There’s something terribly primitive about bombing the hell out of a country simply to get rid of one man (and, perhaps, his small ragbag assortment of grinning, psychopathic sons, obsequious flunkeys and hired assassins).
This is what we’re about to do to Iraq, if I’m not mistaken about the utter futility of this business with the weapons inspectors. We are angry with one evil man and further irritated by his devoted but minuscule coterie. And so we plan to send in the expensive bombers and those weapons of fairly widespread destruction, the missiles; and perhaps thousand upon thousand of ground troops, too, in order to be rid of him and install someone marginally less despotic. It seems an awful lot of effort, just for Saddam. You have to say, we would truly be putting ourselves out. Arguably we were more indulgent even of Hitler.
In a feature film, of course, we wouldn’t bother bombing innocent people just to get one man. In a feature film we’d kill him or have him killed, quietly and surreptitiously, by means of subterfuge and stealth in a manner which showed that we both appreciated the relatively small scale of the problem and demonstrated our ineluctable intellectual and cultural superiority.
So why don’t we do that now? Why don’t we kill just him?
The short answer is that we have almost certainly tried before now, and failed, just as we have with any number of other dangerous Commies or idiosyncratic custodians of desert satraps in the past. And the main reason we’ve failed is because democratic accountability has shackled us and made vague and hazy those areas within which our security services operate. ‘Listen: we could easily do this,’ the gung-ho CIA or MI5 bosses tell the politicians – but the twin terrors of failure and/or political embarrassment, plus the confusing iniquities of international etiquette and law, ensure that the schemes are either half-baked, or called off at the last moment, or strangled at birth.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in