Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

Not one country has applauded the great courage and sincerity of purpose that the Americans are finding in themselves!

The justification for Clinton's offensive, and poddle Great Britain's endorsement, is that Saddam needs to be taught a lesson (ahem, amend that to read: one more lesson, never mind that he does not seem to have learned any of the earlier ones) -- namely, that aggression doesn't pay. If that leaves Saddam a somewhat confused pupil, it is because the punishment he has been subjected to is for a crime he did not, in the first place, commit.

Saddam merely occupied the Kurdish redoubt of Arbil (or Irbil/Erbil as the Americans prefer to spell it). Now, Arbil is not in some foreign country. It does not lie in Kuwait or Turkey or Jordan. We are not even talking of Arbil, Montana, US of A. We are talking of a dusty but indubitably Iraqi town which lies no farther north of Baghdad than Roorkee is from Delhi; and not in some foreign land that is forever Iraq but hundreds of miles within the internationally-recognised frontiers of Iraq.

Moreover, Saddam did not move into Arbil of his own sour will. He did not even go there to give the Kurds another thrashing. He was invited to go there by his most deadly, sworn Kurd enemy, Massoud Barzani, rightful heir to the Kurdish insurgency begun more than half-a-century ago by his illustrious father, Mullah Mustafa Brazani, the one citizen of Iraq who refused to be cowed down by the Ba'athists.

Barzani Jr was annoyed that his main Kurdish rival, Jalal Talabani, was steadily gaining control of the Kurdish cause thanks to financial and military assistance from Iran.

If the Iranian oppressor of Kurdistan could decisively assist in upstart Kurdish faction against the veteran Kurdish faction then, reasoned Barzani, why should he not get an equally long spoon to sup with that other devil, the Iraqi oppressor of Kurdistan? And Saddam, as befits a patriotic Iraqi dictator, agreed to come to the rescue of a Kurd who was at least an Iraqi national against another Iraqi Kurd who had turned to the satan in Teheran.

Nothing more serious to this, one would have thought, than, say, Ram Vilas Paswan turning to Lakshmi Parvati to do down Laloo Prasad Yadav. Yet, it has been casus belli enough for the president of the United States to launch 44 missile attacks on Iraq (from the South Pacific island of Guam, 14,000 miles --- half a world --- away!) to compel the Iraqis to withdraw from their own territory. And never mind that Saddam had already announced that by 4 September he would be pulling his troops out of Arbil anyway -- since Talabani's men had fled towards the Iranian border, the Barzani-Saddam mission thus having been accomplished.

No wonder then that, poddle Great Britain apart, not one single country has applauded the great courage and sincerity of purpose that the Americans are finding in themselves. The two countries most vulnerable to Saddam's excesses, Jordan and Turkey, have done a double-take.

The Turkish prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan (note for Indian readers; Necmettin is the Turkish spelling of Najmuddin), has refused to make himself available to the US ambassador in Ankara. Clinton's message of self-justification has, therefore, had to be delivered to the deputy PM, Tansu Ciller, who has taken the precaution of not endorsing the US action.

And Jordan's King Hussein has so pointedly refused to back the Americans that the Americans are comforting themselves with the thought that even if the chairman of the US chiefs of staff, the incredibly-named General Shalikashvili, didn't get an 'Attaboy' from His Majesty at least he (the general) 'did not go away wringing his hands or shaking his head.' (The quote is from the official briefing!) This, says the above quoted American official, is because the US chief of staff had not come to Amman to ask the King of Jordan --- but to tell him!