The fall of the roamin’ empire

And so it continues. Men and women who are by most definitions noble, but who march to different tunes and under different flags, go out to subdue, and if necessary kill, each other. Most of them are brave, though few are fearless. But then, what is bravery, if not confronting fears and nightmares? And there must be many of those.

Amongst those the attackers would subdue, these horrors must include the death of loved ones. There have been many of those too. Mostly innocent – men, women and children, going about hurried business in crowded streets when bolts from hell strike them down. As I write, I hear of women and children fleeing in a mini-bus only to be cut to shreds by those who claim to be liberating them. Well, they’re free now alright.

The list goes on. There’s the British convoy attacked by an American pilot. He killed one and wounded several. They described him as “a cowboy”. Like his president, then.

Or there’s the missile that shattered a Baghdad market. The Coalition kicked for touch, then tried to suggest it was an Iraqi missile that went astray. Their own missiles were so accurate it couldn’t have been one of them, they said. They promised to look through the video flight recorder of each missile to see if one had gone astray. But they doubted it.

Great tactic. Smother the fury, slow down the play, get it on the back burner, create time. In a couple of days another outrage will have taken its place (and it has) and any admission can be downplayed. And that’s how it is with us now. In the spin-doctored world of the USA and the UK, no statement can ever be truly trustworthy, any more than the bombast of the Iraqi regime. Everything must be verified.

And it was. Bob Fisk gave the serial number of the missile. It was on a fragment found by an old Iraqi man who showed it to him. He quoted every digit. The Americans don’t have to sift for weeks through their video flight recorders. They can check right now. But they haven’t yet.

What did you expect?

Listen, we already knew that Saddam was a nasty piece of work, a bloated bag of greed, violence, wickedness and terror. But this terrible adventure has exposed a range of conceits on the part of the Americans and British as well.

In the colonial spirit, they thought they were going to fight a bunch of towel-heads who would cave in without a fight. With the same stupidity as the politicians and generals of the First World War, they thought they’d be done in a couple of weeks. “The pros against the rag-tag conscripts” – that’s how it was seen in The Observer on March 9. And The Observer is generally ambivalent on the war! It’s so much worse in the right-wing press.

A second conceit was that the Coalition Forces were the Wrath of God, so overwhelmingly mighty and right that the technologically and morally inferior Arabs would crumble before them in shock and awe. But there are many Gods, and each seems to have his, or her, own wrath. And the invaders got something in return for dropping thousands of bombs, some as big as houses. They got a different war than they expected.

A third conceit, inherent in their sense of moral superiority, was that they were going to “liberate” Iraq from Saddam’s evil regime. Laughable as it now seems, they had delusions of a popular uprising, a peaceful revolution, people dancing in the streets, kissing the liberating troops and strewing flowers before them in the streets.

It hasn’t happened. They miscalculated many things, maybe even everything. Some Iraqis who hate Saddam also hate foreign invaders and they don’t want to be occupied or colonised (yet again). And of course, they remember how they were betrayed by these self-same self-styled saviours last time round. It’s all so much more complex than the marketing people foretold.

Brave and (in their own way) noble young men and women have been sent out by ideologues and theorists to play out their scenarios for real, to secure and protect the wealth of Iraq in the Western (and by that I mean American) interest. Obscene amounts of money are being spent in this Crusade, enough to free much of the world from disease, to bring water to the parched of Africa, to feed the hungry of the world...

And all of it will be recouped from Iraqi oil revenues and from higher prices at the pumps from you and me. I know and you know there was another way to get rid of Saddam.

But maybe, like many great powers in history, the US is over-reaching. If they have to fight the Iraqis in Baghdad’s streets, they will set off such a tidal wave across the world that anything might happen. Already there is a rising anger in the Arab and Muslim world. Others – the Chinese, the Russians – are watching with interest.

The USA is the biggest, richest, most powerful and most technologically advanced society on earth. But so was Rome, and in time it was undone by marauding bands of barbarians. Donald Rumsfeld would call them terrorists. But they were just coming out of somewhere else, out of another world, one that was, for all its primitivity and brutality, able to dismantle the biggest, richest and most militarily and technologically complex society known to that date. Rumsfeld should take more care. No empire is safe.

The Hog