Mark Steyn

Saddam's favorite themes

October 13, 2002

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

Well, I knew this would happen. Saddam Hussein has finally got hold of a Weapon of Mass Destruction. In a dispatch on Tuesday's presidential election in Iraq, the Times of London reports:

''Party officials have chosen the Whitney Houston song 'I Will Always Love You' as the campaign theme tune. The song accompanies the dawn-to-dusk election broadcasts on the three state-controlled television stations, which feature almost continuous footage of Saddam.''

What a guy. All over Baghdad, folks are switching on the radio and there's Whitney ululating ''I will always love you-oo-oooaahooeauooooeeeuoaaaoooo . . . '' And, all over Baghdad, folks in the next apartment are sighing, ''Terrific. Saddam's got those Shiites at No. 23 wired up to the cattle prods again. Might as well forget about getting any sleep tonight.''

But why Whitney? Why not Gloria Gaynor's ''I Will Survive''? The defiant diva's dance floor classic is to my knowledge the only disco anthem about a dictator and his on-again off-again relationship with UN weapons inspectors:

"Oh, now, go!

Walk out the door!

Just turn around now

You're not welcome anymore

I should have changed that stupid lock

I should have made you leave your key

If I'd have known for just one second

You'd be back to bother me

Hey-hey . . . ''

Or what about ''Livin' La Vida Loca''? Or ''Macho Man'' (given Saddam's Village People mustache)? Or--here's one for our Kurdish listeners--''Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.'' Or ''Iraqin' Around the Christmas Tree.'' Or . . .

But, around this point, you can't help wondering, ''Why exactly does Saddam Hussein need a campaign song?'' According to the Times, at his last presidential election seven years ago, the old butcher got 99.89 percent of the votes. As the 0.11 percent foolish enough to write in Pat Buchanan have since been killed, you'd have thought Saddam would do even better this time. But who knows? Perhaps there's a Zogby poll with him plummeting to 99.83 percent. Perhaps Dick Morris has some internal numbers showing Iraqi soccer moms want more spending on education and less on anthrax.

So the guy's out there on the stump pressing the flesh. I mean, as opposed to the flesh he presses with the hot pokers down in the basement. His managers have come up with a snappy campaign slogan: ''Yes, Yes To Our Beloved Leader, Saddam Hussein.'' The agency had toyed with ''Four More Decades,'' ''I'm Pro-Saddam And I Vote,'' ''Guns Don't Kill People. Saddam Kills People,'' ''It's Mourning Again In Halabja,'' ''Ask Yourself Are You Better Off Now Than You Were Four Centuries Ago?'' and ''It's The Dictatorship, Stupid!''

I have to confess to a sneaking admiration for the old mass murderer. What's happening on Tuesday wouldn't pass the smell test in any functioning polity, even New Jersey. Voters will find one question on the ballot--''Do you agree that Saddam Hussein should remain president?"--and will have to tick either "Yes" or "No." They have to write their names on the ballot, and in case they're tempted to put ''John al-Smith'' or ''Jane bin Doe,'' they have to fill them out in the presence of ''officials.'' It's not the kind of election you really need a campaign song for.

But no doubt Saddam gets his daily intelligence reports and he noticed that the hated President Bush was reeling under a barrage from America's recording artists. The other day, Harry Belafonte dismissed Colin Powell as a slave who was being allowed to live in his master's house just so long as he agrees with everything massa says. (Note to younger readers: If you've no idea who Harry Belafonte is, ask your parents. What's that? Oh, OK, ask your parents to ask their parents. Anyway, I found Belafonte's slave comments so outrageous that I decided to throw out all my Belafonte CDs. Then I discovered I didn't have any. So I rooted around in the attic and came across an old LP and, after some difficulty wedging it into the player, I heard what sounded like a perfect Saddam campaign theme, "The Bananas Vote Song.'')

As if Harry's not enough, Barbra Streisand's piling on. Barbra recently serenaded Dick Gephardt and other Democratic luminaries with a rewritten version of "The Way We Were":

"Mis'ries--seems that's all that fills the news

Blame the fellow in the White House

For the Way We Are . . . "

So Saddam figures, ''OK, so we can't have secret ballots and a choice of candidates, but that's no reason not to have Great Satan-style theme songs." In adopting Whitney Houston, he's neatly distilled the illusion of what the left calls ''multilateralism.'' If by ''multilateralism'' you meant persuading a significant number of the world's democracies to support you, then Bush has already done that--he's got Britain, Australia, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Turkey, etc., etc., in his corner. But that's not enough for Barbra, Harry, Ted Kennedy and the Democratic leadership. They've contracted out their position on Iraq to the United Nations: We can only do anything through the UN, so we can only do whatever the UN wants to do. The Church of England's bishops argue that this is the ''moral'' position: a ''just war'' is a war the UN approves.

Well, if you happen to dig the UN, fine. Each to his own. What's absurd is the notion that it provides any kind of ''moral authority.'' The UN represents a dilution of moral authority, in which the voices of the 84 free nations in the world are merged with the remaining 107. Many of those 107 are, like Iraq, not nations in any meaningful sense but simply the personal expression of one man's will. Nevertheless, the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, like the Danish ambassador to the United Nations, is a guy in a well-tailored suit who lives in New York and gets chauffeured to work each day. And that's what matters: the suit, not the thug inside it; the veneer, not the reality. The world observes the polite fiction that the Syrian "foreign minister" is a functioning cabinet secretary in the way that the New Zealand foreign minister is. There may be a crude geopolitical necessity in this, but there is certainly no moral component.

And now Saddam has taken this joke of moral equivalence to exquisite new heights, for what could be more delightful than a dictator with no opposition ''campaigning'' to an American pop song? The campaign song is a perfect expression of American democracy, of the requirement that politics be conducted in the popular vernacular. What a shame Barbra's not available to do a fund-raiser for Saddam:

''People

People who need people

Are the luckiest people in the world . . . "

But that's the beauty of the Iraqi electoral system: You don't need people.

Mark Steyn is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc.

-- Anonymous, October 13, 2002