Melville Cooke You think it's the end
It's just the beginning...
Bob Marley and the Wailers
YOU COULD almost taste the satisfaction drooling from Paul Bremmer's lips when he announced "We got him." 'Him', of course, was Saddam Hussein; the 'we' is yet to be determined.
The concept of justice, already out of kilter, hit a very slippery slope on the infamous 9/11 and it has been all downhill from there. We have a situation where those who launched an illegal and immoral invasion will be bringing to trial a man whom they supported, but now term a brutal dictator, perhaps before their hand-picked supporters - who are not representative of the Iraqi people they claim to be bringing democracy to.
And you thought the soaps were ludicrous.
It gets even better. The United States, which led this invasion and is harping for justice, of the jungle or desert kind, is being led by an unelected president, has established a terror camp for prisoners which it holds without any legal rights in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and is determined that its soldiers will not be subject to the rulings of an international criminal court. So might is now officially right.
And it gets even better, believe it or not. Germany and France, at the behest of the U.S., are joining the move to write off a chunk of Iraq's US$120 billion debt, so they can have room to get the 'reconstruction' going notwithstanding the fact that two U.S.-led assaults plus a decade of UN sanctions (led by guess who?) led to the devastation of the country. And, I might add, a great deal of the money was spent to buy weapons from the U.S. and France.
However, while Bush is sure to be elated that his approval rating leapt up in the immediate aftermath of Saddam's capture, in Iraq the joy lasted less than 48 hours. As MSNBC posted on its Web site on Monday, "On a sunny Sunday afternoon, the streets of Baghdad rang with celebratory gunfire and shouts of joy as Iraqis caught the news of Saddam Hussein's arrest. By the next morning, many Iraqis' mood had soured, as they complained of ongoing violence and skyrocketing prices under U.S. occupation."
The story went on to say that the citizens were fed up with the electricity and gasoline situations, as well as the lack of security in the country. Not only that, they are fed up with the Americans as well. This was represented by a man on the street:
"The Americans promised freedom and prosperity; what's this? Go up to their headquarters, at one of those checkpoints where they point their guns at you, and tell them that you hate them as much as Saddam, and see what they do to you," said Mohammad Saleh, 39, a building contractor. "The only difference is that Saddam would kill you in private, where the Americans will kill you in public," he said.
Capturing Saddam Hussein is a nice public relations campaign, but as such things go they often mean much less to those actually in the situation than those who are putting out the press releases.
It also meant much less for the people who I strongly suspect the U.S. would like it to mean a lot to the people who are putting up resistance to the invasion and occupation of their country. The U.S. has termed them insurgents and terrorists, conveniently forgetting that insurgency and terrorism need something that they have not and cannot supply a legitimate government.
What they have furnished, however, is a foreign force which it is quite legitimate to resist. You know, "When in the course of human events blah, blah, blah..."
And, since the capture of Sad-dam Hussein, it has been proven yet again that resistance is fertile. It is not only the police station bombings on Monday morning, or the truck explosion yesterday morning that took care of 10 unintended targets. It is the feeling, as The Guardian reported yesterday:
"But two guerrillas told the Guardian in a rare encounter near Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, that they were not fighting on behalf of Saddam and were undaunted by his capture." "The operations that have happened here against the Americans are not by people outside Samarra," said the first man from the seat of a white BMW, where he sat with a Kalashnikov assault rifle on his lap and a hand grenade resting on a shelf by the gear lever. "We are the tribes of Samarra and we are responsible for the attacks. We are fighting a war against the Amer-icans. We are fighting because they arrested a lot of people, because they attacked a lot of houses in the night; they humiliated our sisters."
The second guerrilla, the driver, said he had deserted from the Iraqi army 11 years earlier. But since the Americans had arrived in Samarra one of his brothers had been killed and four had been arrested and were still in detention. "How do they expect us not to take revenge for this and not to lead operations against them?" he said. "As long as (U.S. forces) remain inside our city we will continue to seek revenge."
And we are at just the start. What will happen 50 years from now? We live in an instant world, where world events are expected to move like coffee from a bottle, but it just does not work that way. Bush and co. are yet to find that instant stuff just does not have the same, lasting flavour.
Rise up all you fallen fighters
Rise and take your stance again
Heathen, The Wailers.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
