War and Propaganda
After the Iraq War
Abstract
© 2003 Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Thursday, 10 April 2003, Friday, 2 October 2009
The Heroes Celebrate
The barstool brigadiers and perfidious pulpit paragons everywhere are now celebrating with the vulgar bawdiness of triumphalism. No human being could find this inspiring or patriotic. But those who think they “fought” the war to save the Iraqis from Saddam are particularly revolting. Anyone against the war is labelled as pro-Saddam and against the Iraqi people, whereas those who have willingly killed a minimum of 5000 of them during the war, and hundreds of thousands in the 12 year softening up process, are supposed to be for these oppressed people. The barstool and pulpit heroes lay down other people's lives to remove Saddam. These lives and the thousands of injured Iraqis are worth it, they have decided.
The barstool victors risked not their lives but their livers and hoarse throats winning this victory. They think they deserve some praise, and deserve the chance of denigrating the cowardly and unpatriotic who think that peace is better indivisible. A megalomaniac Saddam has been replaced by a gaggle of megalomaniacs in the White House and the Pentagon. They do not torture people as openly as Saddam but have never hesitated to use torture in the past, albeit covertly. Utterly openly, though, they will drop bombs on to foreign cities destroying their buildings, treasures, and, despite the “pin-point” targetting, thousands of lives too. If there is no moral equivalence there, it is because no one wants to think about it—it is quite plain enough.
Saddam Hussein has been removed, but the barstool triumphalists are premature in celebrating the victory. The Iraqis have been promised democracy. The war will have ended when they really get it. And where were these heroes with their newly found concern for the Iraqi people, in the past 13 years? The US and Britain never stopped the first Gulf war, but used years of overflying and bombing to spy out the defences of the country and weaken them. The brave “Coalition of the Willing” also spent this time getting the UN to prepare this war for them, with its economic sanctions and weapons inspections, to ensure that Iraqi people were starved, half a million children were killed, its infrastructure damaged, most of its weapons destroyed—in short the country was weakened physically on top of the moral weakening of the odious tyrant the USA had kept in charge of these poor people while he was sacrificing their lives against the Iranian mullahs on behalf of Uncle Sam. Then they found a pretext to send in an invading army!
The so-called “Coalition” made no pretence of this. They were doing it openly only weeks before the war began, and while the debate was supposed to be still going on in the UN. The barstool brigadiers never showed the least bit of concern for the Iraqis dying while this was happening, except somehow to blame them for their own plight! Most Blacks, Asians and Muslims think the war was a farce. Military victory was always assured to the side that can appropriate ten times the enemy's annual domestic product merely in war costs!
For Iraq, the point now is to ensure that all the promises that Bush and Blair have made are realised. Peaceniks are skeptical. The US says it wants a “democratic” Iraq with leaders it approves of. Hang on! What if the people do not want the people the US approve of, or the US do not want the people the people approve of? Democracy means power to the people, not power to US retired generals and oil barons. The US, the UK and Israel placed Idi Amin into power in Uganda in 1970. People danced in the streets of Kampala, but Amin proved to be a monster like Saddam, and typical of the agents of foreign powers put in charge on the pretext of establishing or restoring democracy. When we see the US withdraw, and Iraq having fully free elections in a few months time, as the saviours have implied, then the pulpit poltroons can begin to celebrate. They will not get the chance.
It is certain that the democracy that the Iraqis get will not be one in which they can use their own oil as they see fit. Long term contracts will be signed privatizing the oil wells and the owners will suddenly be US oil companies, not Iraqis, who, at best will have token representation. Let any Iraqi government decide that it wants to nationalize its oil, and “democracy” will again quickly evaporate, with US connivance as it did in Vietnam and many other places.
US rulers have blanched at the thought of formal imperial rule—until now. George Bush has cast off the restraint which held back America's 42 previous presidents—including his father. Now he is seeking, as an unashamed objective, Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian demonstrates, to get into the empire business, aiming to rule a post Saddam Iraq directly through an American governor-general, the retired soldier Jay Garner. Washington's plan for Baghdad consists of 23 ministries—each one to be headed by an American. This is a form of foreign rule so direct it has not been seen since the last days of the British empire. It belies everything America has claimed to believe in.
To add some respectability to this open imperialism, the US have a “preferred candidate” for Iraqi leader. An earlier “preferred candidate” was Saddam. The new “preferred candidate” is Ahmed Chalabi. What do we know about this man? What we find should not surprise us, but does it surprise any but the most critical people in the US? Some of Ahmed Chalabi's less salubrious credentials for becoming Saddam's successor are that he is a convicted fraudster and was the head of a bank that collapsed. But, according Tinker, Banker, NeoCon, Spy, by Robert Dreyfuss in American Prospect in 2002, Chalabi would hand over Iraq's oil to US multinationals. Chalabi's partisans in conservative think tanks are already drawing up the blueprints. These people extend in political terms from the far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon's Middle East policy offices. James E Akins, former US Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, says:
What they have in mind is denationalisation, and then parcelling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies.
Dreyfuss adds:
Once an occupying US army seizes Baghdad, Chalabi's INC and its American backers are spinning scenarios about dismantling Saudi Arabia, seizing its oil and collapsing the Opec.
Many of the Islamist parties say they either do not like Mr Chalabi or have never heard of him, and their goal is an Islamist constitution. The most powerful of these are the followers of Mohammed al-Sadr, and it will be they not Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, who may force a bigger say in shaping Iraq.
The US-British temporary administration is supposed to hand over power when the provisional government takes over, but the Pentagon is not giving up its influence that easily. About 120 Iraqi exiles in America and Europe, chosen by Puul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, are to be grafted on to Iraqi society as advisers to the main ministries. This team, the Iraqi Reconstruction and Redevelopment Council, has been working from US-financed offices in Virginia. No timescale has been set for its stay in Iraq!
While most of the ministries will be handed over, US forces will retain control over security for at least two years as they rebuild the Iraqi army. A multinational force will take some of the strain from the US and Britain. Ten nations have so far offered troops who will serve in three sectors of Iraq. Poland will be in charge of one, probably the north, while the US retains the centre, and Britain the south.
American influence will also extend to the currency. The US dollar will be the main one for about two years, with the Iraqi dinar bearing Saddam's face remaining for small transactions. A US treasury spokeman said it could take about six months for the provisional government to decide on a new currency and it would take nine months or longer to make the plates and get the money into circulation. So dolars will rule for the first 15 months. It should be enough time to make them permanent!
It is an agenda that goes far beyond regime change, to the start of the new imperium. Threats against Syria have already begun. Iran is now surrounded. The supposed war against terror is not really about terror, and the war on Iraq not only about oil. They are about a superpower's self-destructive impulse towards supremacy, stranglehold, and ultimate global hegemony. The lesson of this episode is that the US will attack on the flimsiest of evidence anyone it thinks it can defeat. The UN, indeed the rest of the world, is irrelevant to anything the US decides. Watch out for your baseball, kid, the bully on the block wants it!
The Beautiful War!
Faced with the richest, best-equipped, most powerful armed forces the world has ever seen, ill-equipped Iraqi soldiers have shown spectacular courage and have even put up a defence. The Bush and Blair propaganda machine led by the Australian contingent to the war, Rupert Murdoch, denounced fighting back as wicked. Neverthless, fight back they did, while they could, even with battlefield deaths running at 30 to one against—the face-saving American conception of the kill-ratio.
The US used their complete domination of the air to drop not hundreds, but thousands of explosives on Iraq with no fear of anything other than random retaliation. Yet, the US army said the Iraqis were blowing themselves up! Their missiles were unreliable old ones that fell straight back down onto them! A Royal Marines sergeant, a tank specialist, put it more colourfully but with sadness and restrained anger:
It is like new Ferraris against old Austins. It is madness, and I do not know why the Iraqis are doing it. This is not a fair fight. The buggers don't stand a chance.
40 Commando CO, colonel Gordon Messenger added:
This is not a fairly matched battle, and seeing it gives me little pleasure.
How then does this square with the accusation that the Iraqi regime was a threat to world peace? We hear “they are swallowing all the lies they are spun”. But the propagandists mean the Iraqis, not the barstool brigadiers cheering on the war over their bottles of Bud, disgusting Australian lager, or G and Ts, depending on the barstool you are sitting next to.
When the Arab TV station al-Jazeera showed civilian casualties, the Murdock and BBC hacks denounced it as “emotive” Arab propaganda, as though Iraqis were dying on purpose only to make the “Coalition” look bad. Showing mortally wounded people were insensitive Arab tactics, but stealth or dive bombers and cruise missiles on American and British TV are the “terrible beauty” of war, as Arundhati Roy observed.
When invading American soldiers were taken prisoner and shown on Iraqi TV, George Bush said it violated the Geneva convention and “exposed the evil at the heart of the regime”, as if he could care less about the Geneva convention. US television stations showed the hundreds of prisoners US Government officials admit are being ill-treated, held by the US in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs, blindfolded with opaque goggles and deafened with earphones to ensure complete visual and aural deprivation. These men are sufferring ill-treatment sure enough, but it is all right, the US says, because they are not “prisoners of war”! They are “unlawful combatants”. The UN refused to pass a resolution legalizing the Iraq war, and the “Coalition” went ahead without any UN approval. That must mean that the “Coalition” soldiers fighting the war are unlawful combatants themselves, so they had better not be captured by anyone that thinks like the US leadership.
When the “Coalition” again contravened the Geneva convention by bombing the Iraqi television Station, the American media rejoiced like schoolboys killing a cat. Fox TV had been lobbying for the attack as a blow against Arab propaganda. American and British TV are, of course, balanced in their reporting. Western media does not do propaganda, but that is merely the first lie of it. In fact, they obviously resent anyone else doing it themselves precisely because it exposes their own to anyone who is not already zombified by pathetic rags like those the media barons offer to the semi-literate.
“Embedded” western journalists, having a free ride on the tanks, report just what the Army briefings give them. This is not propaganda! Non-embedded reporters like Robert Fisk and the BBC's Rageh Omaar can only appear on air with a prior warning that “he is being monitored by the Iraqi authorities”. So what he says and shows is all Arab lies! The honest US government bugged the phone lines of UN security council delegates, according to the Observer, so that is all right. Anything the enemy does is deceit.
In a Baghdad population of five million, the “Coalition” managed to find about 100 men dressed in Iraqi smocks to dance and cheer when the fall of Saddam was symbolized by a statue of him being pulled over. A Roy pointed out that, after this phony war, if the Bush regime were to fall, there would be dancing on the streets the world over.
And if Saddam's regime had weapons of mass destruction, it showed astonishing responsibility and restraint in not using them while being sorely provoked by foreign soldiers and bombs. If the boot were on the other foot, and New York was under bombardment, would Bush show the same restraint? The US undoubtedly has WMDs—nuclear bombs and intercontinental delivery systems, or if they should be considered too drastic, the US has chemical and biological weapons, anthrax, smallpox and nerve gas. US leaders over the last few decades have only shown restraint in using weapons of mass murder when the US people have called them to order. Since it seems unlikely that Saddam is a responsible person, the conclusion has to be he did not have viable weapons of mass destruction. Now von Rumsfeld tells us that they will be found only when informers say where they are—after a big bribe, no doubt!
The US Army had a great triumph, we were told, in finding a Palestinian terrorist in Baghdad—proof that Saddam harboured terrorists. Yet this man committed his terrorist acts almost twenty years ago, had since rejected terrorism, had been paroled in the Camp David agreement, had been living openly in Baghdad suburbia, and had openly given interviews about his former activities to US journals only last year. It was a great propaganda triumph to find a man who was not hiding!
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According to a New York Times/CBS News survey, 42 percent of the American public believes that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. And an ABC News poll says that 55 percent of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein directly supports al-Qaida. How many are aware that their administrations supported Saddam Hussein, politically and financially, through his worst excesses?
Private Grunt and his supportive family back home should not be burdened with these details. It might affect his attitude to the job of murdering foreigners that their government asks them to do. For his boys to get the message, President George W Bush, commander in chief of the US army, navy, airforce, and marines has to say in single word sentences:
Iraq. Will. Be. Liberated.
American citizens owe it to the supreme commander to forsake thought and rally behind their troops, and the British are now no different. The propaganda makes it so.
Food Aid
Bush can get $79bn from Congress to pay for the war but none of this money was allocated to caring for wounded Iraqis, keeping the peace, food aid or setting up a responsible government when the supposed object of regime change had been achieved. US soldiers could be assigned to guard oil wells but none were available to guard the national archives, museums or even the hospitals. Indeed, the national archives that had irreplaceale records going back into the Ottomon times were torched. Looters do not normally loot archives—which are just filled with books and papers so far as any ordinary person cares—let alone torch them. Among the papers though were many more recent ones pertinent to Saddam-US relations and the conduct of the first Gulf war. Now isn't that just serendipitous?
An event of July 2002 that did not make the news media, according to Arundhati Roy, was that $5.4bn worth of supplies to Iraq were blocked by the “Coalition” leaders before they were even calling themselves a “Coalition”. When a pittance of food aid landed at Umm Qasr, the TV and news media were the ones that went into a feeding frenzy. Randolph Hearst knew that wars could sell newspapers, and the modern media barons are just as heartless about it. Nick Guttmann, head of emergencies for Christian Aid, says 32 ships of supplies a day are needed, not a token single ship for the newsmedia.
The supplies that were brought in were left for the poor Iraqis to fight over, a plainly contrived situation meant to show them as uncivilized barbarians. The water taken into Basra was, apparently, being sold! The Cabinet Christians of the Bush Administration would have told Jesus to make a fat wad by selling the loaves and fishes.
No one can expect the Washingtom werewolves to do anything else. they honed their methods in the Vietnam war, and nothing much has changed since. John McNaughton in the Pentagon Papers, published during the Vietnam war and discussed in some detail on these pages to illustrate the US administration idea of truth, proposed:
Strikes at population targets (per se) are likely not only to create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home, but greatly to increase the risk of enlarging the war with China or the Soviet Union. Destruction of locks and dams, however—if handled right—might… offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction does not kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after a time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided—which we could offer to do “at the conference table”.
So, there is nothing humane about pin-point bombing. It is to avoid the adverse publicity that killing too many civilians would cause.
On the 28 March, after Bush called for the immediate resumption of the UN's oil for food programme, the UN security council voted unanimously for the resolution. So, money from the sale of Iraqi oil should be used to feed Iraqi people who are starving because of US led sanctions and the illegal USA-led war. “Operation Iraqi Freedom”, Tony Blair assures us is about returning Iraqi oil to the Iraqi people. But the US will decide who gets the “reconstruction” contracts in Iraq and that means also the destination of the profits from Iraqi oil. Some Iraqi oil will be returned to the Iraqi people but via corporate multinationals. Bush does not want these issues of oil for aid “politicizing”, as he calls it.
While ordinary people, Americans among them, will pay for the war, oil compinies, weapons manufacturers, arms dealers, and corporations involved in “reconstruction” will make fortunes out of it. This news does not hit the stands because much of the US media is owned and managed by one US Daddy Warbucks or another.
Global Consequences
Incredibly, the human sarcophagi running America seem oblivious to the world ramifications of their drooling insanity. The US people at home can take refuge on their own continent defended by Homeland Security and nuclear weapons, but its economy is global. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable to attack. It happened during the Vietnam war, and is likely to happen again. The internet already has lists of American and British government products and companies that should be attacked or boycotted. Coke, Pepsi and McDonald's are obvious targets everywhere, but agencies such as USAID, the British department for international development, and private corporations and companies from British and American banks, Arthur Anderson, Merrill Lynch, American Express, through Bechtel, General Electric, to Reebok, Nike and Gap, could find themselves in trouble. The Administration is oblivious to the fury it has generated, and too many US ccitizens are oblivious to it through their blind acceptance of CIA and Pentagon spin.
The world sees the invasion of Iraq as a racist war. A tidal wave of hatred for the US is rising. The word is that America is a nation of morons, indoctrinated with conservative, illiberal politics, and has become a nation of murderers. The propagandists of either side do not distinguish governments from people. The French premier tried to stop the UN sanctioning an illegal war, quite a proper thing for any responsible governemnt to do, and consequently the Good Ole Boy Rednecks of Republican America decided to pour French wine down drains, and to rename French Fries as “Freedom Fries”. In the UK, where the Rednecks are readers of Rupert Murdoch's lavatory rag, the Sun, “the French” were accused of the crime of despoiling a UK war cemetary. Now that Blair has been seen cavorting on the white house lawn with Bush's dogs, the British nation as a whole have become US arse-lickers, Arundhati Roy observes.
Regrettably, it is inevitable that people categorize people with national characteristics and they are inevitably the characteristics of their leaders. Yet large numbers of American and British people protested against the war. The last long term US atrocity—Vietnam—was eventually stopped by the US people themselves objecting so loudly and actively that the administration had to take notice. Many Americans criticize their governments when they become outrageous, but they seem unable to change a system that is quite capable of simply laying dormant until the trouble blows over, or a new generation has forgotten.
A Democratic Tradition?
The US was a country founded in a rebellion against colonialism in the form of British imperialism. Born in a war against a hated colonial oppressor, George III, king of England, it ought to see itself as the friend of all who struggle for independence, and be the last nation on earth to play the role of outside ruler. For long this seemed to be true, but not since 1945 when the rich ruling caste of the USA realised that war kept them in business and getting richer and richer. Since then they have made external wars a way of life and have sought a world map coloured with the bloodied stars and stripes of American puppet dictators.
The US leadership has been so right wing for the last fifty years it has essentially been fascist. From Dulles to Rumsfeld the same caste of fascist madmen have been in power restrained only by their fear of the people and the odd reluctant President. In the US, three quarters of white people are now said to support the war, but only a third of black people. If that is true it shows its racist nature, but the pollsters are hired by the corporate media bosses and are part of the propaganda machine, so who can believe them? Even so, a black veteran of Vietnam sensibly said on TV that he never got to like anyone who beat him up. He meant that the US would be fools to imagine that the Iraqis would love them after the US pounding and looting, official or unofficial, it has allowed. Many US citizens oppose the war despite the rabid right wing jingoism and intimidation of the bully boys. “My country right or wrong” is still the refuge of scoundrels.
American citizens have a huge responsibility riding on their shoulders. They are all that can halt the Washington werewolves when they break free of their sepulchres. As Arundhati Roy pleads to the world, the US people are our allies, and our friends against their own mad dogs in government.
George Bush's war on Iraq is at odds with every one of the competing traditions of US politics. Thomas Jefferson called for an America which would not only refuse to rule over other nations, it would avoid meddling in their affairs altogether—no “entangling alliances”, he pleaded. America had to demonstrate the value of liberty, not through force but by the power of its own example. John Quincey Adams declared that America “goes not abroad in seach of monsters to destroy”. What then is Washington's pre-emptive strike at Saddam Hussein?
The Jeffersonian tradition is not the only one to be broken by “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Walter Russell Mead identified three other schools of US foreign policy, all of them, Freedland tells us, are incompatible with this war. Hamiltonians want to keep a balance of power—that means acknowledging equals in the world, rather than seeking hegemony. So Bush, whose national security strategy last year explicitly forbade the emergence of an equal to the US, is no follower of Alexander Hamilton.
Jacksonians see no logic in travelling halfway across the world to invade a conntry that poses no immediate direct threat to the US. So Bush has defied Andrew Jackson. Woodrow Wilson liked the idea of the US spreading democracy and rights across the globe. Banishing Saddam and freeing the people of Iraq might have appealed to him, but he was the father of the League of Nations and would have been dismayed by Washington's disregard for the UN and its lack of international backing for this war.
Washington has not only broken from the different strands of wisdon which guided the US since its birth, but also from the model that shaped American foreign policy since 1945. Bodies like Nato, the global financial architecture designed at Bretton Woods and the UN itself were almost all American inventions. America contributed considerably to the safety net of multilateralism in the world's affairs. Deriding them, as the Bush camp does, is to trash American ideas.
In the traditions that the greatest US leaders have established, the notion of unprovoked, uninvited, long-term and country-wide invasion is undoubtedly un-American. The US founders and its greatest leaders up until Rooseveldt were firm believers in the freedom of the people and the sovereignty of the US state. Unfortunately, the quality of most US leaders since WWII has been far from great, and the latest batch are slavering werewolves dressed as clowns. They have cheerfully violated the sovereignty of the state of Iraq with their over-hastily executed invasion.
But, Iraq did not come naturally to the rule of Saddam Hussein. Everyone who has looked at the newspapers in the last fifty years knows full well that it is outside interference, most of the time by the US, that has established and perpetuated the regime of tyrants like Saddam. Dictators like Saddam Hussein, and all the other despots in the Middle East, in the central Asian republics, in Africa and Latin America, many of them installed, supported and financed by the US government, are a menace to their own people. They are best dealt with by not putting them there in the first place, and instead by strengthening democracy and civil society in new countries. All the original states that have come to democracy have done so through their own efforts, having put up with monstrously cruel regimes often on the way. We have made our own national errors and have paid for them and learnt something from them.
To finance and protect vile dictators like Saddam cannot be justified, and to use their presence, having put them in place, as a pretext to bomb shit out of their country could only be done by men who are the moral equivalents of Saddam himself—to use that phrase that the Bush mad dogs cannot abide because it is so plainly true. To hold sovereignty and freedom as an ideal for yourself but to deny it to others can only be the most outrageous and disgusting hypocrisy. The US, which holds sovereignty sacred for itself, habitually engages in “operations” which deny it to others.
In New Hampshire, car number plates bear the legend, “Live Free or Die”, an echo of Patrick Henry who said, “Give me liberty or give me death”. Americans resent even the most trivial state meddling in their own affairs but happily, even eagerly, determine to run the lives of a people on the other side of the planet. Yet Americans—whose passion for liberty is so great they talk seriously about keeping guns in case they ever need to fight their own government—think Iraqis should welcome military rule by a foreign power. They saw nothing delightful in being oppressed and openly robbed by Saddam, but can hardly be expected to feel differently at being oppressed and robbed by US generals and oil cowboys.
It might sound messianic for self-righteous God-botherers to send in bombers, missiles and tanks to get rid of those designated as “evildoers” or worse, the “Empire of Evil”, implying that a whole people are evil, but their messianism comes from the bombs, missiles and tanks not from their Christian convictions. If the balance of military power had been anything like equal, then the God convictions of these men would never have driven them to war. They fought it because they knew it would be easy.
Regardless of what the propaganda machine tells us, these tin-pot dictators are not the greatest threat to the world. The real and pressing danger, the greatest threat of all is the apocalyptic force of the present US government, and its ever-present mushroom spawn of careerists and adventurers that run Washington. Bush is a dangerous, almost suicidal, missionary, but the political zealots behind him are more dangerous than he is himself.
Bush and his gangs of zealots have been utterly crass in their aims and ambitions, though. They have completely disdained public opinion as if it did not matter. That might be worrying, because Americans seem not to have been outraged by all the cheating, gerrymandering and blatant lying that has been going on. But the lies and deceit have been so open and the greed so undisguised that the US people can hardly remain with the wool pulled over their good eye for so long. Bush's brazen impudence cannot continue to fool enough people for much longer. He has revealed the ogre behind the democratic mask of the US political system. The ogre opperates the system for itself, but does it in the name of the US voter. We hope Toto and Dorothy soon find out about Oz. The slogan of the anti-war movement must now be extended by the US people to the operation of the whole self-interested pack of Washington werewolves. Oz out! Not in my name! Opportunist Zealots out!
We are told that there is little freedom of speech in the “Great Society” at the minute. To criticise the administration for its outrageous opportunism and greed is to be denounced as a Saddam apologist or even a traitor. You might be denounced for insufficient love of the country, or fall foul of the Patriot Act. The war and the post-9/11 war on terror have been used by the crypto-fascists in government to narrow the bounds of free speech, and limit civil liberties. So much for US democracy even at home.
The Guardian's Freedland concluded that “there is something McCarthyite about the atmosphere which has spawned this war”. Democrats are so scared to open their mouths that they are no longer an opposition worthy of the name. US intellectuals have been utterly silent from what we can glean on this side of the Atlantic. A few people in entertainment voiced objections and were slapped down by the regime. It is time that liberal America not only woke up but got angry again. If they do not the world is in danger of going under an iron heel. It will not be coconut dictators like Saddam or even religious fanatics like Osama Bin Laden who will wear the boots! It will be a religious dictator nearer home.
