President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney call Saddam Hussein the ”enemy.” Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld compares him to Adolf Hitler. Bush’s national security adviser says the Iraqi president is an ”evil man” who will unleash havoc on the world unless the United States stops him.
In trying persuade the public, US allies and, perhaps, Saddam himself that he is fair game, the Bush administration is ratcheting up its rhetoric.
It’s a standard entry in the presidential playbook, some say. The run-up to war always involves planting in people’s minds ”that this must be done because this person represents evil in the world,” says Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University.
”Americans know instinctively that Saddam Hussein is an evil man and we would be better off if he were elsewhere, six feet under somewhere or locked up in a cell,” he says.
But moving people toward ”pre-emptive violence,” as Jillson calls it, is hard when they have not been attacked.
”In other words, a Pearl Harbour will do it,” he says.
Pearl Harbour was the US naval base in Hawaii attacked by Japan December 7, 1941. The surprise attack led to the United States formally entering World War II.
Absent a deadly move on Saddam’s part, the United States is trying to make its case for ”regime change” by demonising him, claiming he would not hesitate to use the cache of weapons of mass destruction he is accused of rebuilding.
Bush met on Wednesday with his top military advisers at his Texas ranch, but said the subject of striking Iraq was not discussed. The president promised to consult allies before any military action and asserted that removing Saddam from power ”is in the interest of the world.” How that is achieved, he said, would be a matter of consultation and deliberation.
One thing is certain, Bush said: ”This administration agrees that Saddam Hussein is a threat and … it hasn’t changed.”
Last week, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice branded Saddam a threat to the world.
”This is an evil man who, left to his own devices, will wreak havoc again on his own population, his neighbours and, if he gets weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, all of us. (It) is a very powerful moral case for regime change,” she told the British Broadcasting Corporation. ”We certainly do not have the luxury of doing nothing.”
This is not the first time a US president has tried to demonise an adversary – foreign or domestic.
Bush himself had harsh words last year for Osama bin Laden, believed to be the mastermind of the September 11 attacks that killed more than 3 000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, as well as members of his al-Qaida terrorist network.
Bush declared that he wanted bin Laden ”dead or alive,” then took to calling him the ”evil one.”
Former Presidents Clinton and Bush also tangled with Saddam, with the elder Bush enduring some flak for comparing the Iraqi leader to Hitler. Sometimes Bush pronounced ”Saddam” in a snarling, nasal tone.
Clinton and his top aides painted former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, now on trial in The Hague for war crimes, as a tyrant in advance of Nato’s bombing campaign in 1999.
Former President Bush used harsh words to describe Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader forced from power in a 1989 US invasion. Noriega is serving a 30-year sentence in Miami on drug-trafficking charges.
Cheney also pressed the administration’s case against Saddam at a fund-raiser last week in Orlando, Florida. ”We must take the battle to the enemy and, if necessary, pre-empt certain threats to our country before they materialise,” Cheney said.
Rumsfeld, in a television interview with Fox News this week, compared Saddam to Hitler, without naming either man.
David Deese, who teaches international politics at Boston College, says the rhetoric is designed to ”make it clear that the US is not only prepared to but inclined to mount the military operation that everybody’s worried about.”
That could come sooner rather than later, based on the comments and despite the administration’s insistence that no plans have been made, says Daniel Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank.
But demonising an enemy is not without risks, the greatest one being failure to back up the threats.
”You have to have a plan. You have to follow through. Anything else would be disastrous politically,” Goure says.
That explains the drumbeat of negative talk about Saddam, Jillson added. ”You have to keep the public with you and you have to build up to the event,” he says. ”You can’t sort of establish that position and be silent for three months and then strike. It’s really hard to back off of something like this.” – Sapa-AP