...
No novelist other than Ian Fleming would accept that the Iraq conflict begins and ends with
a bad-guy tyrant equipped with "weapons of mass destruction." For one thing, the current
Middle East policy was articulated two years ago, in a document commissioned by Dick
Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld called Rebuilding America's Defences: "While the
unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial
American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam
Hussein."
So much for The Madman Who Must Be Stopped.
Should our novelist do some research, it might be amusing to recall that the first time the
United States attempted a "regime change" in the Middle East was in Tripoli -- in 1803. (A
historian friend dishes out this sort of thing, provided I buy the beer.)
Or he might find an interesting analogue for the Bush-Saddam conflict in the nine-week
standoff in 1904 between Theodore Roosevelt and a tribal leader named Raisuni (a
self-styled warrior against Western imperialism), in which U.S. troops sat in Tangier Bay,
ready to fire. As with Saddam (and bin Laden for that matter), Western governments were
happy to use Raisuni as a surrogate for their ambitions in Morocco, until he began to take off
on his own. Then he kidnapped a wealthy American -- an incident reminiscent of Iran in
1980 -- and the U.S. saw red.
Another task for the novelist is to establish the historical resonance of a story, its style. This
one has a Victorian feel: a unipolar world with one superpower (Britain in 1880 had as much
shipping tonnage as the rest of the world put together); in which corporate interests and
foreign policy become blurred (the East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company); in
which the superpower invades other countries for outwardly benevolent reasons
(parliamentary democracy and British justice). All of which combine to form the
geopolitical policy that, in the 19th century, became known as the Great Game.
In crafting a Great Game plot out of the Iraq situation, our scribe might characterize the
U.S. as the last European nation-state not to give up its colonial aspirations; a nation (more
likely a faction within it) whose aim is to create a dominion upon which the sun never sets.
As such, the underlying game plan here might go something like this:
Saddam is really a straw man to whip up public enthusiasm for an attack (Hitler remains a
useful model for the villain du jour), whose underlying objective is to destroy the Baath
Party, which rules both Iraq and Syria as the last of the pan-Arab political movements. Iraq
is at least 25 per cent non-Arab (about 20 per cent are Kurds), and Shiites outnumber the
ruling Sunnis two to one. With the Baath Party gone, the Arab world will fragment -- for
corrupt Saudis, it's only a matter of time -- and then, peace is unlikely in our time or any
other time, let alone democracy in Baghdad.
With the Arab world a patchwork of warring tribes, America can safely turn the policing
duties over to its client state Israel, in order to concentrate on its next objective: Iran -- a
non-Arab country with seven trillion metric tons of oil reserves that, under the Pahlavi
regime, served as a virtual colony of the U.S. for nearly 40 years -- an era the President's
father remembers well and, no doubt, fondly.
The goal? Turn back the clock a half-century, and get the American empire back on track.
The Great Game scenario may be way off the mark; it's a what-if approach to the situation.
But even as fiction, at least it's consistent with history and fact -- which is more than you
can say for the James Bond movie we call news.
