A rchive Date
[ 23-03-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
|
[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur_toronto.html
Why Iraqi tyrant wants to go down fighting
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the Toronto Sun
March 23, 2003
Two tyrants in modern history, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, dominate our collective consciousness.
Of the two, it is Stalin who has been emulated most by Saddam Hussein.
Said K. Aburish, biographer of the Iraqi tyrant, writes that Saddam "modelled himself after and adopted the ways of Josef Stalin and merged them with his tribal instincts."
The evil genius of Stalin was ultimately to survive the terror he had incubated and die at his own time, and then be interred as a hero of a society he built on lies and an extraordinary ruthlessness.
Saddam, emulating Stalin, believed in terror as a means to making Iraq a modern Arab power.
But unlike the passage of Stalin in 1953, the end that is now closing in upon Saddam is that of Hitler in 1945.
Saddam's ambition lies in ruin all around him and, like Hitler, confined in his bunker delivering political testaments to the few remaining loyalists before taking his own life, Saddam is scripting an end for himself by which he would like to be remembered.
And just as the vast majority of Germans erased Hitler and his Third Reich from their memories with the end of World War II, Iraqis awaiting release from their nightmare will erase the memories of Saddam and his gulag.
Hence, Saddam's speech from his bunker in the early hours of March 20, as the first U.S. missiles landed in Baghdad, was a broadcast mostly designed for Arabs and Muslims beyond Iraq's borders.
Iraqis, particularly Shiites and Kurds, who together constitute four-fifths of the population, heard Saddam's words, as they have so often, as lies and hyperbole of a demagogue whose tyranny squeezed out of them their last measure of humanity.
But a great many Arabs and Muslims beyond the borders of Iraq and marching in the streets of Cairo, Amman, Islamabad and other cities, caught in the web of their own anger and frustration with their respective governments run by authoritarian leaders, believe Iraq is being invaded by a new band of Crusaders from Britain and the U.S. in the service of Israel and Zionism.
Saddam is appealing to them, and for them he wants to script an obituary for himself that will tell the story of a faithful Arab leader who found his martyrdom fighting these Crusaders.
And for this obituary to have a minimum of credibility, Saddam needs some remnants of his disintegrating army to make a stand and fight the coalition forces headed for Baghdad. Without such an ending, his appeal is no more than that of Shakespeare's Macbeth, "Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Thus, as winter ends and a new year begins with spring festivals in the mountains of Kurdistan, there are two narratives being scripted in the river valleys of Tigris and Euphrates where the art of writing was invented and civilization first appeared.
In Saddam's mind there lingers one desperate desire: to rescue from the debris of his despotism an image of himself as defying all odds, of someone who will be remembered by Arabs and Muslims as a valiant soldier killed, but not vanquished, by the crusading armies of the West.
The other narrative is that of freedom, of the gates of the hell that Saddam made of Iraq being opened by liberating, not crusading, armies sent by the leaders of Britain and America, and of Iraqis securing a new lease on life and history to script a possible democratic future for themselves.
Iraqis will recall a poet of their own, Ahmad al-Safi al-Najafi who wrote:
Breeze of Freedom, blow our way!
We're running short of breath ...
Over the West, sunny days prevail,
While in our East only a flicker flashes.
Even this flicker will die down soon:
When will we reclaim our sun's rays?
Al-Najafi died in 1978. A generation later, freedom's sun is over Iraq's horizon. And for Iraqis, after the pains and the tears of lost years, the narrative of freedom will be what matters.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Thursdays. He can be reached at smansurca@yahoo.ca. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
Cross-Indexed:
|
|