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| Iraq |
| A proud day for the US and a lesson for all tyrants |
| 2006-12-31 |
| By Ralph Peters Saddam Hussein is dead. The mighty dictator met a criminal's end on the gallows. The murderer responsible for 1 1/2 million corpses is just a bag of bones. For decades, the world pandered to his fantasies, overlooking his brutality in return for strategic advantages or naked profit. Diplomats, including our own, courted him, while the world's democracies and their competitors vied to sell him arms. Saddam always bluffed - even, fatally, about weapons of mass destruction - but the world declined to call him on his excesses. Massacres went unpunished. His invasions of neighboring states failed to draw serious punishment. He never faced personal consequences until our troops reached Baghdad (a dozen years late). As long as Saddam paid sufficient bribes and granted the right concessions to the well-connected, the world shut its eyes to his cavalcade of atrocities. Even when his soldiers raped Kuwait, the United Nations barely summoned the will to expel his military - and the alliance led by the United States declined to liberate Iraq itself from a tyrant with a sea of blood on his hands. Everything changed in 2003. For all of its later errors in Iraq, the Bush administration altered the course of history for the better. It may be hard to discern the deeper meaning of our march to Baghdad amid the chaos afflicting Iraq today, but President Bush got a great thing right: He recognized that the age of dictators was ending, that the era of the popular will had arrived. He and his advisers may have underestimated the difficulties involved and misread the nature of that popular will, but they put us back on the moral side of history. Bush revealed the bankruptcy of the European-designed system of international relations. An unspoken code agreed between kings and czars, emperors and kaisers, had protected rulers - however monstrous - for centuries, while ignoring the suffering of the masses. The result was that any Third World thug who seized a presidential palace could ravage his country as long as his crimes remained within his "sovereign" borders. Supported by other English-speaking democracies, Bush acted. Breaking Europe's cynical rules, our forces invaded a dictatorship to liberate its population. And suddenly, the world was no longer safe for tyrants. No matter the policy failures in the wake of Baghdad's fall, the destruction of Saddam's regime remains a historical turning point. When our troops later dragged the dictator out of a fetid hole, every other president-for-life shivered at the image. Tonight, none of those other oppressors will sleep well. They may try to console themselves that America is failing in Iraq, that we've learned our lessons. But no matter what they tell themselves, they'll never feel safe again. We set a noble precedent, and the critics who insist that deposing Saddam was a mistake are rushing to a very premature judgment. We did a great thing by overthrowing Saddam. We may have done it poorly, but we did it. We also revealed the hypocrisy of those governments who sold out their professed values for oil money (and pathetically cheaply, too). From Paris and Berlin through Moscow and Beijing, many will never forgive us. We should be honored. Was justice done when the trapdoor opened under Saddam's feet? In a clinical sense, yes. But such an easy death was far too kind. He should have been turned loose, naked and handcuffed, in the central square of Halabja, where the survivors of his most notorious poison gas attack could have ripped his flesh with their bare hands. But we live in a civilized community of nations. Bloodthirsty dictators must be executed humanely - and over the protests of human-rights advocates who insist they shouldn't be executed at all. Still, Saddam's death was a last humiliation for him. He lived long enough to see his sons die, destroying his dynastic dreams. And long enough to discover that all those Iraqis jumping up and down and crying "We will die for you, Saddam!" didn't really mean it. Given all of the recent violence in Iraq, it's remarkable how little has been committed in support of Saddam - occasional demonstrations on his home ground, and little else. There'll be a hiccup of violence now, but even his fellow Baathists have been seeking to regain power for themselves, not for their erstwhile master. (And it's easy to picture their relief at the death of the man they, too, once had to fear.) The various factions of Iraq are fighting for many things - but Saddam hasn't been one of them. Sycophantic lawyers - Western and Iraqi - doubtless whispered that the people still supported him, that they and his Western friends would never let him hang. (He must have thought ruefully of Ramsey Clark as the noose tightened around his neck.) Saddam's pathetic grandeur lies in ruins. Millions will celebrate his death; few will mourn. In the end, the all-powerful dictator was just a delusional old man in a cage insisting, "I am the president of Iraq!" Of course, the Middle East has an ongoing problem with reality. Conspiracy theorists who insisted that the United States was keeping Saddam alive to restore him to power as part of a complex plot will now suggest that one of Saddam's doubles went to the gallows, that the dictator still lives, held in reserve by mysterious forces. But Saddam Hussein is dead, condemned to death by an Iraqi court. Even the die-hards will figure it out in time. Again, we can be proud that the United States of America brought him down. And that no dictator can ever feel entirely safe again. President Bush changed the world. For all of today's carnage and confusion, and despite the appalling policy errors after Baghdad fell, the future will show that the change was for the better. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #1 For all his merits, Peters exhibits one of the worst flaws of current punditry (and analysis in general) - his inability to acknowledge certain key facts or truths without qualifying the acknowledgement with assertions of very dubious or at least premature criticisms. "For all of its later errors in Iraq ..... blah blah blah". He also stupidly adopts the "chaos" meme. Ralph oughta visit, oh, about 75% of the country and see how chaotic it seems. Peters has long been clear-eyed about some of the key APPARENT mistakes in Iraq - though he seems to have averted his eyes from the scary and unpleasant fact that these errors were not just embraced by the uniformed military but mostly the fervently held views of CENTCOM and MNF-I, shared by their civilian overlords - but he couldn't write even just one little column in which he focused on his main point. His main point is important, and correct - and unlikely to be widely echoed. Whatever the flaws of his surrounding verbiage ..... |
| Posted by: Verlaine 2006-12-31 12:53 |