A tyrant, assailed by tyranny

When words run out it is time for resignation - for being reconciled to the inevitable - or for worse. With Iraq it's the worst now happening - a tyrant at home being assailed by tyranny from abroad.

Only this time there is nothing the Tyrant of Baghdad could have done to avert war. The inspections were a sham, or at least a sham from America's point of view. Hans Blix's team could have discovered an El Dorado of forbidden weaponry and America would still have gone to war.

The US, or rather the war caucus now at the steering wheel of US policy, has its own agenda, something that goes beyond Iraq and predates September 11. The war caucus wanted a war in the Middle East for a host of reasons all inter-connected. Oil, Israel, the entrenchment of US power (as if any more entrenchment were needed) and Christian evangelism have all been at work in priming the US for this war.

Islamic fundamentalism is not the problem here. A form of Christian fundamentalism is. If he lived and ruled in our part of the world Bush's view of religion would brand him a bigot. An ayatollah in the White House - supported by a corps of ayatollahs around him. If Shias take offence at this metaphor, then a mullah in the White House.

Reading about the war caucus and their inter-connecting threads - the ones that bind Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rove, Abrams, and their fellow-cohorts - will give anyone the creeps. And to imagine that they have a sophisticated country, the most powerful on earth to boot, in their grip.

Bush rules the US. These people, Bush's minders, their moment having come, rule Bush.

In a fundamental respect this is worse than Hitler. No one pushed Hitler into any war. He was war's leading advocate and indeed in 'Mein Kampf' sketched a grand theoretical basis for conflict, Germany's need for living space, a good 15 years before the Second World War.

Bush was an isolationist before September 11. Many in the war caucus had laid out their blueprints for redrawing the Mideast map and ensuring Israel's unchallenged dominance much before. Not Bush. He was not even interested in foreign policy. Now he is war leader, the triumph of the war caucus complete.

Nothing could have deflected Hitler from going to war. No appeasement, no Munich. He wanted war at any cost. Nothing could have prevented the onslaught on Iraq. The Bushites (another name for the war caucus) wanted war at any cost. Saddam just happened to be the perfect excuse, with just the right credentials as a domestic tyrant to invoke justifying clauses about morality and human rights. If Saddam hadn't been around, he would have had to be invented. The Bushites wanted war and they've got it.

From their point of view the perfect war. A weak country, or at least a country no match for the US. An Iraqi army in no position to put up a fight. Between Kuwait where the US armored columns were massed and Baghdad, the ultimate prize, the only serious obstacle is the vast desert.

China, even though without air power, taught the US a lesson in Korea. But that was on a different scale, the Chinese analogy not fitting Iraq. Vietnam taught the US a lesson. Even tiny Cuba, dauntless Cuba, taught the US a lesson during the Bay of Pigs invasion. Alas, Iraq is neither the one, nor the other. Nor is its foolish leader a patch on Ho Chi Minh or Castro. Iraq thus is the perfect victim and Saddam with his megalomania, for which his people have paid such a heavy price, the perfect excuse.

Will the annihilation of Iraq satisfy the war caucus? Or will its appetite be whetted for more? What are the limits of American arrogance? Or, in other words, after Iraq, who? No one can say for sure.

Excerpted from "When words run out" by Ayaz Amir of Dawn