Saturday, December 30, 2006

Sunday Sermon

Sympathy for the Devil

For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler's concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period in my life, a period that would never return?
—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
—Joseph Stalin

But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.
—The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil

I confess: I think he went out like a man.
He refused the hood while his executioners concealed their faces. He betrayed no fear or resentment (at least while the cameras were on). I don’t know if this was design or merely resignation, but it serves as a brilliant final act of defiance. A more striking portrait of our failure in Iraq, and the tragic assumptions creating it, you couldn’t devise: the dictator Hussein can bare his face, but his executioners cannot.
If he could not transfer the shame that he did not (and would not know how to) possess, he could still compel fear, and it was a well grounded fear that required his hangmen to hide their identities. Now this defiant and, yes, dignified death, will help to sustain the remnants of his supporters a little while longer, as they spend themselves in bloodthirsty revenge. His evil outlives him. How many despots can claim to strike from the very grave?

I’ll further confess: I felt pity for him.
No small part of that pity is due to the fact that his death marks the terminus of yet another passage in my own too-fleeting life. In our lives. He became part of our culture, an exemplar of brutality that we made into a caricature of evil. This is my sacrilege: I will mourn the phenomenon that was Saddam in the American imagination. As accomplished as he was at despotism, he was helpless once he became a representation in the panoply of cultural archetypes. In the end he never had a chance.

But why sympathy for this monster? Sympathy for the unsympathetic can help to clarify things. The pressure to give no quarter to those identified as beyond redemption, inherently religious (if not very Christian), blinds us; this is how we allowed this war to happen. It became a widely held article of faith that “bringing Saddam to justice” was a morally unassailable act. This was the distraction, the magician’s puff of smoke.
So it helps if we can take our eyes away from it. If you put out of your mind for a moment Saddam’s visage, it becomes clear just what the Administration was up to when the were plastering it all over the news and hypocritically wailing, “he gassed his own people!”

If we can strip away the false outrage of our conniving leaders, if we can resist the pull of the mass, if we can brave the condemnation that would all but declare us complicit in mass murder, we can see things as they are, not as they are packaged and presented for consumption.
I, for one, am willing to consider that Saddam, the sociopath, may have been the best Iraq could have hoped for, for the time being. The moral thing to do regarding Saddam Hussein may have been to leave him right where he was, contained and constrained, with the clock nearing midnight. This is considered unthinkable by many out of little more than habit; unutterable by people who clamor for more chaos, more warfare, more troops fed into the grinder of Iraq. But never trust someone who advocates war on moral grounds. He is either a liar or a fool; or both.

Iraq deserved a chance at a peaceful denouement to the Saddam years. Iraq deserved its chance to develop by increments a more civilized means of governance. Saddam wasn’t going to live, or last, forever; weakened and contained he was destined to live out his life limited even in his capacity to control all of Iraq.
Of course, Vice President Cheney didn’t want to allow Iraq to determine its own fate; he didn’t have the time or patience for that. What he wanted was certainty; certainty regarding the circumstances of the lifting of sanctions and the development of Iraq’s vast oil wealth. The war was a gambit unrecognized as such, disguised as necessity and glorified as a crusade. These are the crimes we should concern ourselves with.

As Saddam and his executioners prayed together before he was taken away, two of his guards chanted the name of what is perhaps his likeliest successor: “Moktada, Moktada, Moktada.” Removing Saddam was always the easy part; treating him as an aberration was naïve. Now Iraq must pay for our naivete.
This is the justice the vanity and ignorance of our president, manipulated by his more cunning but barely more capable handlers, bestows upon the world. The greatest nation on earth, relegated to the role of spoiler in the dismal realm of Iraqi politics.

Justice was never ours to render; Saddam, and Iraq, committed no crimes against us. Some of these crimes were in fact abetted or willfully ignored by us, hence the truncated nature of his trial and the haste of his execution, before the defendant was given the chance to embarrass the United States. Saddam would pass out of the custody of the U.S. military just hours before he would hang, and no doubt not until every assurance had been made that there would be no delay in sending him to the gallows. This was not justice, this was an expression of power. Worse, it was an uncertain, ignoble, and unconfident expression of power.

Justice is for the aggrieved, for the people; for nations there is only the law, accomodation, or war. That’s why the triumphalism, now so pathetically muted in passive acknowledgement of its absurdity, surrounding the capture and conviction of Saddam Hussein stinks of dishonesty. Originally we, and the Iraqis, were supposed to be sated by this offering; now it takes place with the same furtive, anxious air that accompanied the transfer of sovereignty.

The inter-war years were spent distilling in the public mind the image of Saddam Hussein as our era’s Joseph Stalin. Our culture, comprised largely of television and cinema dominated by satirical irreverence, unwittingly served the wilderness-dwelling neocons’ ends by maintaining this mythology of Saddam Hussein as a singular evil. Saddam was presented not as a product of Mesopotamia’s tribal culture, but as if he had welled up out of the Iraqi desert like the bitumen that was recorded near what is now Baghdad as early as 3000 B.C. (the earliest such)—a byproduct of the true source of our interest, and as great a cause of Iraq’s woes as anything else.
We have forsaken the law to take advantage of our power, to wage war at will and to eschew any responsibility for defending our actions. Might makes right. It is a foreign policy so corrupt that it threatens to destroy us. Our incompetent leadership, by no means limited to the Administration, have taken this priceless advantage in power and turned it against us by employing it profligately. They will destroy us by it, if we allow them.

Now, with the farce of Saddam’s trial, the Bush Administration weakens, not just for us but for the world, international law and the concept of crimes against humanity.
Our neocon elders scoff at the notion of international law. It is toothless; it allows such as Saddam to endure. What is concealed in all the lofty, and not-so-lofty, rhetoric about flabby diplomacy and compromised internationalism, is the fact that their arguments amount to no more than this: international law and diplomacy are imperfect. Even as we get an abject, tragic lesson in just how much more imperfect and destructive is their new order imposed by an American colossus, they remain unrepentant, and more insistent by the day. They are impervious to reason because they have come to the conclusion that reason is a detriment. They believe in will and power creating reality; reason has nothing to do with it.

For them there is only this illusory redemptive power of might and will. We invaded a nation, eradicated its government and imprisoned its leadership; we created a rump legal system with which to try and execute its dictator for crimes we either ignored or encouraged before he became inconvenient to us.

We justify this by citing the list of Saddam’s crimes, yet we hastened his execution before the worst of these crimes can be tried in court. Even as we are drawn into the maelstrom of Arab tribal violence our own actions have precipitated, and our warmongers demand ever more severe measures be taken to subdue the nation they claim we have liberated. It is worse than a farce; it is a crime. But one must ask: what has been accomplished?
We have delivered Iraq from Saddam to Moktada, or whatever new villain or cast of villains might prevail after an extended period of chaos and bloodshed.

Neocons like to aver that the previous status quo goal of stability in the Middle East is a decadent and immoral order that we have the obligation to shatter and replace with transformative democracy. Don’t you believe it, because they certainly don’t.
At least not the first-string players, many of whom are pointing fingers at the coaches, management, the fans even, everyone but themselves, and the game's not even over yet.
The neocon agitprop bench-warmers, now gleefully exulting in the playing minutes they’re getting in our political equivalent of junk-time, don't seem to even know what game they're playing. Frightening; more frightening, to me at least, than a weak despot halfway around the world.

What they want is a new world order entirely on our terms; impossible to attain and beyond any rational justification. They continue to promote their madness because they have committed themselves to the process, and turning back now means surrender, while driving onward means that they may still manage to saddle the nation, and the world, with the fait accompli of a broadened war in the Middle East. They are forcing the issue; “immanentizing the eschaton.” They are not a “new” sort of conservative; they are not any sort of conservative. They are radicals of the worst order, provocateurs of global strife. They are of a kind with anarchists, communists, fascists--and they have gained influence within a nation of unprecedented global power.
This is what the execution of Saddam Hussein means.

If our leaders were truly outraged by Saddam’s crimes against humanity they would have confidently turned him over to an international court, not to the Shi’ite thugs so eager to take up his mantle.
Turning a murderer over to those he has sinned against may carry some justice, it may very well be deserved, but it isn't necessarily lawful. Justice is ephemeral and subjective, rendered by those with might or the moment’s advantage; the law binds and limits us all, weak and strong alike. It is an imperfect buttress against tyranny and chaos; it is also the essence of civilization. But it imposes limitations, even upon the strong. Even upon us. This is the target of our necon radicals; the reason for their unblushing embrace of war and power, and their shameful slandering of diplomacy and international law. Seeing that we are strongest they declare, for the world, the rule of the strongest. They justify it by citing our moral superiority; a moral superiority that is forfeit by the same expression of global might that they identify as its natural and proper mandate.

Note how many who justify the war because of the brutality of Hussein clamor for ever sterner measures in suppressing the insurgency. It’s not merely that they propose killing to put an end to killing; we all know that in some circumstances this can be justified, if it’s the destruction of criminal renegades waging war upon a peaceful majority, or of one hostile nation assaulting another. But if the war has taught us anything, it’s that Saddam Hussein was less an aberration than a refinement of Arabic brutality. Shortly after Ayad Allawi was selected as interim prime minister of Iraq, a story circulated about him summarily executing, by his own hand, a prisoner to establish his authority. Some applauded this, comically, gruesomely, unaware of the irony.

Saddam once held utility for us; he did so when we encouraged and assisted his brutal and mindlessly bloody assault on Iran (and this is why he wasn’t allowed to live to speak to the charges of war crimes concerning it); he did so when Donald Rumsfeld, that virtuoso of moral equivalence and obfuscation, declined to impolitely mention the gassing of the Kurds when he shook hands with Hussein in 1983.*
Our complicity vis a vis Iraqi brutality was one reason why so many leftists became neocon fellow travelers; Christopher Hitchens has made the argument that Gulf War I and the sanctions regime of the nineties caused undue harm upon the people of Iraq; subsequently they had become our wards, to be rescued from Saddam and turned over to the beneficent embrace of Hitchens' friend, Ahmad Chalabi.

But Saddam fit too well the role in which he was cast. In the end perhaps it was the moustache that did him in. It was too perfect, too Stalinesque. Had he a lesser moustache, maybe a thin, Latin-playboy thing, he wouldn’t have looked so imposing, and would have veered too much toward comic and away from sinister; had he been clean shaven, he might not have so easily been seared in the American public’s imagination.

It was his ability to capture the public’s fascination that made it so very easy for Dick Cheney and his criminal gang of fools to conflate him with jihadi terrorists in the public’s mind. These same terrorists would have liked to take him out themselves; they were kept at bay by the same brutality that Hussein used to suppress his moderates. We have done them a favor. Don’t expect them to reciprocate. Of course now this tragic, monumental blunder, making a potential terrorist haven where one had virtually no chance of arising, out of the nation with the second richest oil reserves in the world, is offered as the very reason to press on, without even the slightest acknowledgement of the irony. And I began by saying Saddam had balls!

Perhaps it marks me out as finally and utterly dissolute, but I can’t muster any sense that justice has been served by the hanging of Saddam Hussein (this is not the same as saying he didn’t deserve it; they are not the same thing). I can’t, I won’t, pretend to draw satisfaction from it. Maybe it’s my inherent racism, my lack of sophistication, my isolationism (isolationism and xenophobia of course consisting of standing against killing foreigners in our perverse times), to care far more for the fate of my country than for that of another. But I don’t think so.
Maybe I’ve grown too old to humor myself, or my fellows.

But tonight, at least once, I will raise my glass and silently toast a true hall-of-fame despot; he nearly made it all the way to 2007, after spending the last thirteen years in a state of war with the United States. No mean feat, that.

*Correction: Udolpho points out in the comments thread that the use of poison gas against the Kurds happened in 1988. Dohh! That's going to leave a mark.

11 comments:

Dennis Mangan said...

About the hangmen: what was striking about the hoods was their retro quality. They looked like cartoon hangmen. But executioners have long been taboo in certain societies, the trade is often passed from father to son, and the masks are traditional.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps, it should be known as the night they didn't hang Osama bin Laden -- Saddam merely being the face the the neocons taped on our 9/11 efforts. Saddam's evil helped make the neocon corruption possible. Perhaps, like you, I see Saddam's evil, but I am more concerned with the corruption of my own country.

One imagines the Bush people must constantly whisper in george's ear that history will be the real judge; thus, making sure he never changes policies. Let us hope he hears those same whispers in this case. The lives lost, the billions squandered. The how-to manual that goes out every day over the airwaves to tyrants around the world: How to Win Against American Power; which came with a companion edition that came out in Lebanon: How to Win the War Against Israeli Power. In the end, will the neocons deserve the credit for pulling Israel down, too?

George Bush's advertisement for democracy started out as: "Do you fear me now? Do you fear me now? And now the world answers....'well, ...not really."

The policy is a failure, but they got their man. We closed his chapter and opened a thousand more books in the process. Pathetic.

Anonymous said...

Saddam was more megalomaniacal, less competent, more brutal than the typical middle eastern dictator -- Syria, also a Ba'ath nation, was and is a far more humane place to live than Iraq under Saddam. Likewise even for Iran and Egypt. Saddam's propensity for starting wars was especially destructive; note that those other nations are also less aggressive. So in that sense we shouldn't rush to identify him as the "best the Middle East can hope for".

With that said, I agree with most of your post. Now watch as we start to caricature Sadr as a thug and a monster, just as we did with Saddam. Sadr is violent and brutal, but he is the product of a violent and brutal nation, and I don't think we know his possibilities as a good leader yet. He is clearly clever and courageous.

MQ

Dennis Dale said...

What I set out to express here was the sense of contradiction and moral displacement as described in the quote taken from Kundera, that I felt learning of Hussein’s execution. I got sidetracked, as so often, railing against the neocons. I hope to later explore this subject more properly. Right now thinking is difficult; holding down food is impossible; breathing and heartbeat irregular. Hangovers and blows to the head require more recuperative time the older one gets (and their effects are increasingly indistinguishable).

Good point about the hangmen; they are always masked. I think I was thrown by the group's resemblance to an Eastern European criminal gang, with their ski masks and leather coats. Perhaps if it had been a guy in a pointy black hood and an S&M style get-up I would have caught on.

You’re right that I shouldn’t dismiss Saddam's expansionist tendencies and particularly brutal domestic rule; I don’t mean to suggest he is par for the course in the Middle East. He was uniquely brutal, for any time or place.
Obviously Iraq can produce better, and will someday; but that is for Iraq to determine and manage. It will take that much longer now that our occupation is serving to purge the nation of its professional classes.

I keep coming back to this conclusion: the rhetoric of the neocons is fundamentally dishonest; democracy promotion is a means to an end, an end envisioning global dominance achieved by maintaining the advantage in the oil rich Middle East. It seems obvious to me, though some think “war for oil” is a crackpot slogan. Crackpot is a better description for George Bush’s transformative eternal war of democracy, of course, and I feel that in due time this will all become clear.

War hawks have been taking advantage of the sad fact that our involvement in the Middle East, necessitated by oil, produced bin Laden, leaping upon anyone who points this out as "blaming America" for the horrors of 9/11. Nonsense. It doesn’t help us to reduce the motivations of our enemies to politically palatable, vague dictums like “they hate us for our freedom.”
The real point is that the neocons are as "realist" as anyone, they just disguise their Machiavellianism as a democratic crusade. They are, merely, celebrants of power as a redemptive force. I truly believe that many of them don’t understand this.
Clarity is needed now, more than ever. The brain-splitting hangover pain piercing the fog in my head seconds this sentiment.

But back to the post. I should have pointed out that in addition to Hussein’s aggression going unopposed or encouraged by us prior to Kuwait, it stands in contrast to the two other Middle East nations the neocons insist on demonizing, Iran and Syria.
Their support for Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Hakim in Iraq (who was recently awarded an office with Bush), and the assassination of Hariri resembles the machinations of us and other world powers more than Saddam’s expansionist tendencies. Syria’s involvement in Lebanon stands out, but at least it was a case of a neighboring country subduing a brutal civil conflict and replacing it with stability (the dreaded S-word). Syria has only survived as a relatively poor nation in the ME through cunning and intrigue. We can’t change that overnight, contrary to what the neocons think. Imagine an assault on Syria or Iran. That people are still considering these options is chilling.

It's ironic that we demonize Iranian influence in Iraq: yes, how evil of them to seek advantage in the same country, still right there on their border, that invaded them and sought to appropriate their territory so recently, now a state in chaos; whereas we, from half a world away, not only seek to overthrow Iran's government, we have made it official policy.
Oh, right, because their president, whose authority is limited to domestic policy, says crazy things about the Holocaust and Israel. Who do we think we are, anyway? We should banish the phrase “regime change” from our vocabulary.

As for "best the Middle East can hope for", I only mean to suggest we allow the possibility that leaving Saddam in place was the right thing to do on behalf of the people of Iraq; I think it was, so to address the neocons on their own terms, regime change in Iraq has backfired horribly. I don’t know what the Iraqis, or any nation, is capable of. Neither, apparently, do the guys at AEI, PNAC, etc. I do know when to keep it in my pants, however.

Furthermore, worse than Saddam is even possible, not just the current chaos—clearly worse—that will have to yield to a new order eventually, but rule by the Ayatollahs may be as brutal or more so, and may have set back Iraq’s progress toward a more liberal future (and in spite of my inherent cynicism I do think that chances are better than not that Iraq, as all nations, is making its way toward this, in horrible, painful fits and starts—the thing about the neocons is they think they can compress history, and effect the changes of generations by applying a little military might; they are quacks).

There was a period under Saddam, before the disastrous invasion of Iran, when Iraq was making progress. Who knows what might have been, had Saddam not gone to war against Iran (who knows what might have been if we had pressured him not to, rather than encouraging him and assisting him with intelligence; I know, I know, I must really hate America!)

The hawks endlessly go on about the Cold War (leaving WWII delirium aside and the inherent inadequacy of any historical analogy), oblivious to the fact that containment worked. More importantly for me, containment is morally defensible; wars of aggression are not, no matter how bad the regime. Of course, we see now Iraq’s oil was the prize, its weakness combined with our 9/11 anxiety the opportunity, and Saddam’s cruelty the justification.

Anonymous said...

I think this is all a bit overheated and perhaps overemoted. Saddam's execution for war crimes was inevitable and I didn't find myself taking much note of the event.

However, at one point you remark upon the, I must say, rather trite point that Rummy once shook Saddam's hand. Of course diplomats often must consort with heads of state who are not, deep down, very nice people, and we can safely assume that there wasn't quite the same gleam in Rummy's eye as on the day he proposed to his wife or watched his first born emerge from the room. Now, that aside, since the United States was complicit in at the very least bolstering and arming Saddam's regime in the 80s, did we not perhaps have as one of our debts his eventual removal?

I think conflating the decision to remove him from power with the, as it turns out, quite over-ambitious decision to transform the entire nation of Iraq is a mistake that anti-war types make when they get a little too far into the spirit of their slogans.

By the way, the gassing of the Kurds happened in 1988.

Dennis Dale said...

Ouch. What can I say? They're not all gems, folks. Yes, this one has enough hot air to fly the Goodyear Blimp. I was a bit wary posting it.

I should have said Rumsfeld saw fit not to mention the use of poison gas in the Iran/Iraq war when he met with Saddam in '83. Despite my sloppiness, the point stands, and the point isn't that we were in the wrong to deal with Saddam before, but hypocritical to cite his previously tolerated brutality now as a casus belli.

I reject liberal intervention as a foreign policy goal.

I also reject the idea that we become in any way responsible for removing these despots with whom we have dealt with in the past. That's why, when someone says something like, "did we not perhaps have as one of our debts his eventual removal" I say categorically no. It's a dangerous business once we start thinking not only that we somehow can replace these brutes with something better, but that we are obligated by our unique position to do so. A thousand times no.

I know you offer it as an aside, but what I was clumsily trying to argue here was just that we should have more focused debates on war. Imagine how many people have a muddled idea of what we in fact were after in Iraq (some of them apparently serving high up in government). We never had a true debate on the Iraq war. Cheney controlled the message, the Democrats ran for cover, and before we knew it we owned Iraq.

Iraq is responsible for Saddam Hussein; that is an argument against both the leftist construct of the West as the cause of third world dysfunction, as well as the neocons' unrealistic goals of transplanting democrats for dictators. The neocons think they've found this angle, that anyone not democratically elected is illegitimate, therefore we have the right, even the obligation, to institute "regime change." I think this is a dangerous notion.

I don't know how a philosophy of principled non-intervention will survive in our complicated world. I'd just like to see us try it out for once. I think the time has come. Or perhaps it is being forced upon us.

It's a tricky thing when we start trying to set the world to right.
I'll settle for setting a higher standard on when we should get involved in the first place, i.e. war in response to a direct threat or aggression, as opposed to whatever it is we have now. And yes, limiting our involvement with tyrants.
That's all I was trying to say. Glorying in our "bringing Saddam to justice" only obfuscates the question: why this war?

But of course, when you see me posting a second lengthy response in the comments, it gives away that your criticism has found its mark.

Kerry said...

If the locals had strung him up at the nearest Esso station after digging him up out of the spiderhole that would be justice enough for him. "Principled non-intervention" is just a comforting way to tell yourself you're still a good person if you don't stop the mugger from beating up the old lady.

Dennis Dale said...

Tell that to the poor bastards we have stationed in Iraq, dodging the bullets and IEDs of your "old lady" population.
It's one thing to assist a nation that has been invaded, as we did in Kuwait, another thing altogether to use "regime change" as a foreign policy means. Who's mugging who?
If the locals had strung him up on the street it would have been far more in their tradition, which is my point. Justice has nothing to do with it.
We dishonor ourselves by supplying the rope.
Of course, if you still believe that we invaded Iraq to relieve its population of Hussein, you have a long way to go yet. You have fallen for the ruse.

Are you now condemning us for not occupying North Korea or much of sub-Saharan Africa?
How about our support for the current Ethiopian invasion of Somalia? Would you point out the helpless little old lady, please? Because all I see are men with guns and tanks. Oh, and particular U.S. interests, that might be better served by staying the hell out of it.

You bought that line of horsesh-t about Hussein's brutality having anything whatsoever to do with our invasion of Iraq, not me. You are being lied to.
The point of the post is this: do not mistake means for ends, or justification for motivation.

Anonymous said...

Fine essay, Mr. Dale--I was looking for an honest, incisive one like this, in vain, until now.

Keep up the great work.

Anonymous said...

Great post and comments, Dennis.

At the risk of using an inappropriate analagy, i.e. "what if we could have invaded Germany and executed Hitler in 1938" like the idiots who devised this 'regime change' in the first place, I am compelled to say that our adventure in Iraq reminds me very much of a similar adventure began a quarter century ago - the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

How'd that work out for them, anyway? Why do I continue to get the feeling that it'll pretty much affect us the same way?

Captain USpace said...

..
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
admire brutal dictators


absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
mourn evil tyrants
..

notice

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