The Invisible Hand

Saddam to the Rescue

It looks like our French allies and the United Nations have finally reached some compromise on the Iraq disarmament resolution. But luckily, Saddam Hussein is a truly reliable fellow and is about to make the whole inspection process irrelevant.

The resolution passed unanimously by the Security Council last week seemingly gave the peace-at-all-costs bloc exactly what they wanted . . . a two part process with enough ambiguity to delegitimize any United States military response to the inevitable Iraqi breach.

If it followed the letter of the resolution, the U.S. and its coalition allies would not be able to apply military force against the fascist junta in Baghdad until late February 2003 at the earliest. And that's only if the Security Council is decisive enough to give the go ahead.

Fortunately, Saddam is about to break the diplomatic logjam and give the U.S. all the pretext it needs to launch a regime-changing attack.

You see, everyone figured the wily Saddam would accept the resolution and then cleverly conceal its weapons from inspectors amongst the shadows of doubt. Indeed, our friends on the Security Council were counting on that happening. But now it looks like Saddam is going to reject the resolution. Why, he must be mad!

This morning the Iraqi “parliament” vociferously recommended to Il Duce that he graciously and wisely kick the world community in the groin and reject the UN resolution outright. Doing so would give the U.S. coalition a green light to attack immediately . . . within hours!

I can almost hear the thousands of targeting mechanisms clicking into place. The flight decks of a dozen aircraft carriers are probably already swarming with ordinance specialists scrambling to paint clever graffiti on their smart bombs. Fresh young employees are excitedly taking one last run through their java lingo before pulling the tarps off the new Basra Starbucks.

The “international community” has always assumed that while Saddam is brutal and Machiavellian, he’s not nuts. But actually he is quite nuts.

In the past, unhinged totalitarians like Saddam would eventually get what was coming to them from the more rational nations who reach their tolerance threshold for such bad behavior. But in the multiculturalist world, where every opinion is equally valid, the natural culling mechanism has rusted shut from lack of use. Saddam should have been knocked off years ago but everyone from Bush the Elder to Gerhard the Lame have forestalled the final reckoning.

Saddam wasn’t clever . . . he was extraordinarily lucky.

Today or tomorrow Saddam will deliver a defiant speech to the world in which he upholds Iraqi sovereignty and rejects the UN’s conciliatory resolution. He will do it because he believes the streets of Washington, Florence and Copenhagen are thronged with mobs of pro-Iraqi demonstrators who are on the verge of overthrowing their leaders and ushering in a global Saddamist political movement that will make him the most important and respected goomba in the whole wide world.

Saddam’s dreams of world where he can fire his rifle from the well of the UN General Assembly chamber to the approving applause of its members, where he can drive his black Mercedes down the Unter den Linden over the feet of his adoring fans, where he can romance infidel starlets like Farrah Fawcett under the flickering neon of the Vegas Strip, are all about to come true . . . in his mind at least.

Saddam will listen to all the obsequious advisors in his Revolutionary Council and conclude that he has the United States completely cornered. To him, this makes perfect sense. Now all is left is for Saddam the Magnificent to deliver the final coup de grace that will topple the corrupt Bush dynasty.

This will be a rare moment of clarity in the geopolitical madhouse . . . I expect President Bush to exploit it.

Gentlemen, start your engines.