When George W. Bush marched his troops into Iraq I tentatively applauded the move. After all they had weapons of mass destruction didn’t they? Well actually, no they didn’t, but nonetheless Saddam was a tyrant and surely he deserved to be removed. I was probably influenced somewhat by childhood memories of folk saying back then if only someone had got rid of Hitler in 1938 we could have avoided the terrible catastrophe that was World War II.
There is no doubt Saddam was a tyrant in the mold of Adolf Hitler and many others; Idi Amin springs to mind. And there was plenty of evidence that Mr Hussein had killed hundreds if not thousands of his detractors. There was no doubt he had gassed the Kurds and had brutally attacked Kuwait. George W’s pater had dealt to him pretty conclusively on that occasion. We knew too that he had shot his two son-in-laws after they had defected to the West and then unthinkingly returned to the loving arms of their wives. No wonder they say love is blind.
By ridding the land of Saddam Hussein the “coalition of the willing” naively assumed the Iraqi’s would live happily ever after. Sadly it seems the country, with so many discordant political and religious factions, needed a strong man, no matter how psychotic, to keep the peace.
And then there was a new tyrant on the block, the block being the Middle East, the tyrant being Muamma Gaddafi. Without much forethought a hastily cobbled-together coalition flew headlong into the valley of death in an effort to get rid of him.
Gaddafi had a chequered relationship with the West. He was a handsome young army officer when he took over Libya in a military coup in 1969. But after the usual honeymoon period Libya was soon to become a pariah state and was denounced for oppressing internal dissent, committing acts of state-sponsored terrorism and assassinating expatriate opposition leaders. There was also crass nepotism which saw Gaddafi amassing a multi-million dollar fortune for himself and his family.
He was welcomed by the West initially, but as absolute power corrupts absolutely he became perhaps the most despised leader in the world. The handsome young army officer had morphed into one of the ugliest people on earth, arguably because of the blood on his hands which give credibility to the claim that sinful acts eventually manifest themselves on the faces of the perpetrators and that your eyes are mirrors to the soul.
His bombing of a nightclub in Berlin in 1986, killing a number of Americans, saw a response from US President Ronald Reagan who bombed Gaddafi’s compound intending to kill the leader, but was accused instead of killing his adopted daughter named “Hanna”.
It was later revealed that immediately after the raid Gaddafi had taken a dead child from a nearby hospital claiming to adopt her by chanting: “I adopt you, I adopt you, I adopt you,” saying to an aid, “It works in this country for divorce, so it should work for adoption.”
Gaddafi then promised to avenge the so-called “killing” by committing a terrorist act on a major American airport. I was in America at the time, flying back on my own from Brazil via Miami and Los Angeles. Both airports could be considered “major” and I was tempted to kiss the ground when I landed safely back in New Zealand!
The Lockerbie bombing might have been the last straw for the West but the Christian tenet to forgive those who trespass against us often takes us down paths we might not normally tread. Roving UN ambassador Tony Blair led the charge for absolution, even publicly embracing Gaddafi, which may have had more to do with BP wanting to maintain its oil contracts than any genuine rekindled affection.
In the end Gaddafi was killed by his own people with his own handgun. Like Iraq and Syria, Libya is now a basket case which leads me to wonder whether Western leaders ever considered the old adage ‘the devil you know is better than the one you don’t.’
Call me old-fashioned, but I get nervous when I see witless young men in hooded sweat-shirts mindlessly firing their AK47 rifles into the air with total disregard as to where the lead projectiles might fall. Are these then the new leaders of the Middle East?
The only no fly zone I trust is in our pantry, after I’ve sprayed it with Raid.
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