all the headlines and pictures i’ve come across so far are big shows of jubilation and glee; everyone interviewed by the news sources seems happy and thrilled that the dictator has been captured. he was hiding in a hole in the ground outside his hometown. literally. and all the American news sources celebrate this extraction from the earth.
(pretty long entry ahead…)
it’s a bit difficult for me to not feel like it smacks of Bush’s Thanksgiving photo-op or Jessica Lynch’s well-staged rescue (more on both of those in another post) The timing of this rescue is perfect: Democrats have been commanding much more coverage as of late with the recent crowning of Howard Dean as the Democratic front-runner by our favorite has-been candidate Al Gore. What better way to steal back the momentum and thunder by announcing Saddam’s capture?
so the question is: what happens next? So we got Saddam… now where does he go? Does he go to Guantanamo? Does he get executed? Does he go to trial? And for what purpose does any of that happen? And more importantly, what happens to Iraq?
The man was found in a hole in the ground, unshaven and bedraggled in his own country. He clearly didn’t have the means or the money or the support to go someplace else, as Osama bin Laden probably has. When I was talking with my friend Jeff this, I asked him offhand, “how come we haven’t found Osama yet?” He replied with, “Well, Osama’s a real terrorist. He knows how to hide.”
And he was right. One man is a real terrorist who can provide support (financial, military, and ideological) through a global network to allow acts such as 9/11 to happen. The other man is a little man in big man shoes, who’s spent years trying to play with the big boys of Mideast politics (the US, Iran, Israel), bluffing his way into being a threat in an effort to protect his own fragile power. He bluffed about the WMD. He bluffed about biological weapons. It’s a smart thing to do — play the “I’m a big man, so don’t mess with me” card is quite effective. To use a bad prison analogy, you fight one good fight the first day you get into jail, or else you face being gang-raped the rest of your time in. It’s an effective natural defense — you see it in nature all the time. for instance, the blowfish.
So how impressive is it really to take down a man that, similar to the blowfish, is really just full of hot air? How impressive is it that this is a man who has no power at all in his country now, no power anyplace else, and is relegated to hiding in the dirt is now captured? Is this really a man to fear?
Saddam did do a lot of extremely abhorrent things to his people when he was in power. Frankly, his sons were far worse. But it is apparent now that much of it was a bit of Machiavellian necessity to keep order in the land. The US is trying to do just that bit of order-keeping right now, but it lacks the manpower and the wherewithal to run a country, although it’s doing a terrific job of siphoning off its oil. The government is killing civilians are a pretty snappy rate a day. “Innocents caught in the crossfire,” they say, although Human Rights Watch has noted that they could be doing a better job preventing a lot of those civilian deaths. I have little doubt that Saddam himself did much worse (his sons are another story for certain). The man had his job to keep, and part of keeping it was to keep bigger countries from eating it alive. This Saddam was no International Man of Mystery or global terrorist by any means. His sphere of influence extended to about as far to his backyard, and even then he had to make deals with bigger fish to keep himself in power. Iraq was our ally against Iran during the Reagan Administration, if we all remember…
So now, we’ve taken out a guy who can bluff his way into keeping order in a country (the best thing about it is that we’ve prevented his kids from taking power) and replaced it with… nothing. We don’t have an ‘escape plan.’ We don’t have a reasonable means of passing the power to any Iraqis without inciting civil wars of some sort. We don’t have a plan of how to run the place, although we’re really good at getting overcharged for gasoline.
And please pardon the Finding Nemo analogy throughout this post, but it’s a lot easier to kill a fish than run a fish tank. Destruction is easy. Building and maintenence is difficult: it requires patience, a willingness to think for the long-term, and a great deal of attention. Real, actual, on-the-ground power is not a pretty thing to wield. The US is acting as if its international posturing can substitute for actually running a country at the ground level. It doesn’t have the resources. It doesn’t have the international support to run a new government in Vietnam. Oh I’m sorry, was I talking about Vietnam? I meant Iraq.
Yes, it’s a terrific symbolic victory to have captured the man who aided and abetted 9/11 (or no .. wait, he didn’t), possessed weapons of mass destruction (or.. wait, he didn’t have those either), and was a fearsome global power (wait… this guy ended up being found hiding in hole in ground outside his hometown and not working his international connections and staying at the Waldorf Astoria or something). So what did we accomplish? We’ve outed this former lapdog of the US government for the pathetic man he really is. Great! Now what about running the country he left behind?
All I really hope is that people don’t see the symbolic victory of his capture as any sort of actual victory. We’ve got a long way to go in building a truly peaceful Iraq. There won’t be salacious pictures or any terrific photo op to show that kind of victory off, but people need to realize that that kind of truth is sweeter than any kind of breathless villain capture fiction.