GIVE THE TYRANT HIS THALBERG:

‘What Bush should have said was: Here’s a man who’s been murdering everyone he could get his hands on for 25 years. We don’t need a reason’ (Alan Taylor, 10/31/04, Sunday Herald)

In the second Gulf war, [PJ O'Rourke] was in Kuwait when the tanks bulldozed in, watching on television while events unfol ded. He finally arrived when the battle appeared to be over and the looters were ransacking Baghdad’s galleries, museums and libraries and work was getting under way to restore utilities. “You have seen the backside of war,” an electrical engineer told him.

Indeed. But O’Rourke has also seen the front side of war, having spent much of the 1980s dodging bombs and bullets, ever fearful of being kidnapped and summarily executed. His job, he says, is simply to report what he sees, which he does with panache. Unusually, however, it is from the perspective of a humorist and registered Republican. War may be random in its brutality but in O’Rourke’s hands – as in Joseph Heller’s and Jaroslav Hasek’s – it is also a situation for comedy, a theatre of the absurd.

A decade after the first Gulf war, he found Kuwait basking in the joys of freedom. “The McDonald’s on Arabian Gulf Street has a doorman and a mâitre d’,” he writes. “A Mercedes dealership on the west side of town is the size of a country fair. Premium gasoline costs 87 cents a gallon or – to put that in Kuwaiti currency (at $3.34 to the dinar) – nothing. Lunch lasts from noon to five. The gutra [headdress] on the man in line ahead of me at the McDonald’s bore the Dunhill label.”

Is this, then, what Iraqis can expect, say, 10 years hence? O’Rourke, patriotically dining in a Covent Garden hotel on a steak burger and fries, washed down with a Coke, does not exactly exude optimism.

“Well,” he says, “we may end up cutting and running from this thing. It’s hard to see any attractive outcome on this. Yeah, looking back on it, it may not have been the right thing to do … I think the thought was – if I’m right in reading what was going on in American officials’ minds at the time – that this was a very large chess piece that had to be removed.”

Not that O’Rourke is the slightest bit remorseful about the blitzkrieging of Saddam and his murderous chums. As far as he’s concerned, he was a very bad man who had some very bad relatives, who ran a very bad government, who did some very bad things in a country which had lots of very good oil which gave him the wherewithal to do more very bad things. There was also, he argues, plenty of provocation . “I saw what the Iraqis did in Kuwait,” he says, and the grimace on his face tells you it was not nice.

So they got what was coming to them. It doesn’t concern him that no weapons of mass destruction have been found or that no link has been proved between Saddam and Bin Laden and 9/11. “What Bush should have said was, ‘Here’s a man who’s been murdering everyone he could get his hands on for 25 years. We don’t need a reason. We’re going to do to Iraq’s dictators what Hollywood does to its has-beens at the Academy Awards ceremony. We’re giving Saddam Hussein a Lifetime Achievement Award’.”