A Million Iraqis Will Get the Message - 05 September 2003

A summit meeting on behalf of many nations was held here in New York city on Wednesday evening and ran well past midnight.

At the start of the following news conference the presiding official was asked if the current situation could fairly be called a crisis.

The summit chairman replied: "It's certainly challenging, you'll see a lot of bleary eyes up here given the all-night sessions that will be necessary but I would not categorise this as a crisis given what we've seen going on in the world the last couple of years. Absolutely not."

Bravo! Well said. Especially when you consider who was saying it.

He was the chief executive of the United States Tennis Association who is running the current United States Open tournament, or rather has been abruptly stopped from running it by the heavens above when he had three days of continuous rain.

74 matches waiting to be played. something like 200 players and officials drifting around the lounges, eating, napping, playing poker, chess, just hanging out.

On Wednesday night, sometime around 9 or 10, a solitary, slim, athletic figure in a dark blue, zipped-up jump suit, strode on to centre court - the overhead lights, of course, were still on in hopes - and started, out of hours of frustration, just stroking and banging balls into the tiers of empty seats in the vast coliseum.

She earned a grateful clap or two from the solitary couples hunched under huge umbrellas and waiting, hoping, until finally a voice from above intoned the news that play was positively suspended.

I ought to identify the single player who was defying the elements. She was Martina Navratilova, in the trimmest shape and successfully so far playing doubles. After Martina another deluge and the summit or non-crisis meeting.

There is a very rare type of athlete or sporting official who is aware that his game is a human trifle, a simple escape from the wars and woes of the world outside his sport.

More typically my experience is of the blissful attitude of a famous professional golfer who a week or two ago was asked what he thought of Iraq.

"Of what?" he asked. Of Iraq. "Oh," he replied, "I don't read newspapers and that stuff."

I myself have and have always had among my friends and acquaintances professional men - lawyers, doctors, the like - who sooner or later confess that they're "not into politics".

Which surely explains the enviable fact that mostly they're uniformly amiable, cheerful, good-natured souls. How I envy them.

But there are some of us, more of us I think, who make their living by being into politics and much else besides in a life of a nation.

And the pursuit of the social history of one nation has been a lifetime's trade. Most of the time absorbing and often great fun but often, too often in the past two years, it has been a very grim profession to follow.

And there are times when a single event - a bomb dropped in a place remote from the United States Tennis Association - must take priority.

Well then it is hard to find a parallel in the Western world, the American world, to the assassination of the Ayatollah Hakim.

He was not just an imposing national figure but the leader of the Shiite Muslim sect which was born 1300 years ago.

A revealing New York Times despatch from Baghdad on Tuesday made plain a principal, perhaps the principal, motive for the outrageous bombing of the mosque and the assassination of the ayatollah and why the Americans should be being blamed for them.

But first let's recall a little history. A decade or more, in his last year in office, President Bush the elder made a speech about the threat of Saddam Hussein to the stability of Iraq, which Mr Bush and just about everybody else thought had been guaranteed by Saddam's defeat and the surrender of his forces in the Gulf War over Kuwait.

I think I ought to remind you that there was quite a body of surly Americans who complained for years after that war was over that it had been bungled because "we should have gone on to Baghdad and removed Saddam ourselves."

Realistically, in retrospect, that might have been a good thing but it would have violated the United Nations resolution voting for the war. The order was to get Saddam and his forces out of Kuwait - no more.

Well in that unremarked speech of the first President Bush he simply said: "The people of Iraq must make Saddam step aside."

Not a very fiery or threatening speech or a hint of how you'd do that.

But there were enough Iraqis to respond, and a legion of Shiites, and they started a rebellion in the name of the ayatollah.

14 provinces rebelled whereupon Saddam shattered many of the Shiite holy places.

The ayatollah himself yielded to the urgings of his disciples and followers and he went into exile. Obviously he was the prime target for assassination.

The rebels begged the United States for help but the administration, fearing that a declared war by the ayatollah against the Baathites of Saddam would turn into a civil war, and chose not to launch any more expeditions into Iraq.

The administration trusted the ayatollah as a saintly man and a leader but they could not guess at the character or intentions of the many thousands of Iraqis who would join the rebellion against Saddam.

I don't believe there's any other nation on the UN Security Council willing to intervene.

The ayatollah stayed in exile until Saddam was toppled and, we all thought, the second war was over.

He returned to see and deplore the evident failure of the American-British occupying forces to restore anything like stability to the warring factions and religions and tribes.

Which brings us back to Tuesday's Times despatch.

A month or two ago the dean of one of the holy cities held a prayer meeting with the Ayatollah Hakim and wondered if the ayatollah agreed that he, as the Shiite leader, should join the movement to expel "the infidels".

The ayatollah granted that he thought the American and British had blundered in failing to establish order, let alone law.

But he reminded his friend that for over a thousand years every ruler of Iraq - king, general, dictator - had abused and persecuted the Shiite sect. There then followed an exact quotation from the ayatollah.

"If we repeat the same mistake, if we don't cooperate with the Americans, someone else will cooperate and we will have lost our opportunity. This is our last chance."

There must be a million Iraqis who get the message - whoever cooperates with the Americans is a target.

We may well ask, last chance for what? And we can only guess: to become the government, the political leader of the nation.

I may be wrong but I think it very doubtful indeed in the ayatollah or the leaders of any of the other religio-political factions is thinking of instituting a democracy.

The Baathites - Saddam's socialist party that reigned so absolutely and ruthlessly for years - is by no means a broken enemy.

This administration anyway thinks of Saddam or his successor as having the means, the money and the weapons hidden outside Iraq to remobilise and reinvade and renew the war that had been declared at an end.

Old Middle East experts in and out of the United Nations - they're usually ageing European diplomats - shake their heads, often in private, and add a little chuckle while bemoaning the "naivety" of the Americans in hoping by such interventions - in the Middle East, in Africa, wherever - to usher in democracy to countries like Iraq that have never known it.

Well it may be naive, it may be hopeless but believe me it is the true belief, the ambition, of George W Bush.

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