Short of good news ever since the end of the formal war, Bush
and Blair are naturally exultant that Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, have
been satisfactorily incinerated in Mosul, Iraq, presumably victims of
someone eager to collar the $30-million reward for turning them in.
But though Saddam's sons deserve everything they got, and more,
the news of their demise should not be cause for great rejoicing in the
White House and 10 Downing Street. In the event that Saddam soon follows his
sons into the Great Hereafter, that would not, in anything other than the
short term, be great news for Bush and Blair either.
For obvious reasons, Bush and his entourage have been eager to
identify Saddam, Uday and Qusay as the instigators of the attacks on the
U.S. and U.K. occupying forces, with attendant steady, demoralizing trickle
of casualties.
To suggest otherwise would be to concede that there might be
long-term, organized opposition to the Allied occupation, which has less to
do with Saddam Hussein and his clan, and more with nationalist, or
Islamic/nationalist opposition to the invaders.
The fact that Uday and Qusay were holed up in the house of a
relative scarcely suggests that they had elaborate flight plans, replete
with secret command bunkers, prepared in advance of the U.S./U.K. invasion.
It looks as though, like many others suddenly on the run, the only plan they
could come up with was an desperate rap on the door of a family friend.
With his epic record of blunders and miscalculations we're
probably safe in assuming Saddam wasn't much better prepared. All those
elaborate scenarios about rat lines to Russia or even nearby Syria were so
much hooey. So in the end the huge reward for Saddam will weigh heavier than
loyalty or fear, and he'll end up dead, too.
With Uday and Qusay finished off, Bush may enjoy a short-term
uptick on the polls. Maybe the attacks on U.S. and U.K. troops will slow,
but they certainly won't stop, and in the medium term, they'll probably
increase.
Remember, many Iraqis saw the only virtue of the invasion as the
end of a hated regime. If Saddam gets nailed, too, that fear will finally
dissipate, and then more Iraqis will focus on the business of driving the
Americans and the British out of their country. More U.S. and British troops
will get killed, but the rationale that this is the last-ditch resistance of
the cornered Saddam clan will have disappeared.
It's a cynical proposition, but Bush and Blair will be much
better off if Saddam is not run to earth, at least until some advanced point
in next year's presidential campaign season.
Even the killing of Uday and Qusay won't help much in the steady
erosion in both Bush and Blair's popularity, because of the reasons for
their slump. They stitched together a handsome patchwork of lies about
Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), and that patchwork has fallen
apart. No amount of grandstanding by Blair in Congress about the absolutions
of history alters that.
Take the current uproar in the United Kingdom about the suicide
of Dr. David Kelly, the biowar expert charged by Blair and his minions with
leaking disobliging information to the BBC. The plan of Blair's spin team in
10 Downing Street, headed by Alastair Campbell, has been to create a
diversion, to occlude the obvious: that Blair and his cohort obviously
mangled the truth about Saddam's WMDs.
This is the reason for all the howling from No. 10 about the
BBC's charges, based on interviews with Kelly by three separate BBC
reporters, that Blair's people "sexed up" (words never used by the BBC) the
original report on WMDs prepared by Britain's intelligence services.
But the record is clear enough. First, Britain's intelligence
services rushed from one preposterous piece of inflation to the next,
accepted crude forgeries, plagiarized a student's essay off the Internet,
and so forth. Kelly himself was an assiduous threat inflator till near the
end, and maybe guilt over his own role contributed to his very strange
decision to kill himself. (Or maybe the security services were threatening
him with some damaging personal revelation unless he denounced the BBC for
misrepresenting his remarks to their reporters.)
Then Blair and his team took these threat inflations and
inflated them even further. Whether it was some intelligence officer in MI6
or one of Blair's flacks who came up with the notorious 45-minute launch
time for one of Saddam's bioweapons is a legitimate but not very important
question. They were all in the business of exaggeration, as was UNSCOM,
which has thus far escaped well-deserved rebuke. The same is true this side
of the Atlantic. The press has finally caught up with the matter and won't
let it drop. Neither will the Democrats.
It will take a lot more than the killing of Uday or Qusay to
turn this tide.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
