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Saddam and safety
It’s a complex world
BY PETER KADZIS

SADDAM HUSSEIN’S capture is having a black-hole-like effect on the news: it sucks up all the energy and releases no light. We’ve become so conditioned by the cause-and-effect cycle of the news — especially as presented by cable’s gabby trinity (Fox, CNN, and MSNBC) — that we’re waiting for someone to pull the trigger and tell us what reality has in store for the world. Despite all the CO2 exhaled on the talk shows, most experts are hedging their bets. Even President Bush, in what surely must be a moment of triumph, has curbed his triumphalist tendencies. Since the cessation of "combat" in Iraq, the six-month-long guerrilla war, which has so far claimed the lives of 319 US military and anywhere from 3000 to more than 8000 Iraqis, seems to have sobered most — with the possible exception of that military genius Donald Rumsfeld, who is incapable of reappraisal, agonizing or otherwise.

Certainty has taken it on the chin since 9/11. As someone who grew up in a nation and a world where the only real international threat was nuclear war, that is disturbing. The bomb was something of a comfort blanket. After all, only a "madman" would use it. Sure, nuclear war was a possibility, but it was more unlikely than flying airplanes into skyscrapers. It was — to sane people, at least — "unthinkable." Even during those surreal days in the fourth grade in 1962, as my classmates and I practiced hiding under our desks while Kennedy and Khrushchev figured out what to do with those missiles in Cuba, it seemed remote. My father thought so. A Marine who saw combat during World War II, he was sent off to the hardware store by my mother during the height of the Cuban missile crisis to buy a transistor radio in case the worst happened. When Dad returned home with a plug-in model and Mom expressed her displeasure, he said calmly: "Look, if they drop one on us, we won’t be around to hear about it anyway."

Back then, only a quartet of nations had nuclear weapons — three good guys (the US, Great Britain, and France, although even then a little suspect) and one bad guy (the Soviet Union). Since that time, things have gotten a little more complicated: China (bad guy) acquired nukes in 1965, Israel (good guy) in 1970, India (wild card) in 1974, Pakistan (wild card) in 1998. North Korea (bad guy) is close to producing them now, and Iran (mostly bad guy) is thought to be not too far behind. No wonder Bush scared the knickers off most of the nation when he warned that Saddam (very bad guy) was planning to build the bomb or, at minimum, pass the technology on to Al Qaeda (even worse bad guy).

Now, most of us — who don’t dance with snakes, engage in full-immersion baptism, go to born-again 12-step meetings, own Halliburton stock, or willfully try to screw the poor so that we can get richer — realize that Saddam didn’t have a viable nuclear-weapons program in the works at the time we invaded Iraq. He was trying to establish one. And he once had the makings of a nuclear reactor, but Israel blasted it into ruins in 1981. It may be inconvenient to point out today, but at the time most of the world condemned the action. Life is long, memories are short.

Although it was a fantasy, the idea that Saddam might have nuclear weapons was truly frightening. But it’s not a fantasy that Al Qaeda could get hold of them — or at least the technology to manufacture, say, their own suitcase-size device. Where might they get it? Pakistan, which has a body of anti-American fundamentalist fanatics as dangerous as any in the rest of the Islamic world.

Pakistan is, without a doubt, the world’s most unstable nuclear power. Its mountains on the Afghan frontier are thought to be the refuge of Osama bin Laden. Just hours after US troops captured Saddam, an explosion almost killed Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf. His margin of survival was 30 seconds. In others words, if Musharraf’s car had been half a minute slower, or the bombers half a minute faster, then our most important geopolitical ally in the war against Al Qaeda and the hunt for bin Laden could have been thrown into chaos. Such are the ties that bind the alliance on terror.

The "war on terror" is rubbish, or — more accurately — a rubbish phrase. What the US is waging in Afghanistan is a war on Al Qaeda. And as someone who lived for several years just blocks from the twin towers of the World Trade Center, that’s fine with me. But while the US has finally captured Hussein, our invasion has seriously destabilized Iraq. Even the most aggressive and optimistic of our leaders cannot anticipate when stability might be in sight. Against this backdrop, Newsweek reports that bin Laden has ordered a shift in emphasis from fighting in Afghanistan to Iraq, which offers more favorable opportunities to kill Americans.

I’m glad Saddam has been captured. But I don’t feel safer or more optimistic. Do you?

Peter Kadzis can be reached at pkadzis[a]phx.com


Issue Date: December 19 - 25, 2003
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