Just Who Will This Benefit?
A dictator is dead. He was a bloody dictator. There are more like him around. There are others whose leadership of their countries has been responsible for far more deaths than the reign that Saddam Hussein imposed upon his people. A number of African countries come to mind. They have not been brought to account for their misdeeds, nor will they in all likelihood. Their adherence to their particular rule of law which has brought death to many is more odious than Saddam's. Among them can be found the name most familiar to westerners: George W. Bush.On the other hand, George Bush is not a dictator but a democratically-(legally?)elected leader of a great country who has misused the powers entrusted to him to launch an unneeded and unsupportable war on another nation simply because he wanted to. To set the record straight; to complete the task his father left undone. To let the world know that he meant business.
And his business, as it turns out, is dealing death. For his invasion is directly responsible for more deaths than we would like to think of; both of his own troops, those somewhat lesser of his "coalition of the willing" partners, and the far more numerous deaths occurring daily as a result of the lawlessness and sectarian violence his rash invasion of Iraq has unleashed.
In the end, Saddam Hussein was nothing but a poor, tired old man. A somewhat puzzled man I would venture to say, as well. Since he received great encouragement from the United States when he launched his ill-fated war against Iran - as both he and the U.S. reacted in fear and loathing to the newly-installed theocracy under Ayatollah Khomeini, fearing lest the caustically extreme Shi'ism infest Iraqis with the same Islamic ardour.
To his credit, in his last statement to his people, particularly those Baathist Sunnis who still venerate him, Saddam enjoined them not to hate, since hatred obscures the intelligence and causes people to react in a self-injurious manner. One might suppose that Saddam did not hate when he ordered the deaths of Kurds and other Iraqis who sought to foment rebellion against him. His intelligence informed him that his enemies must be destroyed and he responded accordingly.
At the present time Iraqi Sunnis and Shi'ites have long abandoned any vestigial intelligence they might once have owned, subordinating it entirely to the passionate embrace of hatred one against the other. The strongman gone, restraints born of fear are also gone, and vitriolic enmities are given free rein resulting in torture and murder, mutilations, rape, pillage, a total breakdown of civil order. This, the legacy of the Bush administration's decision to invade the country.
Saddam Hussein was no anomaly as a personage of note in the Middle East. This man shared the hostile tribal enmities that are so endemic among the populations there. In the ascendency, he was able to bring his own tribe to power and to ensure that power stayed with him he played the ruthless hand he was given by opportunity and circumstance. His tenure was, in fact, not quite as inimical to his people or their neighbours as, for example, that of Joseph Stalin in Russia.
As a former Iraqi resident, now living in Canada has been quoted to say: "The Sunnis and the Shiites will never see eye to eye. Bloodletting will not stop between these two. That's why you need a man like Saddam - while an evil man - to rule that country." Reasonable Iraqis, those who have fled the bloodshed and the bitter history to settle elsewhere to live civil and free lives understand the dynamics of what they've left behind full well.
Many of those same people had no wish to impose a death penalty upon Saddam Hussein, much as they feared and hated him. What purpose did it serve, after all? Once he was removed from power he became a ghostly presence of what he once was. While it's true that the evil men do lives long after they are gone, he was no longer capable of unleashing additional evil on the world.
The same cannot be said for the leaders of Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, and sadly, a whole host of others whose people cringe in fear of the present and worry over the bleak future of their offspring.
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, December 30, 2006
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