Everyone makes mistakes. No one is infallible, not even the Pope in Rome. I have committed my share of mistakes throughout my career, and more. However, there are two Arab regimes that I never made the mistake of dealing with, which are Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. I had seen Gaddafi only once when he visited Beirut in 1970, and when I sat down with other colleagues and him, and heard him speak, I concluded that he was ignorant. My feeling towards him was indifference at first sight, but that quickly transformed into concern and then fear for the people of Libya, as the Colonel murdered people within and beyond his country, and engaged in terrorism or supported terrorists, even when he had no clear stakes in such actions. Saddam Hussein began his ascent to fame at about the same time, but my knowledge of Iraq and of the Iraqis is deeper than my knowledge of Libya. After the coup of 1968, I found the Baathist regime to be repugnant. The regime would kill people on mere suspicion, and the reign of terror continued even after the regime of Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and Saddam Hussein after him, became stable. A man would be killed and then tried, and if he were proven innocent, his family would receive financial compensation, and he would be deemed ‘a martyr of anger'. Do I need to go back to the trials of Mahdawi? I was a student at the university and worked as editor at Reuters. Part of my job was to follow the trials over the shortwave radio. As soon as I would hear Mahdawi asking a defendant in the well-known Iraqi dialect, ‘[What's] your name, profession, address', I would conclude that the defendant would be surely convicted and executed. I visited all Arab countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf, but I can boast today that I have never visited Baghdad or Tripoli. I was invited to Baghdad many times in the past, yes, but in each time, I found an excuse not to go. This is while I was never invited to visit Gaddafi's Libya. But I did live to see Lebanese and Egyptian journalists and otherwise, on the payroll of either Libya or Iraq, or both countries together, before they shifted their allegiance after the defeat of Saddam and his withdrawal from Kuwait, and following the revolution in Libya and the airstrikes and missile strikes by coalition forces against pro-Gaddafi forces. The same pen that wrote about the hero in Iraq or the hero in Libya, wrote after that about the fall of the tyrant or the inevitability of his downfall. I was right in supporting the international coalition against Saddam Hussein during the liberation of Kuwait. Al-Hayat was the only Arab newspaper that published a special issue on the invasion of Kuwait, on the second of August 1990. The war was led by Prince Khalid bin Sultan, the publisher of our newspaper, who was the Commander of the Joint Forces and Theatre of Operations along with General Norman Schwarzkopf. I was the only Arab journalist to interview them both in one day, and Al-Hayat published both interviews side by side. But I was not wrong the second time, when I opposed the U.S. war on Iraq in 2003, which I decided was waged on falsified premises, while the neoconservatives were helped in finding false witnesses for this war, by a bunch of traitors and collaborators. As a result of this invasion, one million Iraqis have been killed, a sectarian regime has been established, and Iranian influence there grew, in a manner that cannot possibly be considered good for Iraq or the Arabs. Saddam Hussein was a criminal, but I find Muammar Gaddafi to be both insane and a criminal. The Iraqi president was attempting to build himself a pan-Arab leadership through crime. I had thought that he was rational enough to withdraw from Iraq, when faced with 800 thousand soldiers from the United States and other major and minor countries around the world. But he did not, and he suffered a major defeat as he deserved. Gaddafi, I believe meanwhile, is both insane and a criminal. Some of the terrorist attacks he perpetrated against Western targets, or his support for the terrorism of the Irish Republican Army, is incomprehensible and has no clear benefit for him, while his murder of Imam Musa Sadr and the abduction and subsequent murder of Mansour Kikhia, were unjustified even for Libya, as both men were not a threat to Gaddafi's regime. Today, I am still waiting to visit Baghdad and Tripoli. I was supposed to visit Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, and I have a personal invitation from President Jalal Talabani to visit him at the presidential palace, which is guarded by the Peshmerga outside the Green Zone. However, I told him that I will wait until the last American soldier leaves Iraq. By contrast, I am packed and ready to go to Libya, after 40 years in waiting, because I believe it highly unlikely that the Colonel, who flouted both his country and his nation, would be replaced by foreign occupation. [email protected]
