Hanging around
Talu
New York Elor a man who is supposed to be in Northern Iraq, I'm sure taking my time
in the Bagel. No, I haven't turned yellow, it's just that Charlie Glass keeps telling roe to stay put. Last week P.J. O'Rourke, bored out of his mind, called Charlie from Kuwait City announcing that he'd had it. 'This place makes Tirana seem like Paris in the Twenties ... ' P.J. wanted to join Charlie in Kurdistan. 'I was thinking of Tirana, and what a good time can be had there, just as you rang,' said Charlie. Apparently, there's nothing to do up north but wait around a hotel room. Charlie passed me on to his interpreter who spoke perfect Greek. I asked the polyglot if he could find any women for MC in case I made it to Suleimanyia. Before he could answer — and Glass does not speak a word of Greek — I heard Charlie scream, 'Yes, and they all have beards.'
Poor guy. Two months in Suleimanyia must be like a Monte Carlo weekend in the company of Jack Straw, but what the hell. Now my friend Arnaud de Borchgrave tells me he can get me into
Baghdad — believe that when it happens — so for the time being I will sit tight in the Bagel and wait.
Arnaud just got back from Amman, where 1,600 journalists are cooling their heels, eating lotsa pitta bread, exchanging stories and inventing all sorts of scenarios. Arnaud went straight to the royal palace, had a long talk with the king and flew straight out again. This is the only way to do it. I hung around for months in Beirut and Amman during and after the so-called Black September of 1970, and it was fun because I was young. In fact driving from Beirut to ['bid and down to Amman was tricky and exciting. Then we drove to Damascus, made it through the border, just to fly out immediately to Cairo on a charter. Nasser had dropped dead.
As I write this, old Saddam may no longer be with us. That's what these overexcited women on American networks are
hinting. The CIA is obviously paying out millions to tipsters, and the tips are coming in hard and fast. One thing is for sure: the equipment and weapons of the Iraqi army are not only lamentable — as Andrew Gilligan wrote last week — it makes the war look awfully unfair. Donald Rumsfeld refers to anyone resisting as a terrorist. What I'd like to know is what do you call someone who drops 2,000-lb bunkerbuster bombs on women and children? A liberator? A saviour? An emancipator? I guess all three. On the other hand, here's a Murdoch rag's description of Iraqi terrorism: 'At the end they came charging in a human wave — 10 to 15 guys with AKs and we mowed them down ... All told we killed them in the hundreds. ' Lt-Col. B.P. McCoy, US infantry 3rd Division, fighting from inside his tank, told that story. Doesn't sound like terrorism to me, actually like heroism, but then I'm an oldfashioned person who was taught that a fight should be fair.
Mind you, since when was war fair? The overwhelming superiority of coalition weaponry routed any organised Iraqi resistance from the word go. Weapons with extraordinary accuracy and lethality simply eliminated any opposition. Furthermore, a steel curtain of air-cover flying overhead and extraordinary surveillance systems were able to target any major points of resistance. The only surprise was that it wasn't a cakewalk after all.
So, by the time you read this, Baghdad will most likely have been declared a liberated city, especially if Saddam has been killed but, if I were Rumsfeld, I'd read up on my history. The Mongols besieged Baghdad in 1258, hut two years later, on another battlefield, they were surprised and defeated by a revenging Muslim army. Churches throughout Europe sang Te Deums in thanksgiving. I only hope we won't be singing Te Deums the day exhausted coalition forces leave Baghdad sometime in the future. This has been a senseless war, with thousands of Iraqis maimed and dying. Not to mention the over 100 dead of our own troops. No weapons of mass destruction have been found, none was used against us, yet the Pentagon insists that this was a pre-emptive war against Iraq's mythical chemical weaponry. Go figure, as they say in Brooklyn. And one last question. As Eric Margolis wrote in the American Conservative:
Iraq, which has absolutely no offensive military capability, is such an urgent threat that Anglo-American lives must he spent to conquer it without delay. By contrast. North Korea — which has three to five nuclear weapons and more on the way, mediumand long-range missiles, a huge military, and 5,000 tons of poison gas and germ weapons — is, according to Bush, merely a local problem to be solved through talk.
Again, go figure. Better yet, read up on Alice in Wonderland.
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