Saddam Plays the Palace -- We Can, Too

By Rick Horowitz

Already? Of course already. It's December, isn't it? You can't pass a store window that doesn't have holiday goodies making goo-goo eyes at your wallet. You can't turn on the tube without drowning in ads for the personally perfect purchase.

The classics are jamming the shelves, and so are the hot new gotta-have-its. You've got to hand it to them (and they want you to hand it to them -- cash, check, credit card, whatever): The mirth merchants miss nothing.

Almost nothing. Where's the Home Diplomacy Kit? The professionals can't seem to get it done lately; they might as well turn it over to us amateurs. Maybe we can stumble across something useful -- a little palace intrigue, perhaps.

Key Fact to Remember about Saddam Hussein: He's playing us like a violin. Second Key Fact to Remember about Saddam Hussein: When the suits start yammering about "oil for food," they ain't talking canola.

You have to admit, it was pretty touching the other day, that parade of tiny coffins through the streets of Baghdad. Tiny victims of starvation and disease, the Iraqi leaders said. Victims, to be precise, of those evil sanctions imposed by that evil coalition and kept in place by that evil America.

A bit sudden, though, you're thinking, this show of compassion from the Iraqi high command. After all, Saddam Hussein is a man of so many compelling character traits that sympathy for the less fortunate doesn't even make the Top Ten. Why all the public fuss now?

Why not? Everything else he's tried recently seems to be working. The U.N. inspectors were getting close to his big no-nos -- chemical and biological weapons, and the equipment that produces the stuff -- so Saddam picked a fight and locked the inspectors out for long enough to hide the evidence all over again.

Then he agreed to let the inspectors back in, but declared his presidential palaces off limits. Then he agreed to let certain foreigners visit the palaces -- not the inspectors, of course, who know what they're looking for, but other folks who can't tell anthrax from Ajax.

While all this is going on, Saddam's been pushing hard to get the sanctions lifted. Right now, he's only allowed to sell a limited amount of oil, for food and medical supplies. Not enough, he says; my people are suffering. (Presumably he says this with a straight face.) And the professional diplomats are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to accommodate him without looking like they're accommodating him.

"Well, sure, you betcha, we can see adjusting the sanctions and letting you sell lots more oil for lots more money, but don't think for one minute that we're rewarding you for misbehaving or caving in to your demands or anything like that, nosiree!"

The really creative professionals are even trying to argue that loosening the sanctions would be a setback for Saddam, because he wouldn't be able to use pictures of starving, dying children for leverage anymore.

They don't say why he wouldn't be able to use them anymore. (Self-restraint? A sense of shame?) And of course, if he gets what he wants, he might not have to use them anymore -- but that's just me talking, and I'm not one of the professionals.

I'm one of the amateurs who feels like saying to Saddam, "You want more money for food and medicine? Fine -- sell the palaces."

That's right -- sell the palaces to the United Nations. I mean, I'm new at this, but it seems pretty obvious: Before you hit up the U.N. for more loot from your oil, maybe you ought to liquidate some of your other assets. And if anything in Iraq is going to bring a pretty penny these days, it's those palaces.

After all, there are dozens of the things all over the place, giant-sized buildings on giant-sized grounds. Nothing shabby about the construction, I imagine; they're supposed to stand up to air strikes. And nice? Hey, they're palaces, aren't they? How bad can they be?

Saddam says he wants to buy more food for his people. How badly does he want it? The U.N. can find out in a Baghdad minute.

Call the man's bluff, I say -- but I'm just an amateur.

12/2/97