By John Kass, Chicago Tribune
The last thing Americans want as a souvenir of our war in Libya is the head of the murderous dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
That’s so ancient Rome. Oil is a different matter. And we Americans are definitely into oil. The cheaper the better. But not heads.
Heads are positively Kiplingesque, and in “The Man Who Would Be King” the head belonged to a vulgar fellow named Ootah. And then came the signal to the polo players that it was game on. But that’s not an American tradition.
There’s no sympathy for Gadhafi here. He funded terrorist camps in his deserts. He’s widely believed to have approved the murders of many Americans, including the deaths from the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. So we won’t weep if he’s found by the mob and pulled apart.
Yet as of late Tuesday, Gadhafi’s head was still fixed to his neck, with the rebels storming his compound, storming his house, the rebels grabbing everything they could take. Guns, yes, but bling, too, and one lucky guy allegedly snagged Gadhafi’s famous hat.
In the years that Gadhafi has been a newsmaker, screaming about death, he’s worn that hat. Surely you’ve seen it on those curly locks of his. According to news reports, it was taken after rebels stormed his compound in Tripoli.
Now, a hat isn’t a head, I’ll grant you that.
But a hat is still in the same metaphorical ballpark, isn’t it? And better yet, it’s much nicer and cleaner than a head.
And I hope you saw the same video I did, starring the young rebel with what he claimed was Gadhafi’s hat, a peaked hat of green and gold.
“I’m really proud for this moment,” said the young rebel on TV with the hat on his head, pushed back a bit, with a jaunty air. “l’m going to give this to my dad as a present because he suffered a lot from Gadhafi.”
He smiled and you could see it was a genuine smile, one of relief, and pain for what his father had suffered. And then he was asked: How difficult was it to take the Gadhafi hat as a token?
“It wasn’t really pretty hard,” he said outside the dictator’s former compound, the rebels massing, waving rifles. “I just went inside his room. … I was like ‘Oh my God. I’m in Gadhafi’s room. Oh my God!’ … I am happy for Libyans, for those people who have suffered a lot.”
Within minutes, former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen was on the tube talking to us of the future steps we’ll be taking through this so-called Arab Spring.
“Everyone will look to see what Syria is doing, what Iran is doing, because Syria and Iran together are the problem we’ll be facing in the future,” said Cohen, at least having the good grace to tell us what will come next.
Afghanistan. Iraq. Libya. Now Syria and Iran. Will they be considered on their own or will they be lumped together for war No. 4?
Cohen wasn’t opposed to the American-backed NATO bombing of Libya. But he’s quite ecumenical that way, isn’t he? He was President Bill Clinton’s defense secretary back in 1999, when American-backed NATO bombed Serbia on Easter, ruining churches and ancient monasteries during services.
Like Libya, that was considered a war of liberation. And like Libya, it was one of those wars with “no boots on the ground,” a phrase beloved by American politicians, because it means no significant number of soldiers killed and wounded in firefights.
All the death comes from the air, as if without fingerprints, as if clean, although the survivors know where it originates. And whether it’s politically clean or merely politically digestible, the dead are still dead and there are costs.
This one, courtesy of President Barack Obama, has cost about a billion dollars so far, according to some estimates, and it’s only been a few months. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates openly questioned what we’d win when it was over, and that’s why his first name is Former Defense Secretary.
Some of you will accuse me of being anti-war only because Obama is a Democrat and that when the Republicans ran things I was as bloodthirsty as any other neocon sitting behind a desk, typing. (By the way, I’m no neocon.) But I suppose the question is fair, as far as it goes.
Because I was for it , the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq , the one to get the terrorists like Osama bin Laden, and the other to get a murderous dictator and those weapons of mass destruction that weren’t there.
But every day, more young men and women come home, in bags or without legs, and their families weep, and I can’t reconcile it any longer.
It was a good thing for our president that our warriors got bin Laden in Pakistan. But there are always plenty of murderous dictators. And if the president believed that taking Saddam Hussein out of Iraq was the wrong war, then how is taking Gadhafi out of Libya the right war?
And now that we’ve dropped bombs on his forces and sided with the rebels, our president in our name has accepted responsibility for something a bit more complicated than a single head.
An entire country.
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