OZYMANDIAS
REDUX
Percy Bysshe Shelley (click for the short poem) Shelley's famous sonnet is prescient of the future of Saddam Hussein. The poet even speaks of a "sneer of cold command" presaging Hussein by 200 years. Hussein's decadent life's legacy is about to come tumbling down just as Ozymandias' statue. In the latter's story, none knows whether it was time or pride which shattered him. In Hussein's case we know for certain. It is we, the people of the United States. The initial phase of the war against Hussein has begun. Special Forces has been operating in various parts of Iraq for at least several weeks according to reports in the Washington Post. American propaganda pamphlets are being dropped around the soon-to-be-free country. I can see the President's words being read by those Iraqis brave enough to pick one up: "You are either with us or with the terrorists. Choose." Now there's a rock and a hard place for the top guns of the Iraqi military and government. Few, if any, of them wants to die for Hussein. At crunch time, dictators die alone. What is not yet well understood by most commentators is that this war will be very different from the Gulf War, circa 1991. Observe. 1991 is 12 years ago, eons in technological time. It's doubtful Hussein or his staff is truly aware of what they are about to witness very up close and personal. Would you opt for a '91 car today? You won't even find many of them on the road. First, the Iraqis are going to learn about military rope-a-dope. After some softening up of the underbelly of their country's military and communications infrastructure, the jabs, feints and crosses will come from everywhere at the same time. That's one reason why so many countries are being used as staging areas rather than simply putting everyone and everything in, say, Kuwait. Hussein and Company will not know what has hit them, literally. It will be that fast, that accurate and that deadly. Second, they will learn that we have spent our time since September 11th getting to know the territory better than the Iraqis. Our flyovers, satellite imagery and technical intelligence has simply provided our military with more consolidated, available information about Iraq than the Iraqis possess themselves. Again, go back to 1991; think what was big in the PC world of that day. WordPerfect 5.0 anyone? Hard disks with megabytes, not gigabytes, of storage. 5 1/4 inch floppies and 64K of memory were big then as was Windows 3.1. Nope; the Iraqis have no clue that we know exactly where everything is stored, where it's come from and where it is. Watch them all disappear in the first 3 days or less. Blown to join the dust of the desert or to litter its sands as did the remains of Ozymandias. Third, the message will travel world-wide and very clearly: Dictators, hunker down; cool it. America means business; Bush means what he says. He's neither Clinton nor Carter. Political opposition forces will be emboldened to rise against dictators with less fear. The dominos will begin to fall, first in the Middle East, later in Africa, hopefully in Cuba where somebody should assassinate Castro, and South America, principally Columbia. North Korea will be "handled" by its neighbors, principally China which will not likely want to cross America at that moment. Kim Jong Il doesn't want to die either; he's got a great deal for himself, one he can't duplicate in Hell. Dictators are desperate to somehow stop George Bush's relentless, patient movement to destroy them. Despite critics shouting: "No Rush to Judgment", it's been nearly a year and a half since September 11th. Last, all of this takes time. It has taken us nearly 18 months to get to where we are. Post liberation Iraq will be an organizational and political mess for awhile but the lot of the common person will improve almost from Day One. In a dark corner
of the hall of history, the name Saddam Hussein will be that of
a cruel, tin-horn dictator. No poet will write even of his death,
much less his miserable life. Here are some lines Hussein might
not like to read today: |