March 28, 2005

MITHRIDATES, HE DIED OLD: KING ABDULLAH STAYS ALIVE

"...There was a king reigned in the East:
There, when kings will sit to feast,
They get their fill before they think
With poisoned meat and poisoned drink.
He gathered all that springs to birth
From the many-venomed earth;
First a little, thence to more.
He sampled all her killing store:
And easy, smiling, seasoned sound,
Sate the king when healths went round.
They put arsenic in his meat
And stared aghast to watch him eat;
They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white's their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
--I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old."
--A.E. Housman from Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff

        While much has changed in the Middle East, human nature has not. In order to hold power and survive, tyrants must become masters of treachery and duplicity. For years, the late King Hussein of Jordan played a skillful double game: pretending in the West to be a "moderate" while siding at home with our enemies and currying favor with other Arab tyrants like Saddam Hussein. Now his son Abdullah is cooing sweet nothings in the ears of the Bush administration, while doing everything possible to derail the freedom train in Iraq. Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post makes the comparison between Abdullah and the late, unlamented Yasser Arafat: "...as Arafat did, Abdullah works against U.S. interests in Iraq and elsewhere while pretending otherwise. The youthful Jordanian autocrat pulls the wool over the eyes of a Republican president as the deceased Palestinian revolutionary did with Bush's Democratic predecessor..." See the rest here.