IT’S ELEMENTARY

Professor Moriarty, evil genius and hatcher of diabolical plots; organizer of half that is evil and nearly all that is undetected has been supplanted as the bet? noir of our imaginations in the Twenty-first Century by Osama Bin Laden. Ernst Stavro Blofeld, diabolical genius and arch nemesis of Bond – James Bond has his own Twenty-first Century avatar in Saddam Hussein. Oh, Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein are real life villains true enough capable of plumbing the depths of evil on their own account, but the drama being written by the Bush Administration credits them both with sinister powers approaching the super human. As the plot unfolds in this murky mystery it becomes more clear that their roles at the center of the drama are mere McGuffins, Hitchcockian devices to divert the audience attention away from the final twist in the denouement.

The first act featured the pursuit of the Arch Criminal with the Caves of Tora Bora standing in for Reichenbach Falls. The second act, now in progress, shifts the scene and the antagonist to the Middle East with Saddam playing the part of Blofeld and threatening the world with the technology of organized terror from his lair in Baghdad. Both these plot devices are designed to capture the imagination and direct attention to this duo of masterfully limned antagonists and they have been singularly successful in achieving that end.

But it is in the third act that the real objective of the exercise will be revealed. The first two have been simply preparation. The seeds of the third act are sown in the second. While apparently building to a confrontation with their Blofeld our Bondian heroes are taking aim at the real target – nothing less than the United Nations itself. The inevitable Second Iraqi War has an objective far beyond the borders of Iraq or its oil fields. The ostensible objective, the disarmament of Iraq is being methodically achieved by UN inspections supported by the new alliance of Germany, France and Russia and at far less cost to America than the resort to war, But instead of embracing that economic and effective course to the announced objective the bipartite American-Anglo demonizes both the UN and NATO as impediments to the righteous crusade the Bush Administration is bent on pursuing. It seems illogical and the audience is left asking, “Why?” The answer will be clear in the third act.

For the first half century of its existence the United Nations played an important role in preserving that cold-war stalemate between the West, led by the United States and the East, championed by the Soviet Union. When matters threatened to spin out of control either side could turn to the UN to provide balance. With the decline and fall of the Soviet Union that purpose, that utility of the international organization is no longer necessary. From Washington’s perspective the UN has become an anachronistic restrain on American power and hegemony. The whole purpose of the exercise is to convince America to discard the United Nations – an article of Conservative faith since the Organization’s founding. That is the point of the Third Act. It’s Elementary.