With the hanging of Saddam Hussein comes the end of an age. Much is made of the squalid circumstances of his hanging, the taunts, the profanity (which was pretty vile by Arabic standards), the gruesome dancing about under the gallows, not shown in the cell phone video, the press rubs our nose in this mess until small children emulate Saddam’s hanging. The age of the secular dictator is nearly over. The religious sansculottes Saddam spent his life repressing now hold sway. Saddam curtly told his executioners he’d fought the enemies of Iraq, and indeed he had: most of them religious. Now Iraq has become its own worst enemy. Were I completely cynical, I might conclude we had our reasons for our failure to "win" in Iraq. I have a theory why.
Executions are horrible things, even under the best of circumstances. Most civilized regimes have abolished the death penalty. Saddam leaves behind him thousands of crimes unsolved, decades of terror and genocide undocumented. The USA had no business handing Saddam over to Sadr’s sadistic goons, the same people who knifed Imam Khoei to death on the doorstep of a religious shrine.
The USA’s mission in Iraq was to provide security: surrendering our prisoner, captured at great cost in American lives, to a Shiite death squad, shows in microcosm both America’s and Iraq’s failure in this war. We have allowed these unshaven brutes to create a martyr of the cruelest dictator in modern times by our inaction.
Justice has not been served, not in the smallest fraction: the dead of Dujail remain dead. Saddam was never prosecuted for his gassing of the Kurds: there is an excellent reason for this curious omission. The USA and the world at large knew perfectly well what had gone on at the time in Kurdish territory, and said nothing. Donald Rumsfeld shook Saddam Hussein’s hand, for he was then the bulwark against Iran, back when the Ayatollah was the Assaholah. Any substantive examination of the gassing of the Kurds would point to American and European accessories to these crimes. For these reasons, and many others, we will never see an airing-out of Saddam’s crimes, such as a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. The truth is somewhat awkward for the Great Liberators: Saddam’s death brings down the curtain on Saddam’s grim record, and not a moment too soon. The Iraqi people, especially the Shii, understand the depth of the West’s connivance in Saddam’s decades of tyranny.
Inter arma enim silent leges: in wartime, the law is silent. The law is silent in our day as well, and in our own country: George Bush and his disgusting Attorney General need only to wave their hands about and cry, "We’re at waaaaar!" and all violations of civil rights are excused forthwith. Crude and obscene tortures are visited on our own prisoners, in third-party gulags, as we outsource our War on Terror to the very countries which gave rise to Al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad, Saudi Arabia and Egypt respectively.
The USA has sunk to the level of its immoral enemies, led into wars of revenge and atrocity by arrogant and fearful little shits like George Bush, a man completely devoid of spinal calcium and moral fibre. It speaks to his idealism and stupidity that he would seek to thrust yet more troops into this quagmire, to instill fear in his enemies, to ignore every sensible suggestion offered to him.
Saddam is the last of the great totalitarians: such is the title of this essay. The totalitarians of the last few centuries have been intensely secular men bent upon the creation of a state in their own image. They created cults of personalities around themselves, and to a man, have repressed people of faith. This is not to say totalitarianism is gone, North Korea is still around, a few old Commies still linger on in Europe, but they grow old and grey.
On my desk is an old souvenir my grandfather brought home from World War One, a German army belt buckle, reading Gott Mit Uns = God With Us. A few old rounds of various calibers are soldered to the back of the buckle, a trinket he probably bought from some enterprising Frenchman at war’s end. Clearly God was not on the side of Kaiser Bill, but I’m not sure he was on anyone’s side. God marches with the big battalions, it seems.
I predict the 21st century will bring a new form of totalitarian belief upon mankind, a much more ancient form of tyranny, and it will wear religious garb. Bush tells us God tells him what to do. The jihadis tell us God also tells them what to do. As governments grow increasingly irrelevant, and democracy’s muscles atrophy, the rule of law will give rise to new tyrannies of belief. We will perhaps re-learn the lessons of the 18th century, but not soon, and certainly not in Iraq. Bush has set in motion a far more evil thing, congruent with his neoconservative goals: an internecine war in Muslim lands, and ere all is said and done, a New Totalitarianism will arise. This war has already spread far beyond his ability to control it.