Damn Saddam?

I wonder whether Saddam Hussein knows anything about Valentine’s Day, but soon after it is celebrated, he will discover what love means. It is the American way of cleansing Iraq of the weapons of mass destruction. This grand passion, worth $200 billion, will be displayed by dropping bombs on civilians.

Would the Saddam of 2003 be any different from the man of 1991? How many clones will he have on the ready? And how many bunkers in his palace? And will he be lucky with the women? What??

Yes, the last time round the Italian member of parliament, Ilona Sthaler, a former porn star, had offered to sleep with him to effect the release of the hostages held by his army. She was appealing to the macho man and sadist in Saddam but, without realising it, she was also ‘humanising’ him.

When Saddam was shown on TV with the British hostages, there were many titters. ‘The Independent’ had stated: “As he patted the reluctant young Stuart on the arm, he was telling us like a cheap gangster in a B-movie, ‘Back off or the kid gets it’.” What the western media failed to see and what Ms. Sthaler did was that gangsters in B-movies, after they have picked up the loot, like to retire to the bar and get their little something, not as reward but to confirm that they have succeeded as gangsters.

Saddam has often talked about not wanting war. But he is said to accumulate arms for war, any war. Now let us see Eric Berne’s analysis of sado-masochism in a sexual context. The thinking is that abstinence would lead to serious consequences, so there is the appeal, to quote Berne, “What do you expect from someone as strongly sexed as I am?”

Now to return to Saddam’s anti-war statements. This is the antithesis where, as Dr. Berne explains, “Real satisfaction is derived from the humiliating foreplay” rather than “more conventional forms of coitus”. As the person is not ready to admit it, he is likely to complain, “After all this work, I have to have intercourse yet!”

Saddam had the last time returned tired from work (Iran). It would have become incumbent on him not to fall for influences. But sexuality and power play are interlinked. And the chain that does it is insecurity. Saddam is caught in a situation where he has to acknowledge both Berne’s thesis as well as antithesis. He can be a powerful leader only if he makes war. He also makes war because he needs justification for being tired. I wonder why people wonder how he can be a hero. It is perfectly logical. He does not take chances.

Twelve years ago, Saddam had tempted Adam (USA) with the apple; Bush Sr. fell for the bait. Today Bush Jr., who succeeded the playboy Clinton and was naturally seen as deficient, has to wipe out traces of both Dad and Bill. Some psycho-babble would take us back to an earlier comment about how he was trying to “reconcile who I was and who my dad was, to establish my own identity in my own way.” Has that moment come yet again?

He got into the White House with the precious words, “I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy.” From being seen as just another multimillionaire from Texas who won an election because of the corporate lobby, all he had to do was replace Bill’s quick fixes with the vulnerability of an “I love to be underestimated” family man. He did not have to go through the lame Clintonian justification of “I smoked, but did not inhale”. He just did not do Vietnam. Was he chicken? Today, no one cares. He is out there slaying ’em lions.

Mark Crispin Miller, in his book ‘The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder’, thinks that the attention his post 9/11 rhetoric has got is understandable, “because it actually reflected less on Bush’s speech per se than on the moment’s strange and terrifying context … there was so fierce a hunger for a national father-figure that the audience saw one in the president, who therefore came across like Churchill, or like FDR, despite his lack of stature.”

Pitted now against ‘a gangster from a B- movie’, he becomes the guy restoring honour in a disorganised world by ridding the universe of oriental scum. But just as Operation Desert Storm (sanctified as the Gulf War) remained essentially one in a tea-cup, after this one too Saddam Hussein will survive to tell the tale and give America one more decade to mouth clichés through scalded lips.