[ Golden Gater Online - November 13, 1997 ]
As if he were some undead villain stepping off the silver screen of an interminably long horror movie series, Saddam Hussein is back.
The United States' favorite whipping boy has decided that Americans aren't the stuff an international weapons-inspection team should be made up of, and over the last week has prevented a U.N. team of scientists from monitoring the progress of Iraq's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons destruction program.
It all stems from the Gulf War, that tidy little two-month war we waged against Iraq in order to save Kuwait and all its oil.
But the war turned out not to be so tidy. When Iraqi forces evacuated Kuwait, they set its profitable collection of oil wells on fire. While it made great television, it made for a terrible environmental problem.
American veterans of the war also have these nagging illnesses, with some children of the veterans even born with birth defects. Officials have collected the illnesses into an as-yet unexplained phenomenon called Gulf War Syndrome. But the officials are at a loss so far to explain what is happening, or why a portion of an important report on the illness ended up secreted away in the home of a senior military official. Not very tidy at all.
After the war, we imposed a severe oil embargo, along with sanctions that prevented food and medicine from coming into the country we'd just gutted with those fancy new smart bombs. When dramatic scenes of hunger and despair leaked out Baghdad, the sanctions were quietly and quickly eased. Oh no, that's not very tidy. Not at all.
And it turns out the smart bombs weren't so smart after all. While the Pentagon claimed a hit rate of 80 percent, a Government Accounting Office report issued years after the war said the real hit rate could be as low as an untidy 41 percent.
What Hussein's motives are now is anybody's guess. It could be he just doesn't like Americans. Gee, you wonder why? It could be a stall tactic, buying more time for a weapons destruction program that is already noticeably dragging its feet. Or it could be a political gambit, testing the strength of the Western coalition aligned against him.
Or, more drastically, he could be provoking the U.S. into another confrontation, waiting to pull the trigger on one of the U.N. U-2 spy planes which he has demanded stop flying over Baghdad.
The U.N. Wednesday issued a resolution saying continued defiance of the inspection team would lead to "further measure." It's a step back from what the U.S. originally wanted to say, that "immediate action would" be taken, but Russia and France hedged on the wording, unsure that Hussein was the Anti-Christ the U.S. habitually portrays him as. So the Western coalition isn't so tight, after all.
Instead, we imposed an air travel embargo on senior Iraqi officials, which in effect tells them that they can go ahead and build weapons of mass destruction, as long as they don't vacation in the Bahamas.
It all serves to show that war isn't an easy thing for a nation to get involved in, no matter how quickly the opponent surrenders. This country still suffers from the Vietnam hangover. You can wrap yourselves in the flag, salute your dead and sing hymns to the republic but nothing is ever clean and easy in war, no matter what the Pentagon claims.
[ Golden Gater - November 13, 1997 ]