Memory Lane - Fouad Ajami on Saddam Hussein.... in 1997
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Promoted from Diaries - MartinAKnight
It's amazing the things you can dig up just by searching on a catchy phrase - in this case, "Get him or forget him." Remember that?
This is Fouad Ajami on The Newshour back on November 17, 1997:
FOUAD AJAMI: This analysis by Mr. Wahby tells you exactly what the dilemma in the Arab world is. I don’t think we were talking about Benjamin Netanyahu. This linkage, if you will, this is the old argument that we thought we buried in the Gulf War of 1991, that there was a linkage to what Saddam was doing and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Saddam is a brigand. He’s a threat to his own people. Israel has nothing to do with it, but this tells you exactly what this crisis is all about for President Clinton. This is a "Ground Hog Day," that famous movie by Bill Murray, where the same thing happens all over again, so we’re back again because we never removed Saddam; we’re back with some of the same Arab delusion about Saddam that is going to make the linkage between Israel and the Palestinian question on the one hand, and the Gulf on the other. The weapons of mass destruction and the threat of Saddam represents both to his neighbor and the torment to his people, these are issues that truly matter. What Netanyahu is doing, what Israel is doing, this had nothing to do with it. It just tells you that we waged this great imperial campaign in 1990-91, and we left the man Saddam in his bunker, and we left--we gave an opportunity for this old girth and this old argument such as the one expressed by Mr. Wahby to resurface, and we are there again.
JIM LEHRER: We are there again, and now what do we do about it?
FOUAD AJAMI: Well, I think my own feeling has to--I had this little cliché in a piece I did in the Daily News, the New York Daily News, that what we should do is we should be very clear about Saddam represents; we should either get him or forget him. We have done neither. We have not unseated Saddam Hussein; we have left these sanctions, and now our President says, in effect, that the sanctions--in an unguarded moment President Clinton says that these sanctions will stay to the end of time. These sanctions cannot stay till the end of time. So we don’t put our soldiers in harm’s way; we don’t support a democratic struggle, or even the democratic possibility of the Iraqi opposition to Saddam. We cut them off the payroll, and then we say that Saddam is a great menace, and we have our secretary of defense showing up on one of those talk shows with a five pound bag of sugar to tell us that look if this was anthrax, this would destroy us all, and we are completely confused, and the Clinton administration has not clarified exactly what the threat of Saddam is all about.
Wow! That sure gives some healthy historical retrospective-perspective, doesn't it?
"The Foreigners' Gift" is Ajami's latest and I am in its early pages, but Fouad remains a great American resource, truly one of the most brilliant minds we have.
Back then, he was still somewhat of a Democrat [when I knew him when I was his landlord after he moved into my condo after my marriage he was still somewhat of an old-fashioned Arab nationalist] and Clinton was wearing down his patience with Clintonian hand-wringing and empty rhetoric and hyper-lawyered legal problems with terrorism. Clinton was a dodger and a weaver, just like the current Dems who bay at the moon about Iraq, but have NO alternative.
When Bush adopts a reinforcement alternative many of them advocated, they pull the old bait and switch.
Democrats are mere politicians, not leaders and statesmen.
is simply amazing. Nobody remembers what the Democrats were saying about Saddam in the late '90's. Nobody remembers what the Democrats and GOP in Congress were saying in the late 90's about the Kyoto treaty. There are a lot of folks who can't even remember Jim Jeffords of Vt. leaving the GOP to put the Democrats in the majority in 2002 when the Senate voted approval to the President for attacking Saddam. I don't know if their memory is faulty or if they think they can say the opposite now from what they said then enough times so it becomes 'truthy'.
You’re a persistent cuss, pilgrim.
John Wayne to Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance