They Will Follow Us Home
Saddam Hussein was convicted Sunday and sentenced to hang for crimes against humanity in the 1982 killings of 148 people in a single Shiite town. The ousted leader, trembling and defiant, shouted “God is great!” as the judge handed down the verdict.
Saddam, his half brother and another senior official in his regime were convicted and sentenced to death by the Iraqi High Tribunal in one of the most highly publicized war crimes trials since the Nuremberg tribunals for members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and its slaughter of 6 million Jews in the World War II Holocaust.As the verdict was read, Saddam yelled out, “Long live the people and death to their enemies. Long live the glorious nation, and death to its enemies!”
It’s inexplicable to me that anyone but his defense counsel can defend this man’s right to exist on this earth and breathe our oxygen, yet undoubtedly many will.
“The verdict placed on the heads of the former regime does not represent a verdict for any one person. It is a verdict on a whole dark era that has was unmatched in Iraq’s history,” said Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite prime minister.
I hope he will hang soon:
The death sentences automatically go to a nine-judge appeals panel, which has unlimited time to review the case. If the verdicts and sentences are upheld, the executions must be carried out within 30 days.
A court official told The Associated Press that the appeals process was likely to take three to four weeks once the formal paperwork was submitted.
I also hope that it will be public. Saddam’s surviving victims deserve to see justice done, just as I hope that I will soon see the hanging of Ramzi Binalshibh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, and the rest of those who did this:
Well. What is he doing in that picture, when it’s written on the sacred texts that one had nothing to do with the other? Strong evidence of that specific connection is absent, but if we extend the absence of evidence to evidence of absence, it was only for a lack of means, not will. The evidence of Saddam’s connection with al-Qaeda was strong, although the relationship appears to have been mostly latent. The evidence of his support for terror and harboring of terrorists — including one wanted for the ’93 WTC bombing — was overwhelming. It’s too bad to observe, in retrospect, how bad out intelligence on Iraq was, but I’m also glad his WMD programs were in hibernation, because it means fewer of our soldiers died in the initial invasion. The world’s intelligence community was unanimously wrong about his WMD stockpiles, but ignoring that intelligence would have been the province of (a) the clairvoyant, (b) the irresponsible, and (c) the suicidally passive. If it’s honest to say that our intelligence was mostly wrong, it’s an equally honest reading of the evidence to say that it was just a matter of time before he had, and used, WMD’s. Again. Hans Blix didn’t find many missiles, but it turns out that the missile factory was still on order … from North Korea.
Then, of course, there are people who believe that the President “lied” so that we would go to war. Those people are what we refer to as “retarded;” a more profoundly retarded breed of cat thinks that 9-11 was also a Bush conspiracy. You have to wonder why the executors of these massive, seamless conpiracies couldn’t even manage to plant some convincing fake WMD’s in Iraq. If that allegation were credible or supported by any evidence, it would be patriotic to expose such official mendacity. Because it is facially illogical, it is unpatriotic to allege it while our soldiers are under fire. That’s particularly true when it comes from some of the same representatives who voted for the war but find it politically convenient to undermine the war effort now. John Kerry, for example, must have really faltered in his academic discipline, because he believed the same intelligence that President Bush believed. He wasn’t the one who had to be “stuck” with the consequences, however. Things got harder, conveniences shifted, and the soldiers Kerry helped order into the line of fire became the objects of his snide slurs. (The “Bush lied” meme is often hypocritical as well; how many of those who now think we should have given Saddam the benefit of the doubts Saddam himself created also excoriated the Bush Administration for not being alarmist enough about Afghanistan in its first eight months? I’ll vote for a full-time alarmist any day, but I would have fired George Tenet and plenty of his deputies by the end of 2003.)
All of which is completely beside the point.
Whatever you think of why we went in, we are fighting three enemies in Iraq: one is chaos, one is implacable terror, and the third is our own escapism. There are reasonable differences in how we should fight the chaos. I’ve always been ambivalent about transforming savage places into civilized ones overnight, and Iraq is an especially savage place. Perhaps midwifing Iraq into a free society requires a few more years of benevolent authoritarianism, checked by limited popular representation — an Iraqi Park Chung-Hee or a Lee Kwan-Yew. In a few years, when literacy is over 90% and unemployment is below 15%, when some sort of culture of tolerance and order takes root, it will be time to move forward. Those are tactical questions.
The other enemy is implacable. We can leave Iraq, and they will follow us to Afghanistan, Europe, and as too many of us have forgotten, to our own homeland. There will be new Tora Boras where our enemies will design even more depraved ways to kill us. Their numbers and spirits will be buoyed with victory. Those who root for our defeat today will not forgive us our happiness and prosperity; they will despise us more than ever. Iraq will become another Cambodia, and hundreds of thousands (with a number of terrorists assuredly among them) will knock on our doors seeking refuge. We could defeat this enemy, which has inflicted a toll on our force that is statistically infinitessimal compared to what we lost in previous wars. The question is whether we will.
The third enemy, the only one that can defeat us, is ourselves. There is room for debate about how this war should be fought, but there is no escaping our problems in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else by running from them. Ask advocates of retreat how it will make our country safer or, for that matter, end the war in Iraq, and they will assuredly change the subject because they can’t see beyond the cost of the war. Iraq is a mess and a shithole. It has been one for a long time, and it will continue to be one for a long time. Anyone who expected otherwise going in — left, right, or other — is either a fool or lying. Our lives are free and easy. We have become accustomed to drive-up, swipe-your-card, hassle and sacrifice-free convenience. This is one of those things in life that won’t be easy. Yes, when tactics don’t work, we change them, but sometimes you have to fight for the thing that matters. I say this as someone with a good friend, a Marine, lying gravely wounded from a sniper’s bullet a few miles away. Is it worth it? Every time I look into the eyes of my children, I know that it is. That’s because I can see the alternative.
Update: Someone bothers to ask the soldiers on the ground the “what if?” question:
“Take us out of that vacuum — and it’s on the edge now — and boom, it would become a free-for-all,” said Lt. Col. Mark Suich, who commands the 1st Squadron, 89th Cavalry Regiment just south of Baghdad. “It would be a raw contention for power. That would be the bloodiest piece of this war.”
….
Capt. Jim Modlin, 26, of Oceanport, N.J., said he thought the situation in Iraq had improved between his deployment in 2003 and his return this year as a liaison officer to Iraqi security forces with the 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, based here on FOB Sykes outside Tall Afar. Modlin described himself as more liberal than conservative and said he had already cast his absentee ballot in Texas. He said he believed that U.S. elected officials would lead the military in the right direction, regardless of what happens Tuesday.
“Pulling out now would be as bad or worse than going forward with no changes,” Modlin said. “Sectarian violence would be rampant, democracy would cease to exist, and the rule of law would be decimated. It’s not ‘stay the course,’ and it’s not ‘cut and run’ or other political catchphrases. There are people’s lives here. There are so many different dynamics that go on here that a simple solution just isn’t possible.”
Lieberman aside, I’d like to hear some good options for “changing course” that aren’t really code for “bravely run away.” We’re a better country with a real two-party system, and for all the mistakes you might ascribe to how the war has been run, I don’t see a coherent alternative coming from the Dems, much less a meritorious one. Escapism is no substitute for a policy.