14 December 2003

Feet of Clay

George Washington, Prince Albert and Andrie Sakarov all died on the 14th of December, perhaps agitated by the approach of the holidays. Maybe their shopping wasn't done. I was in pretty good shape in that regard. I rose this morning to contemplate the mystery of the coming days, and to turn a weather eye to the skies to see what might be dropping upon us. My younger son will be traveling today and there was talk yesterday that their might be moisture in the air.

I looked outside and discovered it had snowed overnight. They blew the forecast again. We were supposed to get rain with a few inches of snow in the mountains to the north.

But this is a funny area here by the Chesapeake. The difference of a couple degrees can turn a drizzle into into a flurry and a good soaking cold rain into a foot of heavy white stuff. I contemplated that, and the implications for air travel on the East Coast and turned on the radio. There isn't anything to think about on the Sunday morning show, just soothing music. I heard the tale end of some classical piece and then NPR stopped Sunday Baroque and told me to get ready for an important press conference in Baghdad.

I listened as the local on-air folks chattered that they thought perhaps Saddam had been bagged somewhere in the brown clay of Tikrit. No confirmation, mind you, but the senior officials in for a while and Ambassador Bremer came on and began with these words: "We got him."

There was wild cheering in the background. I thought it sounded like American kids, but it wasn't. It was Iraqi journalists shouting "Death to Saddam" as they saw the images of the capture.

Bremer turned it swiftly over to the current chair of the Iraqi Governing Council and then to Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, of Rio Grande City, Texas, commander of the V Corps and all the U.S. forces in Iraq.

The story unfolded all morning. I cooked eggs, antsy. Trying to figure out what it meant. It was the 4th Infantry Division and some Coalition Special Operators that got him, cowering in the bottom of a "spider hole" on a humble little farm almost within sight of one of his former palaces. His hole was hidden under some mud bricks mounted on a Styrofoam frame. It was a vile little place.

I normally do not watch TV in the morning. But this seemed to merit a break. The first image I saw had a Saddam-looking fellow with a wild thick beard. There was some startling footage of an American Doctor giving him an oral examination, and the former Dictator seemed docile. More images were produced after they shaved him and sure enough he looked like the real McCoy.

The Major General commanding the 4th Infantry Divison came on. He looked like Mr. Clean in Desert Camouflage. He talked about how they had cracked the case. The CIA and DIA had apparently flooded the area and were rounding up friends and family of everyone with a link to the former President. They kept squeezing, and finally got the hide-sites down to two prospects, which they code named "Wolverine One" and "Wolverine Two." Go Blue, I thought. There must be a Michigan fan in the Operations section of the 4th ID.

They surrounded both targets and then shook them down. The little hovel over the hole that the heir of Nebukanezzer was hiding in had new t-shirts and underwear still in the bags in the bedroom.

I thought about the legacy of Saddam. He had always associated himself with the great kings of Babylon. We have a connection to them, too, through the Book of Daniel, chapter 2, verses 31 through 45. He tells the tale of Nebukanezzer's dream, in which the great king of the Euphrates and Tigris sees "a large statue--an enormous, dazzling statue, awesome in appearance. The head of the statue was made of pure gold, its chest and arms of silver, its belly and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of baked clay.

Daniel relates that in the dream a rock strikes the statue at the feet of iron-and-clay and smashes them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver and the gold are broken to pieces and become like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer. The wind sweeps them away without leaving a trace.

Daniel said the statue's feet were partly of the baked Mesopotamian clay and partly of iron, so Nebukanezzer's kingdom will be divided; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as the iron was mixed with clay. That suggests to me that this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. Daniel said that "just as the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay."

The Major General opined that Saddam had not stayed in the same place more than three hours at a time. That would certainly make me tired.

Dan Rather was looking a little unkempt himself. Not like Saddam. Just a little short on the make-up and a bit of a cowlick. He was hyping the event, inventing the conventional wisdom as they ent along. There were a lot of the usual suspects available to give their take on the matter, since they were all awake and ready to appear on the Political talk shows that no one watches on Sunday morning.

The first take, after the breathless excitement of the capture, was that this wasn't going to stop the violence against the Coalition, that we were still mired hopelessly in the mud of the Tigris.

I found that hard to believe, though I agreed with the contention that there were still a lot of angry people out there. I liked the buoyancy that went along with the description of the "perp" pictures of Saddam, the ones where he looks like Kalid Shiekh Mohammed when they dragged him out of bed. Downcast eyes, loss of hope. Resignation.

Dan Rather told me that he had a pistol and he had not used it. Not on the troops who found him, like his sons did, who went out guns blazing. He did not turn the gun on himself like Hitler did. He just surrendered.

In fact, his docility was the most astonishing thing about the capture. Joe Lieberman or someone like him commented that this was sure to take the wind out of the sails of the insurgency. A pause, I thought, certainly that, unless it is the opposite. I find myself not knowing anything anymore, certainly not the hearts of young men and women prepared to blow themselves to smithereens over a point of theology.

I heard nothing through the morning from Howard Dean, the Democratic front-runner who based his campaign on opposition to the war. Everyone else, from Joe Biden of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on down were at pains to be non-partisan, just the way they were after the President flew in for Turkey with the Troops. This is a hard tiger to ride.

I listened to Iraqis shouting questions in their hard consonants, sounding like they were clearing their throats. The same four of five facts were repeated right up until noon, when the President joined us to tell us how pleased he was for the people of Iraq, and for us, too. It was quick and matter of fact, and I could see a certain serenity in his disconcertingly narrow gaze.

Well, I thought, that is one thing down. And a pretty good Christmas present.

After the President was done they cut to the NFL, where our attention will be focused for the rest of the day. But as they went to Dione Sanders and DAn Marino on the pre-game show, I thought that Saddam turned out to have feet of clay like Nebukanezzer's statue

Now the question is how the rest of the Kingdom is going to behave. Iron or clay?