The Gulf War

I have been marginally in favor of the war against Saddam, not because I give a hang about Kuwait or the availability of cheap oil or the safety of Israel, but because Saddam had built an entire society on the basis of violence and war, and he would soon have had the weapons to threaten, quite literally, the world. So it was, as the pro-war demagogues said, a case of another Hitler, and I’m glad to see his face rubbed in the sand.

That said, there are still some bothersome things about the Gulf War. For one, it will give the militarists a chance to strut around and tell us how essential they are, and how we shouldn’t look too closely at defense procurement contracts or question the strategic wisdom of the Lockheed salesmen (or Matra here in France, it’s all the same). For another, it will allow every two-bit diplomat in the world to poke his nose into the Middle East and tell the cameras that he’s trying to find a lasting solution to the Palestinian problem or the Lebanese problem or the Kurdish problem or whatever. Actually, I’ll give Bush high marks for managing the UN coalition, and if he can continue that pace in the present negociations, he might actually “win the peace”. But I have my doubts. Anyone who wants to build peace in that area has to understand that not many people there want peace. Also:

No one except the Kuwaitis likes the Kuwaitis much. They are universally criticized in the Middle East for being arrogant and what we would call nouveau riche; they are also considered fat and weak. Most Arabs weren’t sorry to see them slapped around a bit. Even Arab intellectuals in France say that countries like Kuwait and Oman and Qatar are a bit like the German statelets of the eighteenth century — private fiefs of petty rulers, destined eventually to be absorbed into a larger entity; all it takes is an Arab Bismarck. If you honkeys are uncomfortable with that idea, they say, just look at your own history; we are just a few centuries behind you, that’s all.

No one except the Palestinians cares much about Palestine. The Palestinians are considered to be overeducated, spoiled brats by the other Arabs, and are tolerated only for their political capital, for having been pushed around by the Israelis. Contrary to what everybody says, a “just solution to the Palestinian problem” is not the key to Middle East peace. The Arab gripe is anti-Israel, not pro-PLO. It is based partly on a religious hatred of Jews, but mainly on a perception that Israel is just the colonialist West in disguise. The best thing in the world for Israel would be for the US to bawl them out for something and threaten to cut off the aid. Then their Semitic brethren would rush to their defense, remembering that they stood (more or less) in the same trenches against Saddam.

No one except Saddam gives a crap for Saddam. All of the pro-Iraq demonstrations were just epiphenomenal anti-Western sentiment, and Saddam served only as a totem, just as American punks like to wear T-shirts with Hitler or Stalin on them, to shock people. It is no accident that the fervor of those demonstrations was directly proportional to the square of the distance from Baghdad. The Islamic fundamentalists, who were behind most of them, are interested mainly in grabbing power in their own countries; almost universally, they really despise Saddam because his political party, the Ba’ath movement, is anti-clerical. And now that he’s defeated, Saddam will have no admirers anywhere, simply because he’s a loser; no one considers him a martyr.

So the moral of the story is: Let the Arabs sort out their own shitpile, and intervene only if they threaten us. If it means that Kuwait gets annexed by someone, so be it; Bavaria was too. If it means that Israel loses a war someday, so be it; they messed around too long with their tough line. If it means that all of the Gulf oil comes under one despot’s power, so be it; it serves us right for not having developed alternative energy sources twenty years ago. And if it means that the Arabs finally stop being divided on everything and start exerting some power in the world, so be it; China did the same, and although the results might not be all pretty, the world is still here.

Paris, 12 March 1991

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