PERSPECTIVE ON THE GULF WAR : Hymn for the Unsung : What obsessions, what mythic readings of Good and Evil, bring young strangers together in the embrace of death?

Somewhere in the Saudi Arabian desert, an American corporal is reading “Moby Dick.” He is reading Melville’s novel, a newspaper reports, in order to “understand what drives people toward destructive obsessions,” concentrating above all on Ahab, “how he kept after the whale”--and wondering if “he was like Saddam Hussein.”

How typically American, I thought from my Third World perspective, this need to understand the enemy one is fighting--as American as his pathetic incapacity to achieve that understanding. Saddam as Ahab might fit neatly into the current interpretation of the Iraqi leader as a madman, irrationally pursuing his own downfall in spite of all warnings--but the corporal did not apparently seem interested in stopping to ask who the whale might be in this equation or what the whale might have done to Saddam, which parts of his body and mind had been devoured, to make him act with such abandon.

Because if Saddam is indeed Ahab, the clues to his present behavior might fruitfully be searched for in the past, a search that I doubt the corporal or his fellow Americans are particularly interested in. Instant amnesia seems to have infected the people of the United States as they devastate a country that a few months ago hardly any of them could find on a map. It is easier to conceive of Saddam as Satan--a personification of Evil substituting for historical explanation. No need to ask what has been done to the Arabs--as to so many other Third World peoples--that makes them feel so humiliated, enraged, threatened, alienated, that a tyrant such as the Iraqi leader can manipulate those feelings to turn himself into their representative. No need to ask why there is a power vacuum in the Middle East that this dictator, like others who will come, thinks he can fill. No need to remember that before this Ahab there was Mossadegh, an elected Iranian leader who nationalized oil and was overthrown with the help of the CIA in 1953. The autocrat who replaced him with a puppet was, of course, the shah. When the shah was in turn swept away by Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution, Iraq was encouraged to arm itself to the hilt in order to contain the Iranian menace. Iraq expanded this mandate into a savage war, with America’s blessing (and European and Soviet assistance), all human-rights violations and gassing of Kurds winked at, all condemnations blocked, until some years later when the U.S. ambassador would give Saddam Hussein the go-ahead for the invasion of Kuwait.

But what if Saddam is not Ahab?

How can it be that this young man who faces death so far from his home should be unable to catch even a glimmer of the possibility that Saddam might be the whale and that George Bush might in fact be an Ahab whose search for the monster in the oceans of sand and oil could end up with the ruin, not of the monster, but of those who were bent on its extermination?

Saddam Hussein, of course, is not unique as a monster. He is as monstrous as Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who, having been brought to power by U.S. intervention against an elected democratic government, victimized my own people for 17 years. And Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait is as monstrous as the aggressions of the United States against Nicaragua and Panama, against Grenada and Vietnam, as monstrous as the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. And Saddam Hussein’s lobbing of missiles at civilians in Israel is as monstrous as the Israelis’ bombing of refugee camps in Lebanon.

For the corporal, or the American people, to understand Saddam Hussein in these terms, as one who has been selectively and conveniently demonized, would necessarily mean condemning their own country’s complicity and participation in the pervasive evils of the world today. It would mean seeing the adventure in the Persian Gulf not as a struggle for democracy--which the United States has eroded all over the world by propping up friendly torturers--but as one more sad intervention in the affairs of a region that it knows nothing about, one more step toward the militarization of a world that should be disarming. It would mean denying America’s own morality in a conflict that once again finds a superpower technologically assaulting a poor Third World country, no matter how well armed it may be. It would mean that the true connection of Iraq to Vietnam should be made: that the war in the Gulf is being used to refight the war in Indochina with far more lethal weapons, rewriting that American crisis and defeat, proving how it could have been won, having at last the “good war” the Pentagon has been seeking all these years with a single-mindedness that would have astounded even the crew of the Pequod.

These connections, alas, are not being made. Pursuing their reflection in the gulf, Americans are blind to the true meanings of their actions. It is not, however, only their own image that Americans cannot decipher in the nightmare waters of this war.

Not far from the American corporal musing on “Moby Dick” there is an Iraqi corporal.

I know nothing about him, except that he breathes not many miles away and all too soon will be as close as a bayonet thrust, and not even that intimacy of combat will bring closeness or comprehension. It is the very fact that he is nameless, that he has no face, that no newspaper has told us his thoughts, that we have no way of knowing what “Moby Dick,” what Melville of his own culture he reads in the darkness, what blindness of his own he is submerged in, the fact that his being is a blur that we must imagine, it is the stark fact of his very absence from our awareness that prepares his death. How easy to kill somebody we don’t have to mourn because we never dared to imagine him alive.

I want neither Saddam Hussein nor George Bush to win the war in the Gulf. I wish that both of them could be defeated. But I anticipate that these two, Ahab and the whale, the whale and Ahab, George Bush and Saddam Hussein, will emerge unscathed, and that it will be their people who will have to pay for this absurd conflagration. It will be the two corporals who will pay, even if they survive, even if they are not shattered for life, they will be the ones, along with their children, who will pay endlessly for a war that nobody desires and that everybody seems so eager to fight.

Or is the world itself Ahab, suddenly gone mad?