Mama We're All Ba'athists Now

By Crispin Sartwell

Ostensibly, we went to Iraq to bring the Iraqis free speech and free markets. That is, we went there to make them into us. Instead we've made us into them. Say hello to Dick Cheney, Ba'athist dictator.

There were bad signs from the get-go. The liberating forces set up their command posts in Saddam's old palaces, even as they were pulling down his colossal self-portraiture. One might have thought that this was extremely bad symbolism. It indicated that though the mustache had changed, the dictatorship remained the same.

Then we started rounding up suspects without trial, and when things kept breaking down, we started recalling the old police forces, giving them a brief retraining and turning them back out onto the streets. That is, we tried to leave the internal security apparatus intact while dedicating ourselves to the liberation of the people it had oppressed.

We're even considering recalling units of Saddam's regular army. The next phase will no doubt consist of recalling Saddam himself from his hole in Tikrit to take charge of security.

Meanwhile, international aid agencies have pulled up stakes: partly to avoid the fiery deaths of their workers, and partly because they can't operate freely within the American-imposed police state. We'd love the United Nations to take over and provide us some political cover, but we won't give up the authority that would make their participation possible or meaningful.

Give us a few more years, and the international community will be demanding inspections and imposing sanctions on the U.S. Ba'athist regime.

We have plans for the Iraqi economy, involving billions of dollars in contracting for rebuilding and the eventual dissemination of Iraqi oil under the auspices of multinational corporations into the global economy. This is precisely what inspired Saddam to seize the reins in the first place.

We're not terribly happy with the "Governing Council" we ourselves appointed, powerless though it is. The council, for example, wasn't thrilled with the idea of bringing in 10,000 troops: from Turkey, a neighboring state with a self-interested political agenda for Iraq and a stake in its ethnic conflicts. Perhaps, we think, we should simply disband the body, though it is no more independent or powerful than Saddam's old "parliaments."

It will be said that the Iraqis themselves have goaded us into Ba'athism by their violent resistance. True, true: and now maybe we see why there are dictatorships. It's a lot easier to subdue an uppity populace with tanks than with a friendly smile. (To be frank, however, that is something that the American state, like every government, already understood.)

Is that the hint of a Groucho mustache I see sprouting from Dick Cheney's upper lip? As much as the Iraqi people enjoyed pulling down giant Saddams, they're going to love pulling down giant Cheneys even more, and perhaps the Republican administration with him. .

You are what you eat, and we've consumed Saddam's regime. And perhaps even more disconcertingly, you are what you hate; the distinction between the Bloods and the Crips or the Communists and the Fascists slowly becomes unreal. If you're an Iraqi, as George Wallace might have said, there ain't a dime's worth of difference between the Republican and Ba'athist parties.