8-12).

Researcher Ian Wilson calls the torching of Jerusalem "one of the most thorough urban destructions the ancient world had ever seen . . . Jerusalem’s fall to the Babylonians in 586 B.C. was as calamitous an end to its near five-centuries-old Judahite monarchy as Samaria’s to the Assyrians had been for the Israelites nearly a century and a half earlier . . . It also marked the effective end of the ancient Hebrew language as its people’s spoken tongue."

Many years later, the language would be Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus and His apostles.

Some 11,600 Israelites had been carried off into "Babylonian captivity", as confirmed by Jeremiah 4600 and 2 Kings. For one or two generations they dreamed of returning to Israel in vain. This gave rise to one of the most popular laments, Psalm 137, which you’ll clearly recognize: "By the rivers of Babylon, We sat and wept at the memory of Zion . . . If I forget you, O Jerusalem, May my right hand wither! May my tongue remain stuck to my palate, If I do not keep you in mind!"

This is something on which to meditate this Holy Week. Jesus came down from Heaven, suffered for us, and died, to bring peace. In the Lands of the Bible there is still no peace.

And, as it did in the time of Saul (after the bolt from heaven, St. Paul), the street called Straight still exists in Damascus – and a bewildered but defiant Damascus is being threatened by Washington, DC and London.

Will the war move on to Syria? Is this the real Never-Ending Story? Everyone prays not.