 A Bob Each Way
Saddam's capture will not end this tragedy
I'm not sure capturing, delousing, shaving, gaoling, reviling and publicly humiliating Saddam and televising his execution (the Shi'ites will insist on it) will help things much.
He's lived for months like a rat in a hole; seen on television the swollen corpses of his sons and Mustafa, a grandson, grossly paraded; seen his yacht bombed, his palaces trashed, his statue dragged down, his galleries and libraries burned, his cronies killed or bribed into treason.
His sufferings, like those of Titus Andronicus, have been vast, bloodstained and Senecan. O how the mighty are fallen, one might murmur, and the weapons of war perished.
But... in seeming to close an ugly chapter and end a terrible war the monster's enchaining has made each further death in Iraq, and there will be a few, seem pointless, wasteful and culpable. Who is doing the fighting now the war has been won, for godsake, and 'closure' at last achieved? Why can't our grunts be home by Christmas? Who are these arseholes still shooting at us? Who?
And death by death, and gunfiring funeral by gunfiring funeral, the present jubilation will drip, like tears, away.
There will be five more Americans dead by Christmas, and 30 more Iraqis by New Year's Day. And there will be no more swarthy whiskered bogeyman to blame for them. Italians, Poles and Spaniards will tiptoe off home alleging their work is done. And the killings, the inexplicable killings, will continue. And the quagmire, some call it the quicksand, will bloodily deepen.
But why did so many - his home village, his extended family, his tribal neighbourhood - stick by him? Fear? I don't think so. They knew he was finished. They knew if he had germ bombs he'd have used them by now. Inbred anti-Americanism? No. They greet the Americans, as all humankind, with courtesy.
It could have been that they thought him a flawed good brutal man in the common Arab way. The best health service, the best education, the best universities, the best-educated females, the finest ballet, opera, theatre, sporting grounds and welfare state in the Middle East must have counted for something. He was a hoodlum like Marcos or Mugabe and he looted the nation and spread wealth round his relatives as hoodlums do. But he gave some good things back. And while few actively miss him, they miss the country he gave them, the lifelong jobs, fixed wages and conditions, the hospitals whose equipment worked, the unburgled neighbourhoods, the all-night wine bars, and so on. They miss it every time a pair of yabbering infidels dressed like Space Invaders wipe out a family of five in a car driving home as usual at sunset, or a bureaucrat is fruitlessly sacked and his family starves or a soldier loses his pension.
The Monster's capture will help boost Bush and panic the Democrats for a month or so. There'll be a 'spike' in the polls, Howard Dean will suffer, Gephart will creep up and win, perhaps, in Iowa. Hillary may throw her hat in, Al Gore shyly court a draft. Bill may consider running as Hillary's Vice-President, or Hillary as Clark's, or Clark as Dean's.
But in the end other things will decide it. The army wives appalled by a war their men were gulled into, under-equipped, in pitiful numbers by military nongs. The Greens who won't waste their vote on Ralph Nader this time round. The jobless whose jobs fled south to Mexico. The poor Black and Latino women keen to abort if they want to. The war-hating young who will get out the vote as McCarthy's draft-resisting students did in '68.
It will be close, but it isn't over. If Saddam suicides, or speaks in court of his friend Don Rumsfeld, things will change. If Lord Hutton calls Blair a lying warmonger things will change.
It's not over yet.
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