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COMMENTARY
January 3, 2007
At last
Catching up after the holidays, I see that Saddam Hussein was finally returned to his maker, after a trial of patience that lasted three years. Attentive readers will recall that I had little (read: no) sympathy with the policy of granting the man a show trial, and thereby encouraging every freelance psychopath in the Sunni Triangle to smear things out while Saddam persisted on TV. He should have been shot, not hanged, the moment after it became clear that he could no longer provide useful information on the location of his colleagues.The idea that other regional despots were quaking in their boots, watching Saddam's fate unfold on the small screen -- an argument for the trial that I've now heard too many times -- is bilge. Murderous tyrants are made of stronger stuff. It is like arguing that pictures of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib being forced to wear clown hats would make terrorists whimper in their caves. One is amazed by the naivete of Western speculation. More likely the bad guys were thinking: "Is that all they do when they catch you? Make you into a media superstar?" Another conventional view is that we should keep such a person as Saddam alive indefinitely, either because we flinch at capital punishment even for a mass-murderer, or because we think an indefinitely prolonged de-briefing will add interesting snippets to the historical record. It is a myth that much information can be got from fallen tyrants, or for that matter, from any of the gentlemen the Americans have parked at Guantanamo. Not unless one is willing to employ the sort of persuasions we, as arguably civilized people, are not willing to employ. And even that rarely works; and even when it does, torture gives results seldom checkable. The best one can hope is to get a bit of information in “live time” -- for instance, where the other “hidey holes” were on what one of my U.S. Marine correspondents called “Maggie’s Farm”. War is war is war: circumstances are constantly changing, and what the captured monster did the day before yesterday is already of interest only to historians. As to the unedifying scenes of his Shia executioners taunting the fallen dictator before dropping him through the trap -- sent round the Internet thanks to a smuggled cellphone camera, with repercussions everywhere it was seen -- what can one say? Had Saddam been properly shot three years ago, that wouldn't have happened. I am trying to be coldly hard-headed about this. For I’ve argued repeatedly, that war is war, and that we can’t afford to be sentimental, or meek. Indeed, it is immoral to be so, for lives are in the balance as we pause to reflect on how holy we are. Anyone who feels sorry for Saddam will find the antidote by re-reading The Republic of Fear, by Kanan Makiya. Everyone should have read that book by now: it is the best single account of the hell-on-earth that the Americans and allies broke open. Bad as things are in Iraq right now, they were considerably worse under Saddam. Historians could make themselves useful by explaining, to a public still taking its news mostly from the idiot box, how the mess now reported from Iraq descends directly from what happened over generations previous. That it is the fallout of a 35-year totalitarian experiment, just as Russia today, in its dysfunctional way, enjoys the fallout from its own 70-year totalitarian experiment. The problems do not end, when the waters recede from a terrible flood: only the drownings stop, and death from contagion is about to begin. Saddam ran Iraq the way Stalin ran Russia -- more murderously, in proportion, but less efficiently. Had he been no more efficient, but had a better grasp of the world political order, he’d still be in power today -- and the problems for the West would be that much greater. As it stands we are staring down Iran and Syria. And now Iraq, instead of completing the trifecta, is a base against our mortal enemies on either side of it. That, incidentally, is an adequate retrospective justification (as it was an adequate prospective justification) for the invasion of Iraq. “We” (by which I mean, the West) had to alter the balance of power in that region -- both to pursue terrorists, and to prevent the ultimate oil weapon falling into enemy hands. If we had wished to be moralistic, instead, we could have gone into Iraq the way my leftwing friends suggest we go into Darfur, or any other of several dozen places where murderous tyrants are holding defenceless populations in fear and subjection. But my leftwing friends are complete hypocrites: for if Mr Bush, or Mr Blair, or Mr Harper, or anyone on our side, led such a true humanitarian crusade, they would all start moaning about “imperialism”, and demanding an “exit strategy”. If the troops we parachuted (the only effective way to stop massacres) encountered the slightest resistance (always a possibility in war), their favourite media would be headlining, “Quagmire!” But, PTL, Mr Bush and company did not choose to be moralistic. They made hard-headed calculations of the dangers that confront the Western world, in light of direct experience of possible ramifications -- remember 9/11? -- and acted, in Mr Bush’s case at least, with the overwhelming support of an electorate. Electorates being the fickle things they are, his approval ratings are now spiralling through the mud. Yet what he did was right and necessary, and it is because he did it that we are not yet confronting a bigger nightmare -- including, by this point down the road not travelled, the likely loss of the regular oil supply to fuel the big SUVs in which several of my aforementioned leftwing friends drive the large families they don’t have. Plus a few other things that would follow from the collapse of everything around us. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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