Washington — War is hell we have been repeatedly informed, ever
since that terse judgment fell from the lips of the late General
William Tecumseh Sherman, a general who spent his life adducing
proof for this famous declaration. Yet war can also be very
amusing. Not only have such famous movies and television shows as
“Catch-22,” “Hogan’s Heroes,” and “M*A*S*H,” amused us, but now
midst the carnage and destruction of a real war the Iraqi army and
its Ba’athist party loyalists are playing comic roles. Most of them
are bullies of the worst sort. But they are also pompous asses, and
a bully playing the role of the pompous ass while getting his
pomposity stomped good and hard is a fit subject of ridicule and
laughter.
Furthermore President Jacques Chirac’s unanticipated dependent,
Saddam Hussein, has reached into the ranks of his Ba’ath Party to
provide us with a Malvolio vastly more amusing — and more pompous
— than Shakespeare’s original. I am, of course, thinking of
Saddam’s present information minister, Mr. Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf
— at least Mr. al-Sahhaf had the job when I wrote this last night.
As he stood there in the rubble of Baghdad with American aircraft
screaming overhead, boasting of yet another proud Iraqi victory, I
could not forget that this delightfully risible creature is a
former Iraqi foreign minister. He is not some special hack trained
by Saddam to enunciate the party line even under the most
improbable of circumstances. He is from the Ba’athist elite. In
fact he is from the elite ranks of those who establish what
President Chirac and the popinjays of the United Nations call
“world opinion.”
Mr. al-Sahhaf once padded up and down the hushed halls of the
United Nations and into the presidential palaces of the world for a
full decade while serving as Iraq’s soignée foreign
minister. He was also his country’s ambassador to the United
Nations, to Italy and to India, so he has lived outside Saddam’s
cuckoo nest and knows something of the realities of the outside
world. Nonetheless, as the regime’s current minister of information
he has been popping up on television reassuring Saddam’s friends
“all over the world,” as he says in his expansive lilt, that the
Coalition forces are being “crushed.”
Are American forces in control of the Baghdad airport and joy
riding their armored vehicles through the capital’s streets like
hot-rodding teenagers on a Saturday night in Muncie, Indiana? All
that is “illusion,” says Mr. al-Sahhaf, as he stands in front of
the international journalists at the Palestine Hotel. In truth, “We
[he and Saddam] have defeated them, in fact we have crushed them in
the place of Saddam International Airport.” Why are members of the
vaunted Republican Guard laying down their rifles and stripping off
their uniforms? Perhaps because there is very little left for them
to do. They are victorious. The Coalition forces, Mr. al-Sahhaf
purrs, “have done everything crazy in order to lessen the pressure
we have put on their troops.”
Television viewers, at least in America and the countries of the
Coalition, laugh. French audiences doubtless listen full of hope.
And supposedly anti-Coalition viewers in the Arab world either
thrill with another Arab victory in sight or say as an inhabitant
of Cairo did to a Reuters reporter, “I believe al-Sahhaf
exaggerates a little, but he needs to do that to reassure his
people.” What people could he be reassuring? As I predicted in this
column last month the regime would be defeated in a week (I was off
by ten days). Mr. al-Sahhaf is about to be unemployed.
Personally I would like to see him returned to the United
Nations, where his preposterosities would be unexceptionable; but
we might get regular glimpses of him addressing the General
Assembly, perhaps calling for humanitarian aid shipments to Beverly
Hills or the immediate arrest of the Rev. Billy Graham for crimes
against humanity. Surely he would be invited up to lecture at
Harvard’s Kennedy School and at the Harvard Law School. Do you
remember the time the Harvard Law School invited a bag lady to
lecture there? She was clinically insane. So far as I recall, she
gave a lecture at least the equal of anything Professor Alan
Dershowitz was then regularly delivering to the unfortunate
students of that dizzy institution. A few months after her famous
appearance she was again back on the streets and in serious
trouble. Professor Dershowitz remains at large.
Yet, now that the Iraqi minister of information Mohammed Saeed
al-Sahhaf and Professor Alan Dershowitz have made it into this
column, I bet many readers are thinking the same thought. Anyone
who has watched Professor Dershowitz argue on television for one of
his pet liberal manias must recognize certain similarities between
the Prof and the minister of information. Both are very suave in
skirting around troubling facts. Both lay down some pretty
preposterous conclusions. Yet you will note that Mr. al-Sahhaf is
always much more polite than Professor Dershowitz. Maybe some day
we shall get to see them on “Crossfire.”
