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Volume CXXXII, Number 14 |
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Equating Saddam with Osama
KATHERINE CRANE
COLUMNIST
On the face of it, Colin Powell's presentation to the U.N. on Wednesday might look like a moderate success. General Powell is much more popular in Europe than anyone else in the Bush Administration, and although his list of evidence against Iraq included nothing particularly unexpected, he did provide enough accumulated detail to show that Iraq is not cooperating with U.N. inspectors.
But that was fairly obvious anyway, and people who are flatly opposed to a doctrine of preemptive warfare are unlikely to be swayed by a few minutes of intercepted phone conversations on the order of "The inspectors are coming! Did you hide everything?" As an attempt to convince other countries of our right to invade Iraq, Powell's speech will probably prove to be a failure.
However, since any speech made by the Bush Administration is made with at least one and a half eyes on the American people, there was only one thing Powell needed to do to ensure support for the war in Iraq, and that was to show conclusive evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Osama bin Laden. Although Powell repeated the claims that Bush has been making for months about Saddam's ties to terrorism, he failed to show any compelling evidence for it.
If the American people are aware of that failure, the government will suddenly have a much more difficult job on its hands. Ever since 9/11 sent his approval ratings shooting up, Bush's popularity has been closely tied to his stance on terrorism. His response, then, to a public that is nervous about war in Iraq and still angry at bin Laden, has been to equate bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. When Bush, in his State of the Union address, talked about Saddam Hussein and "shadowy terrorist networks" in the same breath, he probably gave thousands of Americans the impression that Saddam masterminded the September 11 attacks.
The strategy is an old one, but it is more commonly associated with corrupt, cynical totalitarian governments than with democracy. Hitler describes it admiringly in Mein Kampf: "The art of leadership, as displayed by really great popular leaders in all ages, consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary. ...The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to the one category; for weak and wavering natures among a leader's following may easily begin to be dubious about their own cause if they have to face different enemies…Where there are various enemies...it will be necessary to block them all together as forming one solid front, so that the mass of followers in a popular movement may see only one common enemy against whom they have to fight."
On Wednesday, Colin Powell had the chance to prove Bush right, to provide
evidence that far from cynically misleading the American people, Bush
is still pursuing Osama bin Laden with the same determination that he
showed in the months after September 11. If the government did in fact
have proof of ties between Saddam and bin Laden, there is no reason why
Powell would not have presented it to the U.N. And the fact that the government
has been looking for such proof for months seems like a good indication
that there is none to be found.
There is also the opinion of the FBI, where an official said of the link between Saddam and bin Laden, "We've been looking at this hard for more than a year and you know what, we just don't think it's there."
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