Security officials in Washington will be getting their dictionaries out soon and for once it won’t be for something George Bush said (or meant to say). Actually, there will be a lot of translating going on because Saddam Hussein has thrown a wrench into the Bush war machine. Last week, a deadline approached for Saddam to turn in a detailed record of all weapons programs and activities that he had ordered or arranged. Well, he did. In fact, he did so a day early. President Bush and his administration had been saying that the deadline is very important and that being late could be a cause for war.
Saddam wasn’t going to take any chances, not now that he knows President Bush is anxiously waiting for him to screw up, so he made sure that the report was in a day early (just in case the deadline was by American time instead of Iraqi time). And it would be hard to say that anything was left out of this report. I’m sure the 12,000-page document records every little thing one could ever want or need to know about Iraqi weapons or weapons programs.
However, Washington wasn’t prepared for Saddam’s cooperation. Mr. Bush needs a reason to go to war and Saddam’s cooperation isn’t helping. So we slowly began to see how Saddam’s human rights record came into play. The administration never used this argument for war but it has surfaced with help from the British. A British investigative team compiled a report about Saddam’s human rights record and released it last week. What impeccable timing. Just as the world had begun to think that maybe there is a peaceful solution to this problem and that Saddam might be able to cooperate, this news report about human rights abuses is all over the place.
Saddam does not have a good human rights record. In fact, he has a terrible one, but I don’t think we needed the British to tell us this; it’s not as if we didn’t know it already. The timing of this report, which I’m sure most concluded was mush before its release, came just as Saddam was letting inspectors into palaces and sites with no restriction. So why does this work in the favor of hawkish U.S. administrators? It helps them persuade the public that even if Saddam cooperates he still needs to be eliminated. The fact that it’s coming from the British, the jolly tea-guzzling tagalongs of the conflict, allows the U.S. to show others that they are not the only ones concerned about Saddam, while at the same time they will not have to emphasize human rights as a problem.
You see the United States would never want to argue human rights as a reason to go to war. This country makes way too much money in trading with nations whose human rights records are just as bad if not worse than Saddam’s. For the U.S. to begin policing human rights would mean it would have to start condemning China and other nations vital to our economy, and that would be contrary to our national interest.
So where do we go from here? Well, for the Bush administration, they will probably continue to say that Iraq is a threat to the U.S. They will probably look at this document, realize they already knew about Saddam’s weapons program because the U.S. was an integral player in supporting and supplying them a decade ago, and call most of the document a lie.
But first the document will have to be translated into English. Many parts of the 12,000 pages are in Arabic. Translators will have to be employed so that we can read the document in English, and even when it will be a translated from Arabic – it won’t really be in English. It will most likely be filled with more technical mumbo jumbo than any educated State Department official will be able to comprehend on his/her own.
We will need to bring scientists in to explain some of the difficult terminology. And when the national security advisors finally understand what it means, they will have to dumb it down just a bit further so even President Bush can figure it out. By that time his term might be over. Yet giving President Bush (a Yale “edumacated” man, of course) the benefit of the doubt, he should probably have some sort of response for this by January at the earliest.
You might be thinking that that isn’t a long time, but as Security expert and Five College Professor Michael Klare has told me, the ideal time for a war in Iraq is between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day. And since Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat, President Bush is running out of time.
The bottom line is Mr. Bush has to make a decision and make one quick if he wants to get his war on. If Saddam succeeds at getting through this vital period, it might make the nation look inward to the status of the economy and find out why the secretary of the treasury resigned. The first Bush lost power because President Clinton was able to turn the country’s attention inward at the dismal economy and the grossly high military budget. Unless ‘Dubya’ gets his act together quick, Saddam might survive yet another Bush.
Yousef Munayyer is a Collegian Columnist.
Photo Bendee: Munayyer
Pull Quote: “This country makes way too much money in trading with nations whose human rights records are just as bad if not worse than Saddam’s.”