Bush is joking, Saddam is awake

By Gwynne DyerImagine for a moment that you are Saddam Hussein. How are yougoing to keep yourself and your family alive over the coming year?Because that's what it's about this time.Saddam Hussein will not have the slightest illusions about the younger George Bush's declaration that the United States will wage a war, if necessary, to bring about "regime change" in Iraq. No regime in independent Iraq has ever been overthrown without the previous incumbent being killed, and Saddam and his widely hated sons could never make it out of the country alive if the US project succeeds. They would all be killed, and both George Bush and Saddam Hussein know it.In Saddam's eyes, the Bush family has simply decided to exterminate his own family, and there is no way for him to mollify this implacable enemy.He cannot satisfy Washington by ending his support for international terrorism, because he hasn't been doing that anyway. Right after September 11th former CIA director James Woolsey was tasked with finding evidence linking the Iraqi regime to the attacks, but months of digging have left him empty-handed. The US government doesn't even seriously try to produce 'evidence' for that accusation any more. Instead, the new justification for going after Saddam is that he wants to develop weapons of mass destruction and might pass them on to terrorists. As Vice-President Dick Cheney said in London last week: "We know that clearly, given their past track record, (Saddam's regime) would use such weapons should they be able to acquire them. We have to be concerned about the potential marriage between a terrorist organisation like al-Qa'eda and those who hold or are proliferating knowledge about weapons of mass destruction." Whether that is a good reason for a war or not, it is certainly a line of argument that leaves Saddam no peaceful way out. Saddam is an evil and a brutal man. He was that even back in the Reagan years when he was a de facto US ally against the revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran, and he certainly had programmes to develop nuclear, biological and chemical 'weapons of mass destruction' (WMD) at that time. But after Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War, most of its facilities for producing WMD were dismantled under the supervision of United Nations inspectors. Those inspectors have been excluded from Iraq since 1998, and Saddam has probably reactivated all of his WMD programmes to the extent that he can, given the strict embargo against selling relevant technology to Iraq. A recent British intelligence report estimated that he might have nuclear weapons within five years if sanctions failed -- but they haven't failed, and he doesn't have them now. So why does the Bush administration want to go to war against Iraq now?To Saddam, the answer must seem obvious: To kill him and his family by exploiting the present mood of insecurity among the US population. And nothing in his long and bloody career (he has ruled Iraq for around30 years now) suggests he will just sit there and wait for the sky to fall on him.Saddam Hussein began as a young gunman for the revolutionary Ba'ath Party in an Iraq ruled by a king.He dragged himself away from his first big operation with a bullet in his leg, lived in exile in Cairo until the heat died down, then went back and rose to the top in what all Arabs acknowledge to be the toughest countryto rule in the whole Arab world. He has been dealing practically non-stop with plots to kill him since long before George W. Bush gave up drink and took up politics, and he is still alive.Nobody has ever tried to kill George Bush, or Don Rumsfeld, or Richard Perle, so they don't get it. The rather leisurely debate in Washington about ways and means of taking Saddam down assumes that he is a sitting duck, but he is nothing of the sort. Faced with a situation where to do nothing means his death, he knows he must act first -- and he has a wide variety of spoiling actions to choose from.Why not wait until the Israeli army blunders into some really big massacre of Palestinians in the occupied territories, and then launch some missiles with conventional warheads at Israel? Sharon's government would certainly strike back, the Arab world would rally to Iraq's side, and any subsequent US attack on Saddam would make him look like a martyr and cast Washington as Israel's poodle.Why not attack Kuwait or even Saudi Arabia, and force the US into another ground war in the Middle East? Why not attack Iran again? (That would confuse those who believe in the 'axis of evil'.) If the current constellation of forces spells your doom, then shake it up. Doing anything is better than doing nothing. Saddam knows that, and he will certainly do something.John Nagenda is ill and unable to write. He will be back next week.