Saddam Hussein captured

The capture of Iraq's ousted president, Saddam Hussein, in a farmhouse outside Tikrit where his relatives live, seems to be almost anticlimactic. He was found hiding in a cellar by American soldiers, to whom he meekly surrendered, although he had a few guns with him.

Due to modern information technology, the whole world could witness the surrender of this man, once so powerful and feared by his own people and Iraq's immediate neighbors. If anyone should still be harboring doubts that the Saddam Hussein regime has indeed collapsed, then the television footage of this man wearing a stupefied face and a disheveled beard meekly surrendering and his gaping mouth being poked by an American military doctor, should provide a convincing answer.

Saddam Hussein's capture eight months after the fall of Baghdad is indeed timely -- timely for President George W. Bush and the Republican Party who are facing what will likely be a brutal campaign if the Democratic Party convention is able to agree on pushing Governor Howard Dean as presidential candidate and Gen. (ret.) Wesley Clark as his running mate. Ironically, however, the capture of Saddam Hussein is timely also for the Iraqi nationalists in their different variants, especially those nationalists within the Ba'athist party who have managed to survive after Saddam Hussein hijacked the party in 1968. The fact is that with the presidential campaign approaching, Saddam on the loose was becoming a very awkward embarrassment for President Bush and his political advisors.

After Saddam Hussein's capture, Washington can now speed up the "Iraqization" process and declare that although the United States' presence will be maintained, what now remains to be done in Iraq, not only militarily but also politically, virtually amounts to no more than a mopping up operation. In that way, George Bush could enter the upcoming presidential election campaign without the Iraqi situation hanging like an albatross across his neck. It could well be that with all the publicity trappings of modern information technology, the U.S. controlled trial of the fallen Iraqi dictator will be synchronized in such a manner that it will yield a positive political fallout for the Republican Party's presidential candidate (more than likely Bush) when the campaign is in full swing.

To appreciate why Saddam Hussein's capture is timely and politically beneficial also for the nationalists in the pre- Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist party, one should have at least a sketchy knowledge of the party's history. Tariq Ali, a prolific writer who, as an editor of the New Left Review based in London and who is well known for his left-wing inclinations has been critical of Saddam Hussein, and has written an overview of the Ba'athist party's history in a recently published book (Bush in Babylon -- The Recolonisation of Iraq, London 2003).

The Ba'athist party was founded in 1943 by two Syrian intellectuals, Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar, who were educated at the Sorbonne in Paris. The movement quickly spread to Iraq. In simple terms, the ideology and political vision of those two Sorbonne-educated intellectuals could be branded as a mixture of some elements of the social-democratic ideology imbued with nationalism and elements of Islam. The radicals within the Ba'athist party soon denounced the two intellectual founders and their supporters as being in the grip of bourgeois idealism. They were subsequently removed and marginalized by the radical factions within both the Iraqi and Syrian groups, which united and became a majority during the party's sixth national congress in Damascus in 1962.

To make a long story short, Michel Aflaq, with his bruised political ego, went to Baghdad and used the military committee of the Iraqi Ba'athist party to take over control from the majority. He appointed Gen. Hasan al Bakr, and his cousin Saddam Hussein was made secretary-general of the party. The rest is history. When Saddam Hussein gradually gained control over the party and became Iraq's strong man, he obviously tried to eliminate his rivals, although not always successfully.

One should therefore not be surprised that eight months after the fall of Baghdad, with Saddam Hussein on the loose, elements of the pre-Saddam Hussein Ba'athist party in combination with other emerging nationalist groupings, albeit covered in religious slogans, have tried to get their act together. Their common target is clear, namely to get rid of the American and British occupation forces. Obviously, the presence of Saddam Hussein is a political liability that hampers the resurgence of the nationalist groupings under the aegis of a revived Ba'athist party.

Thus we see the ironic situation where both George Bush and his Republican Party on the one hand, and the burgeoning Iraqi nationalist groupings on the other indeed welcome the capture of the former dictator. Both, of course, have divergent political goals in mind. If, or when, George Bush is reelected and decides to maintain the neo-conservatives as his close associates, then we can expect that the messianic keenness to remake the Middle East with Iraq as a launching pad will be continued.

On the other hand, if or when a relatively cohesive group of nationalists crystallized in Iraq to bridge the ethnic and religious variants, having gotten rid of the Saddam Hussein followers, then the Iraq that emerges might not be in line with the Washington/London scenario. The capture of Saddam Hussein apparently will bring to the fore divergent developments that would cause unexpected complexities to the entire Middle Eastern situation.