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COMMENTARY
December 17, 2003
Saddam on ice
The capture of Saddam Hussein marks "the end of the beginning" of the terror war. Everything that in the light of 9/11/01 obviously needed doing has now been done. The U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were inevitable from that morning. The fate of Saddam Hussein himself was sealed in the collapse of the WTC. (His role in that catastrophe may soon be common knowledge.) While there were real and huge tactical reasons to invade these two countries -- it makes sense to attack the enemy where he is most concentrated -- there was an even greater reason for the choice of Afghanistan then Iraq as the places to begin. They were both unfinished business from the time before the terror strikes on New York and Washington. The U.S. failure to take effective action against Al Qaeda's international operations after serious hits on American targets in Aden East Africa and elsewhere had added to the impression of U.S. pusillanimity that was the legacy of Somalia. Osama bin Laden and his allies rhetorically exploited the image of the U.S. as a paper tiger presenting themselves as the invincible champions of all the disaffected. And the Saddam regime despite the successful eviction of Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1991 remained an open taunt to all U.S. interests. Saddam had survived that war to become a pregnant symbol of American ineffectuality the proof that U.S. punches would always be pulled and that America's worst enemies could continue quite literally to get away with murder. Arguably a third target should have been directly confronted from the outset: the vast Iranian-sponsored Hezbollah operations. The authors and patrons of the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983 remain mostly at large. Iranian and Syrian sponsorship of international terrorism has still not been stopped. Here the Bush administration made a political calculation to keep the fight as far away from Israel as it could. The na?ve dream of creating a free Palestinian state and thus bringing peace between Israel and her neighbours without first utterly destroying the terror apparatus that focuses on the destruction of Israel continues to animate U.S. foreign policy. A big lie is still being told and lived -- that the terror networks in support of "Palestine" are somehow different in kind and unrelated to the terror networks that threaten the United States and the West. Another comfortable lie -- the refusal to see that Saudi Arabia was abetting terror officially through its sponsorship of Wahabi missionary activities around the world and unofficially through pay-offs to specific terror operations -- has been not so much contradicted as phased out. Great if quiet pressure has been brought upon the Arabian princes who little by little have caved to it. They now seem to understand that their own wealth and survival depends upon stopping Jihadist funding at source. For a long time to come Iraq and Afghanistan will remain terrorist targets of choice -- as much or more for their symbolic value than for their practical utility in keeping the U.S. and its allies tied down. The Jihadists cannot allow the Arab world especially to believe they have given these countries up for lost. This includes a radical element within the Sunni community in Iraq itself which now free of the leadership of Saddam may still be prepared to fight to the death for their imagined interests. For the Sunnite hegemony within Iraq long predates even the Ba' athist Party; they fear the consequences of losing it. Iraq and Afghanistan thus remain "fly traps" for the Jihadists. But the mission of converting them from bases for the enemy into fly-traps for the enemy is accomplished even if it is impossible to kill all the swarming flies. By the accumulation of experience the U.S. Army gets better and better at swatting them however. That "piece of garbage waiting to be collected" in Secretary Powell's colloquial phrase -- or rather his final collection on the weekend -- puts the lid on the first phase of this very strange international and partly civilizational war. The chartable part of the conflict is finished. We enter now the unchartable part. Contrary to the general media assumption the Bush people are not popping champagne corks. Saddam's capture is a breakthrough against the Iraqi terrorist underground and comes with a trove of fresh intelligence leads. In the short time since the weekend U.S. and Iraqi troops and police have uncovered over a dozen Baghdad cells (each with up to two dozen operatives) and pulled in various Saddamite fish around Tikrit Fallujah and Samarra (including more than 70 in one Samarra raid that is breaking news as I write this). These are significant gains against an underground whose total membership is unlikely to exceed 10 000 persons and which is having increasing difficulty recruiting from abroad and buying its own cover. But while the news from Iraq is incredibly good there is a world left to conquer. It now becomes easier to see who the irredentist enemy is: not a man nor a regime but an armed "Islamist" Jihadist religious ideology. In a sense the preliminaries are over and the real battle for the Middle East and for the heart and soul of Islam has begun. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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