![]() ![]() ![]() The little gulags of bloodied rooms with their telltale stacks of I.D. Stacked coffins in a warehouse (which turned out to be relics from the Iran-Iraq slaughter). The allies fought their way into the heart of darkness, and the clues are everyhwere. Without bin Laden and the specter of 9/11, the American public could never have been induced to take Saddam seriously a second time.īut just as Saddam is fading like a Cheshire cat, his menace is finally palpable to the free world. We have been much more spooked by the mysterious ascetic evil of Osama bin Laden moving silently between caves with his laptop and virtual army, the technician of terror waiting to strike again. It has been tempting to dismiss Saddam as a relic from a bygone age of Ruritanian Peter Ustinov dictators - the military uniform, the growling rhetoric about Running Dog Lackeys of Colonial Imperialism, the enormous statues that toppled in slow motion. Easy enough for us to forget that behind their preposterous airs are the horror and the torture whose reality we are just beginning to glimpse in Iraq. America stayed out of World War I for so long because it felt intimidated by that efflorescence, as Harper's frankly acknowledged in doggerel at the time:Īll dictators look ridiculous from a distance because we who are safe from them observe only their vanities. Hitler's toothbrush was clearly the manifestation of a deep inferiority complex in comparison to the hirsute virility of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Saddam undoubtedly picked his up from Stalin, whom he idolized, and he followed Stalin's style in pretty much everything else. The 16 look-alikes will keep showing up in smoky cafes in Cairo, crowded mosques in Jakarta, a paramilitary version of "Where's Waldo?"Īs Saddam fades, so, perhaps, will the genre of dictator defined by whiskers. The National Enquirer in the next five years is going to have a field day of Saddam sightings. Or is he? As the flags wave, it doesn't seem to matter either way. Now the chances are he is holding that same meeting under a pile of rubble. Is it possible that Saddam will fade away like the Cheshire cat, with nothing left but the mustache? The videos we were endlessly analyzing before Monday's bunker buster pictured him trying to be jocular in a curtained chamber with a group of unhappy-looking fellow mustaches. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |