President Bush has a problem, and I’m here to help him with
it.
His problem is that he's hot to go to war with Saddam but
not everyone thinks that’s a good idea. And he's under pressure
because Big Daddy Bush had all kinds of support 11 years ago in his
war with Saddam.
Dig this statistic: according to an A.P. story last week,
"the 1991 war cost the U.S. $61 billion; allies paid for all but about
$7 billion."
That's putting your money where your mouth is.
But as of last week, the U.K. was the the only government
supporting our replay of the Gulf War. And even that support was
shaky. A poll showed that only 28 percent of Brits thought an attack
would be justified, and only 19 percent said the U.K. should help us
with it.
And these are the guys on our side.
There's not much more enthusiasm in this country. Of
course, Democrats are opposed. They say a war would just be a way to
distract us from how corporate corruption has played hell with our
retirement funds.
But a lot of Republicans are also less than gung
ho—including our own Sen. Hagel and Rep. Bereuter.
Bereuter says he'd prefer "covert means" to a "conventional
attack"—and without naming names, he said "we have some people in
this country who think foreign policy is set by the Old Testament."
Hagel says now is not the time to invade Iraq, "especially without
any allies being with us."
Even House Majority Leader Dick Armey said that an
unprovoked attack would violate international law and "would not be
consistent with what we have been as a nation or what we should be as
a nation." He means we don't do "pre-emptive strikes." We used to
call them "sneak attacks."
The most persuasive rationale for attacking Saddam would be
that he was behind the 9/11 terror, but nobody's found evidence of
that.
Another powerful rationale—one I don't hear anyone talking
about—is that a new war with Saddam could be a satisfying resolution
of an unresolved inter-family feud. The 1991 war wasn't a gentleman’s
war. Saddam and Big Daddy traded lots of colorful insults. Big Daddy
repeatedly called Saddam "Sad-dumb," and said in his preppy elegance
that "we're going to kick ass."
But the least gentlemanly act of all came after the war
ended and Saddam had his boys try to assassinate Big Daddy in Kuwait
in 1993.
I don't know about you, but if somebody had tried to
assassinate my daddy, I'd probably hold a grudge. For a long time.
And the current President Bush is in a position to give
payback. Big time, as Dick Cheney might say.
Which explains why in most of his speeches about Iraq, the
president seems fixated on getting rid of Saddam. To quote Norman
Mailer—wildly out of context—Saddam is the sliver of bone up the
president's nostril.
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The Truth, Mainly
So here's my attempt to help:
Why involve two whole countries in a Hatfield-McCoy feud?
Rather than spend a whole lot of money, rather than kill a whole lot
of grunts with no stake in the matter, let's have George W. Bush and
Saddam Hussein go at each other alone.
Single combat.
One on one.
Just George W. and Saddam.
It would be a whole lot less brutal than the 1991 war when,
according to our own estimates, we lost 300 Americans and killed more
than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers and who knows how many civilians.
And George W. should have a physical edge. He probably
spends more time working out than any head of state in world history.
Saddam's a little paunchy.
Anyway, we could rebuild the set from "High Noon" in some
neutral country, sell the TV rights, give six-shooters to our two
bully boys and let them go at it.
Surely they'd both welcome the chance to do for themselves
what they'd command others to do.
And here's the kicker: The six-shooters wouldn’t be real.
They'd look real and feel real and George W. and Saddam would believe
they were real.
But they'd be paint-ball guns, and the paint-balls would all
be filled with sticky blood-red paint.
It would scare the bejeezus out of both George W. and Saddam
every time they got hit. On international TV, they'd yelp in terror
at every new blood stain, and by the time it was over, they'd have had
a bellyful of sticky red liquids.
When they'd realized that they weren't really wounded they
might even find it funny. They might even laugh and shake hands.
And then—I know, I know, I'm getting carried away
here—they might even pull the same paint-ball ruse on Sharon and
Arafat and end up sharing the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.
I'm a sucker for happy endings.
Retired English Professor Leon Satterfield writes to salvage clarity
from his confusion. His column appears on alternate Mondays. His e-mail
address is:
leonsatterfield@earthlink.net.
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