Imprimir

Saddam Hussein’s record is well known: He took part in a coup d’etat in the ’60s; became president 11 years later and has oppressed his own people since; attacked Iran and gassed thousands of Iraq’s Kurds in the ’80s; invaded Kuwait and launched missiles against Israel in the ’90s; and is currently financing Palestinian suicide bombers and embarked on an insane procurement program of weapons of mass destruction while playing hide-and-seek with the international community.

He poses a threat to global peace and must be removed from power. So says the United States.

But why should I believe President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has not yet confirmed America’s fears, when U.N. Secretary-general Kofi Annan says that Iraqi cooperation «seems to be good,» and when one of Hussein’s generals, Hossan Muhammad Amin, reassuringly declares: «Really, we have no weapons of mass destruction»?

Instead of getting tangled with the issue of Hussein’s deadly arsenal, I suggest that the dictator of Baghdad be deposed for a different reason — an artistic one. Let me explain.

Hussein is certainly the villain in the current drama, but he is also a man of many talents — an artist, if you wish. He has a taste for paintings, sculpture and architecture — as can be appreciated in the Mother of All Battles mosque in the outskirts of Baghdad, inaugurated last year to mark the 10th anniversary of the Gulf War. Creatively enough, the mosque’s minarets were built to resemble ballistic missiles sitting on launch pads. According to The Sunday Telegraph, the Scud-shaped minarets are 37 meters high, and there are four more minarets next to the mosque dome that look like huge machine-gun barrels, each 28 meters high. Taken together, 28/4/37 give Hussein’s date of birth. The mosque has a holy shrine housing a 605-page Koran, which was written, according to Iraqi propaganda, with the blood of the elected dictator himself.

«Over three years, the president gave us a total of 28 liters of his own blood, which has been mixed with chemicals to produce this handwritten Koran,» explained Dahar al-‘Ani, the mosque’s director of information.

But it is perhaps in the realm of literature where Hussein has excelled. In 2000, the sensational novel Zabiba and the King appeared in Iraq. Although it was anonymous, it was rumored that Hussein had authored it. The Iraqi media, writers and poets all praised it generously, Iraq’s television began to prepare a 20-part series of the novel (casting famous Iraqi actress Hind Kamil), and the Iraqi National Theater announced that a grand musical based on the book was in the making (adapted by Palestinian poet Adeeb Nasir).

Western reactions to the novel were diverse. A British journalist called it «an allegory of the confrontation between the Iraqi leader and the evil West, which combines romance, patriotism and adventure with openly sexual accounts.» In a review published in the Middle East Quarterly, Ofra Bengio, an expert on Iraq, said that Zabiba «is boring and incoherent . . . not written in the best Arabic style . . . clearly the work of an amateur . . . propaganda disguised as a novel — and poorly disguised at that.» For its part, the CIA studied the text in an attempt to access Hussein’s mind.

So here’s my suggestion. Remove Hussein, and everyone will benefit, primarily Hussein himself, who would have plenty of time to write more novels and design new mosques while serving his life sentence in prison. As a plus, Blix and Annan would be freed from the difficult task of searching for weapons in an expanse the size of Central America, the Iraqi people would enjoy a breath of freedom at last, and the planet would be free of the clear and present danger that the Iraqi leader represents.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Geneva, and a member of the American Jewish Committee.