Another Sobering Milestone in Iraq

Last night, while I as hanging out with my friend Alex at the Salt Lake Roasting Company, the Iraqis hanged Saddam Hussein. If every time I went for coffee a dictator was terminated, I'd probably go more often. Last night, while I was reading the news and analysis on the matter, I came across this great obituary by Brian Bennett with Time. He wrote:

For many who watched it, the execution of Saddam Hussein was a personal vindication. He killed their brothers, uncles, tore apart their families and ran their beloved country into the ground. Even if his finger didn't pull the trigger, they blamed him for everything: every nail-biting visit by an intelligence officer, every midnight execution, every tongue cut out by a sadistic guard, every body in the mass graves at Hillah and Hawija and Musayeb. He projected absolute authority while he was in power and now faced absolute responsibility for every death under his rule. The moment the steel trap door below his feet was released, he suffered the absolute punishment — a powerless old man, dying alone.

In this sense, death at the gallows at the hands of his countrymen is a poetic ending for a man who spent his life terrorizing his own countrymen and his neighbors for the sole purpose of securing and enriching himself and his enablers. The timing of the execution was also poetic. Saddam's death came at the dawn of Eid ul-Adha, which commemorates Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Ismail (and not Isaac, as it was written in Genesis) out of obedience and devotion to Allah. Eid ul-Adha also marks the end of the Muslim Hajj.

Considering that many Shi'ite imams and ayatollahs in Iraq have publicly prayed to God to exact revenge on Saddam, was the timing of his execution lost on those who meted out the punishment? Even President Bush framed Saddam's execution in terms of justice and sacrifice, marking the incident as an "important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain and defend itself, and be an ally in the War on Terror."

I've always attested that the world is better off without a man like Saddam around to raise hell. In this regard, the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 accomplished a good deed. And I can appreciate the relief that many Iraqis must feel now that he is permanently, irrevocably gone. The Ba'athist party was such a personality cult that it is unlikely someone could rise up to take up the mantle of Saddam. He was so roundly humiliated during his capture and the trial that there is no mantle left. This, too, is a good thing.

But for the President's talk of a milestone on Iraq's journey toward democracy, I'm skeptical. We've heard these words from him before, after the completion of major combat operations (remember "mission accomplished"?), after the installation of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council, after the empaneling of the interim authority of Dr. Iyad Allawi, after the referendum on the constitution and the election of the current transitional government. The milestones go on and on, and yet the violence is unabated. There's nothing to suggest that the execution of a de-fanged dictator will be any different. In fact we are on the verge of yet another milestone: the 3,000th U.S. combat fatality.

For all the good we accomplished by removing one dictator from power, our follow-through has been grievously, criminally, devastatingly inept. Because of this, a unified Iraq isn't likely, let alone a healthy and prosperous democracy. Instead of making the world safer by bringing democracy and stability to the middle east, our mismanagement of the enterprise has sown the dragon's teeth for some future generation to contend with. As any student of the region will tell you, this war didn't begin with Saddam and it won't end with him, either.

(Image credit: John Fewings)