A very senior Iraqi military man had fallen out of favour, hadn’t been sycophantic enough, far worse, had dared to disagree with Saddam Hussein. He’d been locked up for months, tortured by security police. Eventually his wife was able to get close enough to appeal in person to the great liberator of Iraq.
She told him that her husband had always been fiercely loyal to Saddam, had indeed been threatened with his own life by clandestine dissidents as punishment for his fidelity and devotion to his adored leader. She begged Saddam to give back her husband to her and their children. He smiled as he kissed her on either cheek. He said her pleas had touched him deeply and that, indeed, her husband would be back with her the following day. The next day a sack was delivered to the woman. It
contained the disarticulated body of her husband, chopped up into a hundred or so little pieces.
Quite naturally, there will be those who will say that this diverting revelation of the Saddam Hussein sense of humour is apocryphal, another typical example of the rabid slander that has befallen poor President Saddam as he’s struggled heroically against the imperious, militaristic neo-colonialist conspiracies of the Jewish-controlled sexually incontinent infidels of Washington in their covetous schemes to gain absolute control of the Arab oil-fields so that they can erect thousands of
McDonald’s and Coca-Cola dispensing machines all over the deserts while imposing a vicious Israeli government across the entire Middle East.
For those and a battery of other obvious reasons, it is being held that a war with Saddam Hussein is highly undesirable except, perhaps, as a method of exposing the true measure of Tony Blair’s hypocrisies.
I thoroughly disagree. I cannot wait for the first actions of the pending Gulf war. I went all of a dither last week when CNN reported that United States aircraft had taken out an Iraqi radar facility in the no-fly zone. Here we go, I thought, plumping up the pillows on the television couch. All the waiting and hoping hasn’t been wasted. Here come another few weeks of the first-rate entertainment we all enjoyed with Desert Storm. There is no ‘reality” television to compare with the gut-thrill of watching a smart-bomb go down the ventilation shaft of an Iraqi underground bunker filled with 10-year-old ‘Saddam Youth” soldiers. I just hope that this time they are going to show us actual footage of a 15 000-pound Daisy Cutter going off.
I also hope that this time the American generals won’t listen to that namby-pamby peacenik, Colin Powell, when at the last moment he tells them to pull back and not annihilate Bagdhad. This time I want to see it all. I want visions of dusty tanks rumbling through the smoking ruins with grinning GIs sticking out their turrets waving at the grateful Iraqi citizenry, interspersed with shots of sweet little Iraqi girls waving home-stitched stars and stripes as they throw bunches of wild flowers into jeeps full of ethical-looking US colonels. Mostly, I badly need to see shovelfuls of Saddam being sacked.
Alas, it was a false alarm. The radar facility take-out was not an opening salvo, more a sort of practise run for carrier-borne fighter jocks. May as well bomb something for real while you’re about it. Save the bother of having to do it later.
There are other good reasons why this commendable war should go ahead. Tony Blair will look pretty damn silly if all his vacant boastings come to naught. Nothing’s more embarrassing than arriving back from the battlefield without the enemy’s head under your arm. George Bush will be even worse off. With no war, no new orders for billions of dollars of replacement military hardware, planes, tanks, rockets, aircraft carriers. Single-handedly George has quintupled the US defence budget to
$360-billion. He can’t come slinking back into Congress to admit he hasn’t been able to spend it all.
Then there’s Manto Tshabalala-Msimang. As you may know, our ‘Hello the Future MTM” recently has been in Iraq on a humanitarian fact-finding mission. Now that she’s all but pulverised the South African health services, Manto’s demolition expertise is in high demand by dictators like Saddam. In an interview Manto was asked a leading question by some white racist reporter. Did she think that splurges like the South African R60-billion arms deal were of priority, given that so many poverty stricken South African children don’t have access to basic medical care?
Manto rustled her ventral feathers and laid another of her sublime idiocies. She said the need to update the South African defence force at the cost of bankrupting the fiscus was a necessary precaution. ‘You never know when George Bush might invade our country,” she cackled — in all seriousness.
It’s reliable Department of Health-style logic. With all his ammo used up in Iraq, Dubya won’t be able to invade us. What better reason to hope for a new Gulf war?
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby