 Previous posts
What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: XXIX i didn't give a fuck if i was locked up, should be... physically strong! MORALLY (not mentally) straight! in a white t, lookin for wifey An angel rides in the whirlwind What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: X... What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: X... What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: XXVI The pump don't work cause the vandals took the han... What gives you the right to fuck with our lives: XXV Sunday, November 05, 2006
The devil has many faces, yours just fits:
You don't have to be an enthusiast for the Iraq war to cheer, unreservedly, the death sentence of Saddam Hussein. The man was truly a monster. For all the criticism that has come his way, no one explained the enormity of Saddam Hussein's crimes more eloquently, passionately and effectively than Kanan Makiya, whose books Republic of Fear and Cruelty and Silence will remain classics of dissident history and polemic. Still, there are at least two questions to consider.
The more academic question is whether the process that has led to the end of Saddam can be considered a just one. And the answer is, tragically, no: the trial has been a farce from start to finish, characterized by incompetance, negligence, and violence. The U.S. and its Iraqi accomplices rejected the proven model for success here, an international tribunal, for fear that it would become a forum to put the occupation on trial and allow Saddam a venue to froth and inveigh. He did anyway. Then is the question of whether the end of Saddam Hussein can lead to the birth of a better, more decent Iraq, and here the answer, as well, is no. On the right, the trope continues that whatever the crimes of the occupation, Saddam was worse. In one sense, it's undoubtedly true that the moral difference between deliberate murder and deaths caused by negligence, incompetance, indifference and inadvertence is a huge, yawning chasm. But that doesn't exculpate the U.S. by a long shot. By one estimation, Saddam was responsible for over 800,000 deaths in his 20-plus years in power. Say we shave off 100,000 casualties from the Lancet study, and the three-and-a-half year war has seen over 500,000 deaths, with no end in sight. This, it needs to be recognized, is a moral nightmare that the architects of the war will never be held accountable for. And for what? An Iraq of pitiless sectarian murder and advantage, veering between raw mob rule and crude Islamist force, where anyone with the ability and the means has left for the cooler environs of Amman or London or anywhere else. Where every American and Iraqi death is an indictment of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Franks, Myers, Powell, Armitage, Wolfowitz, Cambone, Feith, Luti, Libby, Hannah, Shulsky, Rubin, Schenker, Bremer, Sanchez, Miller, Odierno, Karpinski, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, Zarqawi, Chalabi, al-Sadr, al-Dhari, al-Hakim, Allawi, al-Jaafari, al-Maliki, Sistani. May they never live down what they have taken from us. This also must be remembered as we cheer the gallow's-march of Saddam Hussein. [CLARIFICATION: I include myself in the TNR category here.] --Spencer Ackerman
"Where every American and Iraqi death is an indictment of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Tenet, Franks, Myers, Powell, Armitage, Wolfowitz, Cambone, Feith, Luti, Libby, Hannah, Shulsky, Rubin, Schenker, Bremer, Sanchez, Miller, Odierno, Karpinski, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, Zarqawi, Chalabi, al-Sadr, al-Dhari, al-Hakim, Allawi, al-Jaafari, al-Maliki, Sistani" |
