Article: Jan. 2004 - Iraq: A Morality Play?

IRAQ: A MORALITY PLAY?

This is a traditional Morality Play, with actors who take roles which are symbolical of virtues and vices, and act out in a crude plot which exemplifies some universal truths. It is presided over by persons set in high places (ladders L & R front of stage), who are supposed to represent God and the Devil.

The curtain rises on a great country known as the United States. Out of the blue, on a day called ‘nine-eleven’, it suffers a sudden terrible attack from an unknown source. Our Hero, the President, calls it the work of ‘terrorists’, and duly declares outright war on terrorism, vowing that the free world will crush it by force. He first attempts to house-train the wild warrior factions of Afghanistan and then, to demonstrate his country’s mighty power-for-good he sends a vast army to liberate the downtrodden people of Iraq from a truly disgusting maniacal dictator and former ally, Saddam, the Villain of the piece, who is thought to possess and be poised to unleash on the world, some terrible ‘weapons of mass destruction.’

This-all seems, on the face of it, to be a worthy cause, and the danger to the world posed by Saddam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ seems to be a good enough reason to pre-emptively invade a sovereign nation with a massive surgical strike that would depose the dictator and his henchmen in a few days, and thereby swiftly bring the benefits of Western democracy to the Iraqi people and the Middle East, which is, after all, the sort of place where terrorists seem to be coming from.
The rest of the world, a disparate chorus played by the United Nations, is divided in its views of the project and has some reservations, like, for instance, it doesn't much relish the idea of the U.S. just invading countries which do things it doesn’t like, and like there is no connection discernable between the Iraqi régime and the perpetrators of the terrorist attack. Also the Middle East countries are less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a large foreign army trampling around the region, because however ‘liberating’ its declared purpose, once victorious, they do have a tendency to take everything over. Indeed, the United States has already declared its intention of dumping an alien form of democracy on to the area.

However, for the President and his vast army, these are details. For them the clincher is the threat of ‘mass destruction’ posed by Saddam’s ‘weapons’ thereof. Poised on the borders of Iraq in the ever-growing heat, Our Hero and his vast army sing an chorus of righteous frustration (in fact the action is interspersed throughout with arias, rousing choruses and significant asides, which I have taken the liberty of omitting).

There follows an episode of diplomatic dance in which a nice man from the United States flies about the world trying to persuade members of the United Nations to legitimate its project.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the stage, the plot thickens. Like a podgy Pied Piper, the villainous Saddam is leading the United Nations’ patient Inspectors in a long ritual dance, backwards and forwards across his sandy country, constantly not quite revealing evidence of the maligned ‘weapons of mass destruction’, but keeping the possibility of their existence alive in their minds with transparently contrived pieces of duplicity and random significant prohibitions. At the same time he is singing the praises of his glorious military machine and the valour of his beloved people in their determination to defend the Motherland street by street with the huge quantities of small arms which he has handed out to them, and so defeat and drive off the vast army. This is clearly nonsense, but throughout his reign Saddam has always shown an intriguing contempt for veracity.

While this is going on the audience has time to ponder various questions, like for instance:-

What are Saddam’s true purposes? Does he really want the world to believe his announcements? If so, he must be barmy. Or . . . does he perhaps know something we don’t know? Who can say? How can anyone see into the mind of a man whose self-esteem is so pathologically low that he has to starve his people in order to build a multitude of palaces to his own glory, while he himself has to spend his time bumping along side roads in a succession of clapped-out cars? He is certainly not the sort of leader we are used to. He is not a rugged homespun warm-hearted persuader, surrounded by rich oil-greedy empire-builders and who plays John Wayne to baleful audiences in the Middle West. He is not a smirking, smooth-talking, passionately plausible salesman spun by his PR cronies. As he is not troubled with trivia like the need to curry votes from an electorate, he does not have to explain himself.

Maybe Saddam is just a simple Medieval despot living a life of revenges and hatreds, spiced with random brutalities and sentimentalities, a control-freak for whom chaos and misery are living (and dying) tributes to his insatiable need for glory. But, as befits an archetypal Villain, Saddam is clearly not simple. He is deeply cunning, with a clear-sighted contempt for the confusion that common compassion can impose on those he sees as weak-minded. And there is no doubt that he is up to something . . . but what?

Suddenly the interlude ends. Goaded beyond endurance by Saddam’s teasing, by the hot weather and by the rising doubt at home, the United States rallies the Coalition of nations that it has rounded up, gets one of them to declare that the proven existence of Saddam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, coupled with his readiness to unleash them in a matter of 45 minutes, is an immediate call-to-arms. Then the President thumbs his nose at the United Nations, sounds the trumpet and charges straight in, mob-handed.

Predictably the campaign is short but, for the Iraqis, bloody. Enormous damage is inflicted at astonishing speed. And, in spite of the resounding victories proclaimed by Saddam’s information service, the Coalition achieves ‘total victory’ in record time.

Jubilant "Huzzahs" are shouted and "Mission accomplished!" is declared.

Meanwhile, unseen, our Villain has taken loads of money and armaments and, with a hard core of followers, has legged it into the desert.

From there he shows us what it was that he knew and we didn't. Now, quietly, among the angry, battered people of Iraq squatting amid the shattered remnants of their facilities, his residual supporters can move freely and unseen, neatly fomenting internal strife and carefully setting up covert acts of destruction to delay the repairing and rehabilitation of the country. By blowing up the people who have only come to try and help, and by randomly attacking the invaders, his supporters systematically make the occupation an intolerable and unending struggle, one which no amount of conventional military force can defeat, simply because the enemy is invisible.

In the aftermath of their ‘total victory’ the U.S. forces notice that they are unable to communicate. Not knowing the language, all they can do is either shoot at or shout at the people and kick their doors in. That, to put it simply, ensures that they will continue to be blamed for everything that happens, and remain almost universally hated.

Thus the scene is set for a leisurely and very nasty guerrilla war of reprisal and revenge, one which Saddam knows the fun-loving American people will not be willing to stomach for long.

The plot becomes clearer. Now we can begin to see why Saddam chose to goad the Americans into the attack rather than wait for a slower and more carefully thought-out action. Perhaps he knew that if the U.S. and the U.N. were to come to an amicable arrangement by which the invasion would be overseen by the U.N., other Middle East countries, many of which thought he was a complete bastard, might well have joined in and, if that had happened, he and his régime really would have been for the chop. For one thing his neighbours would have known the language and known how things work in that part of the world. The U.N. would have sent in people who could explain to the Iraqis what was being done and why. They might also have been able to recognise who was friend and who was foe. They could even have convinced the Iraqis that they had come to liberate them, not to smash everything and perhaps take control of their oil reserves.

Predictably perhaps, our Villain is eventually captured, not so much by skilful detection as by simple treachery.

But this is no defeat. The Play is not yet over. Saddam has fulfilled his ambition: to bring down the "Great Satan" and if, in so doing, he has turned his once-beloved country into a killing-ground in which every zealot with a grudge and a grenade can come in and have a go; a place where every effort to bring order or peace is being systematically slaughtered - it is all part of his victory.
Thus our Villain reaches his goal and finds his warped glory. Now whether he lives on or dies is an irrelevance. Perhaps, by quietly taking him out of the public eye, he could be denied his last ambition - to become a glorious martyr in a magnificent media circus. But that is a small matter.

The noise goes on, but the curtain comes down.

Then, like a peal of thunder, the voice of God is heard:
“OK, so if that garbage is a Morality Play, make with the Universal Truths bit.”

“Well”, replies the Devil, “How about ‘nine-eleven?”

“What about it? It was an atrocity! An act of mindless, barbaric terrorism. The Great Country has declared war on terrorism and has vowed to wipe it from the face of the Earth.”

“Like maybe it declared war on the weather?”

“Yeah, OK. So they make umbrellas. They protect themselves. What’s wrong with that?”

“Oh, my dear chap! Nothing. Of course one must protect oneself.”

“Right, so what’s the first Universal Truth?”

“Try this.” The Devil clears his throat and pronounces:-

“Now that the ability to deliver massive destruction is available and can potentially be inflicted by any Tom, Dick or madman, the possession of so-called ‘military might’ can no longer give protection to, or confer political power on, any single nation or human group.”

“So what?”

“So lots! For one thing it means that power-politics is over. Do you get that? It means that not even the awe-inspiring might of the United States can give it the power to impose its will on other countries. It just tried, didn’t you notice? And made a right pig’s ear of it, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“Yeah. I guess there were some administrative difficulties, but that’s hardly a U.T.

“So you want the full text?”

God sighs. “OK then.”

The Devil begins:-

“Partly because a war can rarely, if ever, be won, or even ended, and partly because the incredible damage that it can do is in itself a fountainous cause of anger and misery, and thus a prime incentive to revengeful terrorism, for one country to wage war on another can no longer be considered a viable military or strategic option.

Terrorism on the other hand, because of the abundant facilities that are now available to it, can be seen, from the terrorists’ point of view, as being a ‘very viable strategic option.’

“Hey, why do you keep on about terrorism? Just a bunch of thugs and killers. All they have to do is weed them out and kill them off.”

“Ahem.” The Devil looks almost embarrassed. “You know, for a deity, you do, if I may say so, take a rather short-sighted view. Thugs and killers have been about for ever and, like the rain, terrorism can always appear where there is cause. So, as I said: declaring outright war on terrorism is like declaring war on the weather - a nonsense."

"Yeah, I got that already. So what’s new?"

"What’s new is modern, state-of-the-art, terrorism and that, dear boy, is the natural end-flowering of the Arms Trade . . . pardon; the Defence Industry.”

“But that’s just business, honest commerce!”

“Yes, and profitable too, developing ever-more-efficient and user-friendly instruments for killing and destroying, selling them to all and sundry so freely that today the world is awash with the things and any nerds with a grudge (and God knows there are plenty of them!) can lay hands on any amount of sophisticated murdering equipment originally manufactured and supplied by those they intend to murder. My! You have done well!”

“Hey! Whose side are you on?”

“Oh yours, yours, every time! Look at the WMDs.”

“What about them?”

“Well,” says the Devil. “For a start they aren’t WMDs any more. Because of DOD and MAD they became IGMMSs, or rather they were, for a while. Now they are ITMEs.”

“And what the hell are ITMEs?”

“Invisible Threats of Mass Extermination.”

“Hey, I’m a simple guy. I can’t be doing with that many letters. Make with the names.”

“Certainly. As you know ( because you were there), in 1945 Nuclear bombs were used as Weapons of Mass Destruction. Then, a few years later, after the Russians had made some, the Doctrine of Deterrence came up which ensured Mutually Assured Destruction. That meant that they became Instruments of Guaranteed Mutual Mass Suicide, which meant they were junk - useless.”

“And now?”

“Now, nearly sixty years after Hiroshima, the world contains a globally lethal amount of mass-destructive material, much of which is poorly guarded and all of which is coveted, not only by deluded nations who can’t get it into their heads that that the things are useless as weapons of war, but also, and far more dangerously, by the covert invisible instigators of terrorism – for whom they do constitute a totally devastating weapon because the policy of Deterrence obviously can’t be exercised against them - simply because you can’t bloody find them!

“Hey, Devil, cool it! You almost sound as if you care!”

“Oh . . .sorry.” The Devil hangs his head.

“Come on, tell me another U.T.”

“Oh, right-ho. Try this:-

“Now that direct violence between nations has shown itself to be ineffective as a way of settling disputes and to be too damaging to the world as a whole to be tolerated, the people and governments of the world must, simply in order to have some hope of survival, form, support and give independent authority to a supra-national organisation which, mindful of the welfare of the planet and of the multitudinous life it supports, will serve as its guardian authority, final referee and giver of justice.”

“Hey! Sure! I’ll buy that. Only you do know that it’s been tried before, twice, and each time it’s hit the wall. Why should it work this time?”

“Because they’ve got no bloody option!” shouts the Devil.

God is silent for a moment, then he asks. “Which side are you really on?”

“There are no sides, Dumbhead! Now, here, on our patch, there is good and there is evil, OK? But if the buggers blow themselves and everything else to pieces, just because they are too proud or too stupid to see what’s in front of their faces, there will be nothing . . . just a dead rock, spinning un-numbered years in the emptiness of space, a place where, to all intents and purposes, all these saints and sinners of ours might just as well never have existed! Do you buy that?”

“I buy it.”

The audience has long ago left, so they begin, creakily, to climb down their ladders.

Oliver Postgate

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