The spectre of an invisible sniper casually picking off innocent citizens going about their business in suburban Washington is a terrifying one. People are finding reasons to stay home from work, parents are keeping their children out of school, and the Guardian Angels, that red-bereted gang of gung-ho heroes who until now were most famous for keeping the New York subway safe and helping grannies cross the road, have put themselves in the firing line, filling up motorists’ petrol tanks so that, presumably, the motorists can keep their heads down in the relative safety of their automobiles in case the sniper
strikes again.
It’s not an enviable scenario. And after last year’s catastrophic attacks in New York and Washington, the American public must be feeling a severe case of the jitters, to say the least.
How can you predict the random pattern of the sniper’s attacks? Who feels safe, even in the privacy of their own home? And with the country’s history of crazies running amok with pistols and other weaponry in high schools, in the workplace and elsewhere, who can say that the apprehension of this latest maniac, even if it happens in the foreseeable future, will also signal the end of the horror? Who knows when copycat snipers will emerge to add to the mayhem?
The question is: how many Guardian Angels will it take to save America?
But perhaps an even more pressing question is: how many guardian angels will it take to save Iraq? America, for all its internal problems and contradictions, remains set on a course of vengeance against that Arab state huddled between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. The supposed object of its wrath is one Saddam Hussein, who, like Osama bin Laden, was formerly an ally in the American war against the “Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union, but is now a menace to the “Free World” in his own right.
Saddam cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called a cuddly and loveable character (although I suppose his mother loves him). But, once again, the question is (and I’m sorry that this is going to be a column full of questions), when Saddam was using the chemical weapons that are now touted as being the reason for his attacks against the Kurdish minority in the north of his own country, where was the collective will in the world community, led by the US of A, to stop him in his tracks? And so on and so forth.
The answer is obvious: Kurds are expendable and Americans are not.
But this has been bothering me in my conversations with some of my American friends over the past few weeks. Why does the United States have such a bad reputation in the rest of the world, yet still demand that the rest of the world give Americans unconditional love, especially in times of trial and tribulation, like the present?
Sure, America established itself as “the home of the free” and has done much to justify that claim up to this day.
But it is also clear that the claiming of freedom for some meant the denial of freedoms for others –starting with Americans native to that continent, and continuing with the morally unjustifiable importation of African slaves to power the flowering of that same American dream of freedom.
The question now is whether the American president, even with the backing of the Congress and the Senate, is really justified in making choices for the people of Iraq.
There has never in recent history been a war justified by the statement by a serving head of state that a country needed invading “because they tried to kill my daddy”. Boy George, of course, can never forget that he is the natural heir of his father, Ol’ Massa George, in the American presidency, and will never let the world forget it, either. But is it fair to presume that Ol’ Massa George’s determination to eliminate Saddam in 1991 should not have elicited an equal response from the Iraqi supremo? Is this a good reason for trying to persuade the rest of the world to let America go to war with Iraq today?
My American friends vary in their judgement. One of them explained that he was tired of Americans being criticised around the world anyway, and had decided to move back to the US, even though he considered George W Bush to be an idiot. (Would you go over the precipice behind an idiot?)
Another said that America was justified in terms of various treaties the US had made with itself regarding its justified behaviour when it felt that its interests were being threatened (and there’s the rub — is this a war about democracy or about the survival of Exxon?).
The thing is, once the shooting starts, it’s not going to be just Saddam in the firing line of a lone and lethal assassin’s bullet — as in what is happening around the District of Columbia at this moment. The carnage will be far more extensive, and will inevitably embrace not just the targeted villain Saddam, but countless civilians as well.
The US will survive its horrific serial sniper, as it has done in the past, and will do in the future. But who knows what will become of Iraq (and the world) if Boy George gets his way?
My American friend’s answer to the question: “So if you do get Saddam, what next?” was simply to say, “We’ll have to see when we get there.”
What, I had to ask, has this got to do with democracy?
My American friend didn’t really have an answer.
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