From: scerir (scerir@libero.it)
Date: Thu Mar 13 2003 - 14:27:16 MST
[Italian best journalist, leftist too, living in N.Y.C.,
writes, for the Wall Street Journal, something very strong,
as usual, about the present situation, the Pope, mr. Chirac,
and all that]
The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt
Thoughts on the eve of battle in Iraq.
BY ORIANA FALLACI
Thursday, March 13, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
To avoid the dilemma of whether this war should take place or not, to
overcome the reservations and the reluctance and the doubts that still
lacerate me, I often say to myself: "How good if the Iraqis would get free
of Saddam Hussein by themselves. How good if they would execute him and hang
up his body by the feet as in 1945 we Italians did with Mussolini." But it
does not help. Or it helps in one way only. The Italians, in fact, could get
free of Mussolini because in 1945 the Allies had conquered almost
four-fifths of Italy. In other words, because the Second World War had taken
place. A war without which we would have kept Mussolini (and Hitler)
forever. A war during which the allies had pitilessly bombed us and we had
died like mosquitoes. The Allies, too. At Salerno, at Anzio, at Cassino.
Along the road from Rome to Florence, then on the terrible Gothic Line. In
less than two years, 45,806 dead among the Americans and 17,500 among the
English, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the South
Africans, the Indians, the Brazilians. And also the French who had chosen De
Gaulle, also the Italians who had chosen the Fifth or the Eighth Army. (Can
anybody guess how many cemeteries of Allied soldiers there are in Italy?
More than sixty. And the largest, the most crowded, are the American ones.
At Nettuno, 10,950 graves. At Falciani, near Florence, 5,811. Each time I
pass in front of it and see that lake of crosses, I shiver with grief and
gratitude.) There was also a National Liberation Front, in Italy. A
Resistance that the Allies supplied with weapons and ammunition. As in spite
of my tender age (14), I was involved in the matter, I remember well the
American plane that, braving anti-aircraft fire, parachuted those supplies
to Tuscany. To be exact, onto Mount Giovi where one night they air-dropped
commandos with the task of activating a short-wave network named Radio Cora.
Ten smiling Americans who spoke very good Italian and who three months later
were captured by the SS, tortured, and executed with a Florentine partisan
girl: Anna Maria Enriquez-Agnoletti.
Thus, the dilemma remains.
It remains for the reasons I will try to state. And the first one is that,
contrary to the pacifists who never yell against Saddam Hussein or Osama bin
Laden and only yell against George W. Bush and Tony Blair, (but in their
Rome march they also yelled against me and raised posters wishing that I'd
blow up with the next shuttle, I'm told), I know war very well. I know what
it means to live in terror, to run under air strikes and cannonades, to see
people killed and houses destroyed, to starve and dream of a piece of bread,
to miss even a glass of drinking water. And (which is worse) to be or to
feel responsible for someone else's death. I know it because I belong to the
Second World War generation and because, as a member of the Resistance, I
was myself a soldier. I also know it because for a good deal of my life I
have been a war correspondent. Beginning with Vietnam, I have experienced
horrors that those who see war only through TV or the movies where blood is
tomato ketchup don't even imagine. As a consequence, I hate it as the
pacifists in bad or good faith never will. I loathe it. Every book I have
written overflows with that loathing, and I cannot bear the sight of guns.
At the same time, however, I don't accept the principle, or should I say the
slogan, that "All wars are unjust, illegitimate." The war against Hitler and
Mussolini and Hirohito was just, was legitimate. The Risorgimento wars that
my ancestors fought against the invaders of Italy were just, were
legitimate. And so was the war of independence that Americans fought against
Britain. So are the wars (or revolutions) which happen to regain dignity,
freedom. I do not believe in vile acquittals, phony appeasements, easy
forgiveness. Even less, in the exploitation or the blackmail of the word
Peace. When peace stands for surrender, fear, loss of dignity and freedom,
it is no longer peace. It's suicide.
The second reason is that this war should not happen now. If just as I wish,
legitimate as I hope, it should have happened one year ago. That is, when
the ruins of the Towers were still smoking and the whole civilized world
felt American. Had it happened then, the pacifists who never yell against
Saddam or bin Laden would not today fill the squares to anathematize the
United States. Hollywood stars would not play the role of Messiahs, and
ambiguous Turkey would not cynically deny passage to the Marines who have to
reach the Northern front. Despite the Europeans who added their voice to the
voice of the Palestinians howling "Americans-got-it-good," one year ago
nobody questioned that another Pearl Harbor had been inflicted on the U.S.
and that the U.S. had all the right to respond. As a matter of fact, it
should have happened before. I mean when Bill Clinton was president, and
small Pearl Harbors were bursting abroad. In Somalia, in Kenya, in Yemen. As
I shall never tire of repeating, we did not need September 11 to see that
the cancer was there. September 11 was the excruciating confirmation of a
reality which had been burning for decades, the indisputable diagnosis of a
doctor who waves an X-ray and brutally snaps: "My dear Sir, you have
cancer." Had Mr. Clinton spent less time with voluptuous girls, had he made
smarter use of the Oval Office, maybe September 11 would not have occurred.
And, needless to say, even less would it have occurred if the first George
Bush had removed Saddam with the Gulf War. For Christ's sake, in 1991 the
Iraqi army deflated like a pricked balloon. It disintegrated so quickly, so
easily, that even I captured four of its soldiers. I was behind a dune in
the Saudi desert, all alone. Four skeletal creatures in ragged uniforms came
toward me with arms raised, and whispered: "Bush, Bush." Meaning: "Please
take me prisoner. I am so thirsty, so hungry." So I took them prisoner. I
delivered them to the Marine in charge, and instead of congratulating me he
grumbled: "Dammit! Some more?!?" Yet the Americans did not get to Baghdad,
did not remove Saddam. And, to thank them, Saddam tried to kill their
president. The same president who had left him in power. In fact, at times I
wonder if this war isn't also a long-awaited retaliation, a filial revenge,
a promise made by the son to the father. Like in a Shakespearean tragedy.
Better, a Greek one.
The third reason is the wrong way in which the promise has materialized.
Let's admit it: from September 11 until last summer, all the stress was put
on bin Laden, on al Qaeda, on Afghanistan. Saddam and Iraq were practically
ignored. Only when it became clear that bin Laden was in good health, that
the solemn commitment to take him dead or alive had failed, were we reminded
that Saddam existed too. That he was not a gentle soul, that he cut the
tongues and ears of his adversaries, that he killed children in front of
their parents, that he decapitated women then displayed their heads in the
streets, that he kept his prisoners in cells as small as coffins, that he
made his biological or chemical experiments on them too. That he had
connections with al Qaeda and supported terrorism, that he rewarded the
families of Palestinian kamikazes at the rate of $25,000 each. That he had
never disarmed, never given up his arsenal of deadly weapons, thus the U.N.
should send back the inspectors, and let's be serious: if seventy years ago
the ineffective League of Nations had sent its inspectors to Germany, do you
think that Hitler would have shown them Peenemünde where Von Braun was
manufacturing V2s? Do you think that Hitler would have disclosed the camps
of Auschwitz, of Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dachau? Yet the inspection comedy
resumed. With such intensity that the role of prima donna passed from bin
Laden to Saddam, and the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the engineer of
September 11, was greeted almost with indifference. A comedy marked by the
double games of the inspectors and the conflicting strategies of Mr. Bush
who on the one hand asked the Security Council for permission to use force
and on the other sent his troops to the front. In less than two months, a
quarter of a million troops. With the British and Australians, 310,000. And
all this without realizing that his enemies (but I should say the enemies of
the West) are not only in Baghdad.
They are also in Europe. They are in Paris where the mellifluous Jacques
Chirac does not give a damn for peace but plans to satisfy his vanity with
the Nobel Peace Prize. Where there is no wish to remove Saddam Hussein
because Saddam Hussein means the oil that the French companies pump from
Iraqi wells. And where (forgetting a little flaw named Petain) France chases
its Napoleonic desire to dominate the European Union, to establish its
hegemony over it. They are in Berlin, where the party of the mediocre
Gerhard Schröder won the elections by comparing Mr. Bush to Hitler, where
American flags are soiled with the swastika, and where, in the dream of
playing the masters again, Germans go arm-in-arm with the French. They are
in Rome where the communists left by the door and re-entered through the
window like the birds of the Hitchcock movie. And where, pestering the world
with his ecumenism, his pietism, his Thirdworldism, Pope Wojtyla receives
Tariq Aziz as a dove or a martyr who is about to be eaten by lions. (Then he
sends him to Assisi where the friars escort him to the tomb of St. Francis.)
In the other European countries, it is more or less the same. In Europe your
enemies are everywhere, Mr. Bush. What you quietly call "differences of
opinion" are in reality pure hate. Because in Europe pacifism is synonymous
with anti-Americanism, sir, and accompanied by the most sinister revival of
anti-Semitism the anti-Americanism triumphs as much as in the Islamic world.
Haven't your ambassadors informed you? Europe is no longer Europe. It is a
province of Islam, as Spain and Portugal were at the time of the Moors. It
hosts almost 16 million Muslim immigrants and teems with mullahs, imams,
mosques, burqas, chadors. It lodges thousands of Islamic terrorists whom
governments don't know how to identify and control. People are afraid, and
in waving the flag of pacifism--pacifism synonymous with
anti-Americanism--they feel protected.
Besides, Europe does not care for the 221,484 Americans who died for her in
the Second World War. Rather than gratitude, their cemeteries give rise to
resentment. As a consequence, in Europe nobody will back this war. Not even
nations which are officially allied with the U.S., not even the prime
ministers who call you "My friend George." (Like Silvio Berlusconi.) In
Europe you only have one friend, one ally, sir: Tony Blair. But Mr. Blair
too leads a country which is invaded by the Moors. A country that hides that
resentment. Even his party opposes him, and by the way: I owe you an
apology, Mr. Blair. In my book "The Rage and the Pride," I was unfair to
you. Because I wrote that you would not persevere with your guts, that you
would drop them as soon as it would no longer serve your political
interests. With impeccable coherence, instead, you are sacrificing those
interests to your convictions. Indeed, I apologize. I also withdraw the
phrase I used to comment on your excess of courtesy toward Islamic culture:
"If our culture has the same value as the one that imposes the burqa, why do
you spend your summers in my Tuscany and not in Saudi Arabia?" Now I say:
"My Tuscany is your Tuscany, sir. My home is your home."
The final reason for my dilemma is the definition that Mr. Bush and Mr.
Blair and their advisors give of this war: "A Liberation war. A humanitarian
war to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq." Oh, no. Humanitarianism has
nothing to do with wars. All wars, even just ones, are death and destruction
and atrocities and tears. And this is not a liberation war, a war like the
Second World War. (By the way: neither is it an "oil war," as the pacifists
who never yell against Saddam or bin Laden maintain in their rallies.
Americans do not need Iraqi oil.) It is a political war. A war made in cold
blood to respond to the Holy War that the enemies of the West declared upon
the West on September 11. It is also a prophylactic war. A vaccine, a
surgery that hits Saddam because, (Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair believe), among
the various focuses of cancer Saddam is the most obvious and dangerous one.
Moreover, the obstacle that once removed will permit them to redesign the
map of the Middle East as the British and the French did after the fall of
the Ottoman Empire. To redesign it and to spread a Pax Romana, pardon, a Pax
Americana, in which everybody will prosper through freedom and democracy.
Again, no. Freedom cannot be a gift. And democracy cannot be imposed with
bombs, with occupation armies. As my father said when he asked the
anti-fascists to join the Resistance, and as today I say to those who
honestly rely on the Pax Americana, people must conquer freedom by
themselves. Democracy must come from their will, and in both cases a country
must know what they consist of. In Europe the Second World War was a
liberation war not because it brought novelties called freedom and democracy
but because it re-established them. Because Europeans knew what they
consisted of. The Japanese did not: it is true. In Japan, those two
treasures were somehow a gift, a refund for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But
Japan had already started its process of modernization, and did not belong
to the Islamic world. As I write in my book when I call bin Laden the tip of
the iceberg and I define the iceberg as a mountain that has not moved for
1,400 years, that for 1,400 years has not changed, that has not emerged from
its blindness, freedom and democracy are totally unrelated to the
ideological texture of Islam. To the tyranny of theocratic states. So their
people refuse them, and even more they want to erase ours.
Upheld by their stubborn optimism, the same optimism for which at the Alamo
they fought so well and all died slaughtered by Santa Anna, Americans think
that in Baghdad they will be welcomed as they were in Rome and Florence and
Paris. "They'll cheer us, throw us flowers." Maybe. In Baghdad anything can
happen. But after that? Nearly two-thirds of the Iraqis are Shiites who have
always dreamed of establishing an Islamic Republic of Iraq, and the Soviets
too were once cheered in Kabul. They too imposed their peace. They even
succeeded in convincing women to take off their burqa, remember? After a
while, though, they had to leave. And the Taliban came. Thus, I ask: what if
instead of learning freedom Iraq becomes a second Talibani Afghanistan? What
if instead of becoming democratized by the Pax Americana the whole Middle
East blows up and the cancer multiplies? As a proud defender of the West's
civilization, without reservations I should join Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair in
the new Alamo. Without reluctance I should fight and die with them. And this
is the only thing about which I have no doubts at all.
[Oriana Fallaci for The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2003]
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