"Set Saddam Loose On Osama"
Farrukh Dhondy, Column in the Mid-Day, Bombay edition, Saturday, 22nd March 2003.
A poster on a 4x4 in Lower Parel proclaims: SADDAM — Real Life HERO.
Ganesh, our Nepalese cook, wakes me up with the news that the US and Britain have begun the bombing of Iraq. He is against America for the reason he says that they conspired to kill the Nepalese royal family in the bloody massacre that Prince Dipendra did not perpetrate. He wishes Saddam well.
The firm's temp driver, Anthony from Mangalore, is of the opinion that the Americans are short of oil and want it from Iraq. I point out that they could lift sanctions and buy it. World opinion may not be able to prevent taking a war to Saddam's brow, but it will certainly stop American firms from annexing Iraqi oilfields through military conquest. Even the USA can't behave like that. He says they will wring concessions and get the oil cheap because they are running out themselves. It's news to him that North America has Texan oil and other sources and some of these are owned in part by key members of the Bush administration. There's enough oil around from the Gulf as it is and flooding the world market with cheap Iraqi oil would only bring prices down and result in a Bush family bankruptcy. He chews on the argument between Bandra and Prabhadevi. Then maybe they're doing it to seal Iraqi oil forever and keep their own prices up!
Maybe. Or maybe oil is a red herring. (I thought it was a brown to black viscous liquid — Ed. Kya Punjab Matric Chemistry maara yaar! — fd)
India's easternness on the globe gives me the advantage of emailing my British 'cohorts,' as Colin Powell would call them, to inform them that they are at war, "At the stroke of dawn, while the world sleeps, America keeps its tryst with destiny..." I write — or words to that effect, hoping that the above-mentioned cohorts will switch on their computers before their TV sets.
My son texts me to tell me that he and his school friends are going down to the American embassy in Grosvenor Square to throw stones. I book an urgent trunk call to remind him that we can't afford the bail — let some other friend cast the first stone. He is against the war because the United Nations hasn't sanctioned it and he feels that it has no political legitimacy.
I am not against war. Just against this one. The logic of the American administration and of Boney-headed Tony is awry. There should be a war in the Middle East. The main target should be the wallets of the Wahabi tendency that fuels the ideology of terror and murder and pays for its operations. Iranian fanaticism aside, which threatens writers — a very nasty business in itself and the worst form of literary criticism — Saudi Arabian petro-dollars, Royal and anti-Royal, fund 90 per cent of the feudal nonsense that is heretically perpetrated in the name of Islam around the world. The US should identify this as the main enemy, give the Saudis — which includes Osama and any other of these cowboy outfits around the world — a short ultimatum and then set Saddam loose on them. He can have Kuwaiti oil as part of the bargain and the world should expect him to stamp out this vicious form of fundamentalism in the name of the secularism that he has always professed. He could then, as a key player in the US alliance against terrorism assist in the negotiation towards a settlement with justice for Palestine.
A Great Brainwave!
Comments by Prax Maskaren.
The above drivel is carried by a 'serious' newspaper! This is truly a Great Brainwave, one that strikes the world with a shock and awe that little else in human intellectual history has ever created.
This genius advocates that the US and the world should go from a sometime passive complicity in wrongdoing, a la Munich-Sudentenland and Yalta, etc., to an active cooperation and abetment of wrongdoing! Saddam's megalomania must be indulged by permitting him to extend his tyranny and build a Middle East Empire comprising of the Gulf States, so that he can replace indigenous non-democratic governments with a foreign non-democratic government — and at that, one with an ambition for world empire! And also hold the countries dependent on Gulf oil hostage to his whims and fancies!
This genius pretends that the madman who launched missiles at Israel, which was not involved in the War of Kuwait Liberation, in 1991, in a desperate effort to recast this War from being merely Anti-Saddam to being Islam vs. Rest-of-the-World, so that the War for Kuwait's Liberation should become a IIIrd World War, (only America persuade Israel not to retaliate) is morally a better man — verily a benefactor of the human race, as compared to that other Arab madman who launched hijacked passenger aircrafts at civilian buildings!
And this is not all. This great thinker also suggests that this blood-thirsty lunatic and patron of Arab colonialism and Islamic terrorism targetted against Israel, should be permitted to get stronger so that he can be enabled to accomplish his pet-project: Perpetrate and finally complete the genocide of the Jews that Hitler sought to achieve! And this with international approbation!
With lunatics like this, I begin to seriously wonder why I should not start to root for George Bush Jr. and his campaign to get the Butcher of Baghdad. If all the lunatics, crackpots, cranks and weirdos of the world unite and gravitate behind Saddam out of natural sympathy for one of their kind, then I must necessarily gravitate behind Bush, what?
Therefore, I say: "More power to you, Mr. Bush! Go get that skunk and finish him off good!"
(The ironies of life. Here I am, a firm and intractable enemy of America, of its policies and actions against Soviet Afghanistan, 'Bosnia,' Kosovo-Metohija and Slobodan Milosevic, and the hypocritial, racist and criminal mistreatment of Elian Gonsalves, his kidnapping by the US government thugs and his 'repatriation' to Communist Cuba, being forced to support the US today!)