Dan and Saddam

I’m watching Dan Rather’s interview with Saddam Hussein. It’s fascinating. Hussein comes off as a fairly reasonable guy, an aging Arab aristocrat, well-spoken and slightly rumpled. He does let slip the occasional unsettling phrase (”jealousy is for women”), but nothing especially Hitlerish. If you’d just ripvanwinkled your way out of a century-long nap, and this is the first thing you’d heard about the Iraq situation, you’d probably be wondering what all the fuss was about.

Of course, he spent much of the interview spouting lies so outrageous, and with such placid equanimity, that I have to assume he believed everything he was saying. In Saddam’s head, Iraq didn’t lose the gulf war; the Iraqi people are happy under his despotic reign; there’s nothing suspect about his near 100% plurality in the last “election”; and so on, for hours, with out ever missing a beat. At one point he stopped his translator in mid-sentence, telling him to refer to our Prez not as “Bush”, but as “Mister Bush”, because he and the Iraqi people show respect even for their enemies. As Rather pointed out, he also tried to get Bush senior assassinated, and his state-run newspapers refer to Bush junior as the “snake”.

Whatever. I don’t think anyone really took this interview seriously. It was very entertaining, however, to see the monster we’ve heard so much about sitting calm and hornless at a little table, in front of microphone, speaking softly and smiling patiently at every provocation Rather hurled his way.

What’s really interesting, though, is to speculate on what the American government did when they found out that CBS had scored this interview. Did they approach Dan Rather and delicately suggest that he should view this as more than a simple scoop? That it’s really a golden opportunity to help his nation in its time of need? That they would be happy to replace his normal pen with one capable of firing .22 caliber bullets, or exploding, or releasing poisonous gas, or doing any number of nasty things to the corpus of a dictator who just happened to be sitting right across the table from its holder? That he, Dan Rather, elder statesman of American journalism and respected newsman, could end his years of public service by saving the lives of hundreds of American servicemen and thousands of Iraqis, by cutting the head off the problem that’s vexed the world for over a decade?

Of course they didn’t. I’m sure it was tempting, though, on some level. There’s been much speculation that, if the shadier aspects of the American military and intelligence communities could find a way to assassinate Hussein, they would.

I’m equally sure that, if asked, Rather would have refused, and he would have had lots of good reasons to do so. Even if he could kill Saddam, wouldn’t someone as bad or worse just step in to fill his shoes? Wouldn’t that enrage the Arab “street” that we’ve been hearing so much about lately, and engender a wave of terrorist attacks across Europe and the US? Wouldn’t that alienate half of our European allies, and place the governments of all our authoritarian, non-democratic Arab allies (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia), already working hard to quash public sentiment and crush any signs of fundamentalist rebellion, in a great deal of jeopardy?

And so on. But then again: if Rather could end the possibility of war by just killing one man, then he really would be saving the lives of thousands of people. Isn’t that worth his life, and Saddam’s, and the possibility of small-scale terrorist attacks in the future?

There’s no answer to that question, because we’re not just dealing with one man, or one government, or even one country. Everything that we do in Iraq has ramifications for the entire region, and possibly the world. It just isn’t possible to know — much less understand — all of the variables in this equation. Which is what makes the Bush Administration’s attempt to play God here, spinning rosy scenarios that have a Saddam-less, democratic Iraq under the benevolent rule of the American empire setting an example for the entire Arab world, so frightening.