Excellent! by Goldstein Saddam Husseined
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Jeff Goldstein -- Protein Wisdom
proteinwisdom.com
“That the dead are seen no more ... I will not undertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears”—Samuel Johnson, from The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia
So it is done.
And truth be told, I have very little to say about the hanging of Saddam Hussein. Was his public execution justified? Of course it was. Will his death halt the insurgency? Of course it will not—though I believe it will have a greater impact than many opinion shapers are allowing, particularly insofar as it provides a kind of psychological relief for the many Shia oppressed and brutalized by the thuggish Ba’athist regime.
Today, let those who weep for Hussein’s death—and more pointedly, those who pine for the halcyon days of his “containment” (a contingent that, sadly, consists of many of our own foreign policy realists, who, like colicky, mewling anachronisms have sprung newly birthed from the intellectual womb of Henry Kissinger or Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford or George HW Bush)—take a good look at themselves.
Let them, for one brief moment, bracket their partisan aggressions and reflect on what the US and its allies have done in removing this butcher from power—which, contrary to received wisdom, has made Iraq a far better place, if only for the moment potentially.
And that was one of the ancillary goals of the Iraq campaign, was it not?—to allow the Iraqis, or better, fellow humans who have for years lived in the kind of constant fear peculiar to brutal dictatorships, a chance to forge their own destinies, to rule as a people, moving sectarian tensions off the literal battlefield and transporting them into the battlefield of politics and policy formation.
The process is necessarily slow—the preconditions for a democratic republic depend upon an uneasy trust between traditionally warring ethnic factions (which trust cannot be built overnight, though it most certainly can be aided by elections and a ratified constitution) and a cessation of sectarian violence, something the coalition has to this point failed to produce, though that fact is, I believe, the fault of a military strategy that has been too introspective and politically circumspect—but it is a process that can and will succeed, provided it is aided, henceforth, both by the timely assertion of political will and by a willingness to resist the steady drumbeat of defeatism from both the left and right daily refracted through those ideologues in the press whose worldview, it is perfectly evident, would be stroked by a defeat of the US hegemon and its vile militarism.
Such defeatism continues to embolden the insurgency—because, protestations from the left to the contrary, our enemies, who are also the enemies of a free Iraqi state, do indeed follow our internecine political squabblings, just as they work to undermine our resolve through a campaign of propaganda aided, wittingly or not, by both a credulous media and the useful idiots who help their message to take hold.
As Samuel Johnson famously noted, nothing so concentrates the mind like the prospect of a hanging.
Today, then, let us hope that the hanging of one of the world’s most infamous tyrants and mass murderers forces many of those who have only recently—and cynically, in many instances— disabused themselves of their idealism in favor of the kind of protectionist (and oft-criticized) foreign policy long relegated to the political right, to reconsider, if only for a moment, what it is they wish the US to be.
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