Ariel Dorfman wrote this piece for the Los Angeles Times a bit over twelve
years ago (February 1, 1991). It unfortunately could have been written
today in almost exactly the same terms perhaps with the exception of the
prophecy of Saddam Hussein's survival, though who knows. . .

Iraq and Moby Dick Twelve Years Later (new title)

(Hymn for the Unsung, LA Times title twelve years ago)

Somewhere in the Saudi Arabian desert, an American corporal is reading
Moby Dick. He is reading Melville's novel, a newspaper reports, in order to
"understand what drives people toward destructive obsessions,"
concentrating above all on Ahab, "how he kept after the whale" -- and
wondering if "he was like Saddam Hussein."

How typically American, I thought from my Third World perspective, this
need to understand the enemy one is fighting -- as American as his
pathetic incapacity to achieve that understanding. Saddam as Ahab might fit
neatly
into the current interpretation of the Iraqi leader as a madman,
irrationally pursuing his own downfall in spite of all warnings -- but the
corporal did not apparently seem interested in stopping to ask who the
whale might be in this equation or what the whale might have done to
Saddam, which parts of his body and mind had been devoured, to make him
act with such abandon.

Because if Saddam is indeed Ahab, the clues to his present behavior might
fruitfully be searched for in the past, a search that I doubt the corporal
or his fellow Americans are particularly interested in. Instant amnesia
seems to have infected the people of the United States as they devastate a
country that a few months ago hardly any of them could find on a map. It
is easier to conceive of Saddam as Satan -- a personification of evil
substituting for historical explanation. No need to ask what has been done
to the Arabs -- as to so many other Third World peoples -- that makes them
feel so humiliated, enraged, threatened, alienated, that a tyrant such as
the Iraqi leader can manipulate those feelings to turn himself into their
representative. No need to ask why there is a power vacuum in the Middle
East that this dictator, like others who will come, thinks he can fill. No
need to remember that before this Ahab there was Mossadegh, an elected
Iranian leader who nationalized oil and was overthrown with the help of
the CIA in 1953. The autocrat who replaced him with a puppet was, of course,
the shah. When the shah was in turn swept away by Khomeini's Islamic
Revolution, Iraq was encouraged to arm itself to the hilt in order to
contain the Iranian menace. Iraq expanded this mandate into a savage war,
with America's blessing (and European and Soviet assistance), all
human-rights violations and gassing of Kurds winked at, all condemnations
blocked, until some years later when the U.S. ambassador would give Saddam
Hussein the go-ahead for the invasion of Kuwait.

But what if Saddam is not Ahab?

How can it be that this young man who faces death so far from his home
should be unable to catch even a glimmer of the possibility that Saddam
might be the whale and that George Bush might in fact be an Ahab whose
search for the monster in the oceans of sand and oil could end up with the
ruin, not of the monster, but of those who were bent on its extermination?
Saddam Hussein, of course, is not unique as a monster. He is as monstrous
as General Augusto Pinochet, who, having been brought to power by U.S.
intervention against an elected democratic government, victimized my own
people for seventeen years. And Iraq's aggression against Kuwait is as
monstrious as the aggression of the United States against Nicaragua and
Panama, against Grenada and Vietnam, as monstrous as the Soviet invasions
of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. And Saddam Hussein's lobbing of
missiles at civilians in Israel is as monstrous as the Israelis' bombing of
refugee camps in Lebanon.

For the corporal, or the American people, to understand Saddam Hussein in
these terms, as one who has been selectively and conveniently demonized,
would necessarily mean condemning their own country's complicity and
participation in the pervasive evils of the world today. It would mean
seeing the adventure in the Persian Gulf not as a struggle for democracy
-- which the United States has eroded all over the world by propping up
friendly torturers -- but as one more sad intervention in the affairs of a
region that it knows nothing about, one more step toward the
militarization of a world that should be disarming. It would mean denying
America's own
morality in a conflict that once again finds a superpower technologically
assaulting a poor Third World country, no matter how well armed it may be.
It would mean that the true connection of Iraq to Vietnam should be made:
that the war in the Gulf is being used to refight the war in Indochina
with far more lethal weapons -- rewriting that American crisis and defeat,
proving how it could have been won, having at last the "good war" the
Pentagon has been seeking all these years with a singlemindedness that
would have astounded even the crew of the Pequod.

These connections, alas, are not being made. Pursuing their reflection in
the Gulf, Americans are blind to the true meanings of their actions. It is
not, however, only their own image that Americans cannot decipher in the
nightmare waters of this war.

Not far from the American corporal musing on Moby Dick there is an Iraqi
corporal.

I know nothing about him, except that he breathes not many miles away and
all too soon will be as close as a bayonet thrust, and not even that
intimacy of combat will bring closeness or comprehension. It is the very
fact that he is nameless, that he has no face, that no newspaper has told
us his thoughts, that we have no way of knowing what Moby Dick, what
Melville of his own culture, he reads in the darkness, what blindness of
his own he is submerged in, the fact that his being is a blur that we must
imagine; it is the stark fact of his very absence from our awareness that
prepares his death. How easy to kill somebody we don't have to mourn
because we never dared to imagine him alive.

I want neither Saddam Hussein nor George Bush to win the war in the Gulf.
I wish that both of them could be defeated. But I anticipate that these two,
Ahab and the whale, the whale and Ahab, George Bush and Saddam Hussein,
will emerge unscathed, and that it will be their people who will have to
pay for this absurd conflagration. It will be the two corporals who will
pay, even if they survive, even if they are not shattered for life, they
will be the ones, along with their children, who will pay endlessly for a
war that nobody desires and that everybody seems so eager to fight.

Or is the world itself Ahab, suddenly gone mad?