The
trail leading to Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction
may have grown cold, but the
search for Saddam Hussein's gay porno flick is getting pretty
hot. (In answer to numerous reader inquiries: Yes, yes,
I fully realize that this story is from the Weekly World News.
But it has already seeped out and gone beyond its original
source. Aside from that, however, dont turn your nose
up too high at the Weekly World News: they, after all, had
the scoop on this
story, which, in retrospect, seems indisputable.) Those
who have purportedly seen a grainy 16 mm film "uncovered
by the Kuwait secret police" swear up and down that
the hairy-chested stud shown in "La'iba al-Waladaani"
(The Two Boys Played) is none other than a slimmer, younger
version of Saddam. A "researcher" by the name of
Sadiq al-Sabah, who authored a biography of Saddam, tells
us that this is just one small part of Saddam's resume: under
the name of "Omar Studdif," he supposedly starred
in "as many as 85" gay flicks. Gee, they used to
call Saddam the dictator with "staying
power," but who knew how very true it was?
The
plot of "La'iba al Waladaani," we are told, depicts
the sexpot despot as a naïve young peasant thrown in
jail and "initiated" by older convicts. According
to our "researcher,"
"Saddam's
acting in the picture is actually quite good. One scene, in
which he buries his face in a pillow and cries, is so touching
you almost can forget you're watching a low-budget sexploitation
film."
What
was done to Saddam in that naughty flick is happening, on
a larger scale, to the entire Iraqi people. Except it isn't
all that low-budget, as Republican advocates of a tax
cut are discovering to
their sorrow. Iraq's cities are devastated, its national
treasures looted, and, in
sections of the country, civil society is threatening
to give way to civil war. Iraqis are biting their pillows
as they are initiated into that great prison-house of peoples,
the American Empire.
Speaking
of cheap exploitation: Since 1991, the
killer sanctions that have crippled the Iraqi economy
and decimated an entire generation murdering
hundreds of thousands have been in place, eagerly enforced
by the U.S. and supported by the War Party's minions here
at home. Now, at long last, George W. Bush has called for
abolishing the sanctions and the UN Security Council is
balking!
It
is a close contest as to whom is the biggest hypocrite in
all this: the U.S. government, which is directly responsible
for the the mass murder of Iraqis by sanctions-induced starvation
and disease, or the Europeans, who also supported the sanctions
regime but opposed the war and are now calling for the formal
continuation of this merciless blockade!
And
the winner is the Europeans! After all, they have been wailing
and moaning correctly about the effect of this war on
the Iraqis: the civilian casualties, the starvation, the decimation
of a civilization far older than our own. So now they won't
lift the sanctions only "suspend"
them until the holy United Nations sanctifies the country
by pronouncing it weapons-free. Send in Hans Blix, they cry:
then and only then can an Iraqi child not have its little
brain shrunk and stunted by malnutrition.
There
may be value to having Blix sent in there, on the grounds
that, in his absence, the Americans will pull off what in
the weapons inspection business is the equivalent of discovering
Piltdown
Man. But the blatant disregard for the health and well-being
of the Iraqis, whose plight the Euro-critics of this war supposedly
sympathized with, is staggering. As Jacques Chirac and Gerhard
Schroeder nurture a mega-Euro-state into existence, the rise
of what many have termed a "soul-less
monster" is dramatized in this gesture of a singular
arrogance.
In
the struggle between the United Nations and the united
neocons, principled opponents of the ongoing aggression
take neither side. Neither the UN nor the U.S. has
any right to rule Iraq: that is the exclusive prerogative
of the Iraqi people. The U.S. invasion is a fact, although
how tenuous is their control of the country may just be dawning
on Pentagon planners. The harm has been done. The dead won't
rise. But that cannot be an obstacle to a free referendum
on the future of Iraq and the immediate withdrawal
of all American troops. I
see by the news that the generals are planning to dig
in for the long haul, but how long will the American people
pay for the occupation of Iraq? And what, I wonder, will be
the price, not only in treasure but in the blood of our best?
As
I have written before, this war is, first of all, a boon
to Iranian hardliners, who see the flames of Islamic revolution
rekindled by the sight of Crusaders in Baghdad. As I predicted
before the outbreak of hostilities, the U.S. fought
two wars on a single battlefield. The Ba'athists are vanquished,
but, as Iraqi phalanxes give way to waves of terrorists and
suicide bombers, the battle against Islamist "volunteers"
from throughout the Middle East is far from over.
Officers
in the
higher echelons of the U.S. military and diplomatic corps
are perfectly well aware of the growing danger, and, as usual,
the chickenhawk brigade is utterly oblivious. The latter believe
that, having been once royally screwed, the Iraqis will be
so "turned out," so to speak, that they'll eventually
come to
like it.
I
wouldn't count on it, however. It will take more than the
crude propaganda circulated by the Kuwait secret police
hey, if we "liberated" them in 1991, what's up with
this "secret police" stuff? to dampen the fires
of Iraqi nationalism. "Saddam is gay" just won't
cut it.
NOTES
IN THE MARGIN
Best
opening line of the month:
"As
we sat in the Oxford-Cambridge dinner in Washington in the
midst of the Vietnam War listening to Dean Rusk, Rhodes Scholar
and Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of State, exhort us to be the
inheritors of the British Empire, I became uneasy
."
Richard
Cummings, "Taking Up the Burden," [review of Empire:
The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons
for Global Power, by Niall
Ferguson], in The
American Conservative, April 21, 2003. Sorry, it's
not online. You'll just have to subscribe
.
Speaking
of The American Conservative, I see Chilton
Williamson has an essay reclaiming James
Burnham from the neoconservatives. Relying heavily on
citations from Congress
and the American Tradition and Suicide
of the West, one would never know from reading Williamson
that Burnham's claim to the mantle of "social philosopher"
rests
almost entirely on his authorship of The
Managerial Revolution, a book that celebrates the
triumph of bureaucratic
collectivism as the reigning ideology of a post-socialist
ruling class.
Williamson
also ignores the important sense in which neoconservatism
describes an intellectual trajectory as much as a fixed ideology.
It isn't just that he "knew Trotsky," as Williamson
puts it: Burnham was one
of Trotsky's chief American disciples.
After
waging a long faction
fight with the exiled founder of the Red Army, Professor
Burnham and his ally Max
Shachtman went off to found their own Trotskyist party
without Trotsky. A month later, Burnham dropped off his
letter of resignation at the new "Workers Party"
headquarters, wherein he explained that the whole thing had
been a mistake, a
huge misunderstanding, and he wasn't a Marxist after all.
Only
a few years passed before Burnham ascended to the senior editorship
of National Review, in the pages of which he commented
on the progress of "the third world war," as his
column was called. His Machiavellian and utterly statist ideology
was best summed up by Murray Rothbard, who once remarked:
"In
a lifetime of political writing, James Burnham [showed] only
one fleeting bit of positive interest in individual liberty;
and that was a call in National Review for the legalization
of firecrackers."
Justin Raimondo
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