by Mike Carlton; The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia); April 20, 2003
One or two readers have accused me, rather crossly, of taking a far too negative view of the great liberation of Iraq. Easter being a time of hope and renewal, I shall use this column today to look on the bright side.
What a triumph the war has been for Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, now surely the finest military strategist since Karl von Clausewitz. The whiskery old Prussian coined the famous aphorism that "war is the continuation of politics by other means", but Rummy, with his twinkling eye and iron nerve, has demonstrated that war is now the continuation of economics by other means. The Abrams tanks headed straight for the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which stands today miraculously unscathed amid the ruins of Baghdad, liberated for ExxonMobil and Vice-President Dick Cheney's old firm, Halliburton.
Not bothering to call for tenders, the Pentagon has granted a Halliburton subsidiary, the delightfully named Kellogg, Brown & Root, a $US7 billion ($11.5 billion) contract to clean up Iraq's oil industry. Cheney's income tax declaration, reported in The New York Times this week, reveals he earned $US162,392 in "deferred compensation" from Halliburton last year. As President Bush said on Tuesday, "These are great days in the history of freedom."
It was unfortunate that the Iraq National Museum was looted and the National Library torched with the loss of priceless antiquities, but Rummy was brave about it.
"Stuff happens," he said, in that folksy way he has. I doubt that he took quite the same sanguine view of September 11 but what the heck: "Freedom's untidy but free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things," he assured an audience of chuckling Pentagon reporters.
There are some loose ends. It is disappointing that Saddam Hussein and the entire Iraqi leadership have vanished - wives, children, booty, the lot - somehow evading the most sophisticated surveillance technology the world has ever seen.
And there is the niggling question of the weapons of mass destruction. A few months ago Colin Powell showed the UN Security Council the most detailed diagrams and satellite images explaining where these things could be found, but now that we have boots on the ground, nothing has turned up. This is very curious. Our own Foreign Minister, Lord Downer of Baghdad, has suggested, very sensibly, that the stuff could be buried on farms and things. The digging must begin immediately.
But far more important, we should now invade Syria. Goodness me, it turns out that President Bashar al-Assad is also a wicked tyrant who possesses evil weapons, harbours terrorists, etc. Let us take the road to Damascus and march to the sound of the guns.
Still on a positive note, Rupert Murdoch has had a very good war, too. "We can't back down now, where you hand over the whole of the Middle East to Saddam," he told The Bulletin magazine in February. "The greatest thing to come of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $US20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country."
By a quite marvellous coincidence, it turns out that all the 35,627 editors, producers, writers and reporters employed in Rupert's global empire concur entirely with their employer's view and, moreover, have not been afraid to say so.
The News Ltd coverage - on Fox television, the newspapers both broadsheet and tabloid - has been as Stars 'n' Stripes as the White House could have hoped for, very much in the old meaning of the word "embedded". In particular, Fox television ratings have shot skywards like a Patriot missile, leaving the less excitable CNN coughing in the dust.
So how pleasing to see that Rupert, having taken so much from Iraq, is now giving back with unstinting generosity.
I have been moved beyond tears by News Ltd's heroic efforts this week to save the life of Ali Ismail Abbas, a 12-year-old Iraqi boy who lost both his parents and both his arms in a US cruise missile attack on Baghdad. Young Ali has been flown to Kuwait for the urgent surgery unavailable at Saddam Hospital.
"The Daily Telegraph stepped in to arrange his rescue," trumpeted Sydney's Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, splashing the boy's photograph - sloe-eyed, curly-haired, cute as a button - right across the front page.
"His rescue was organised by The Australian," said The Australian of the same day. "His rescue was organised by the The Courier-Mail team in Baghdad," reported The Courier Mail. "Ali was in pain from his burns as he spoke briefly to The Advertiser yesterday," said The Adelaide Advertiser. I haven't checked further, but I dare say the The Times of London, The Sun, the News of the World and the New York Post have also selflessly pitched in.
There will be critics, mostly from the left-wing elites at the ABC and the Fairfax press. Some may even think that this is gutter journalism of the most gross and tawdry cynicism, a disgusting exploitation of a child's tragedy.
But let us be optimistic. In years to come, with one prosthetic arm from the Telegraph and the other from The Australian, a grateful Ali Ismail Abbas will know with quiet pride that his sufferings have been in the cause of freedom, News Ltd circulation and oil at $20 a barrel.
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