Saddam Hussein

Often I listen to BBC World News as a way of getting outside the vortex that is the American world view. On Thursday morning, they ran a story that was both fascinating and horrifying. It was a report on traveling dramas that are being performed in eastern India. The plays depict Saddam Hussein in his last days as a dictator, illustrate his fall from power, and often portray his execution. The upshot of these plays, which are set up as morality tales, is to suggest that Saddam was a bad guy but not, perhaps, as bad as George W. Bush. I found the whole story chilling. Chilling because it reveals how deeply suspect the American government has become in the eyes of other nations. Chilling because, as bad and as ineffective as he has been, George W. Bush is no Saddam Hussein. The good will of the world was with us in the aftermath of September 11 but the existence and popularity of these plays demonstrates that we have squandered every last bit of it.

I always doubted the wisdom of the Iraq war and I never bought the rationale that the Bush Administration offered: life, especially political life, is simply not that black and white. But I never doubted that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. His government did maintain stability in an unstable region but he did so at great personal cost to certain segments of the Iraqi population, especially the Kurds. I will forever see in my mind photos of a Kurdish genocide ordered by Saddam in which small children are dead in their play, gassed to death by Saddam's regimes. When George W. Bush took office in 2000, the question of how to help the Iraqi people achieve independence and dignity was an issue of real merit. Considering the idea did not make the Bush Administration wrong.

It was the Bush Administration's proposed cure for the Iraqi disease that made them wrong. The political factors that allowed someone like Saddam Hussein to hold power in Iraq were complicated. The potential instability of Saddam's fall from power was eminently predictable. These problems were not going to go away in a blaze of expensive American weaponry. In principle, getting rid of Saddam Hussein may have been a good idea. He was a bad guy. But principles and reality are very different things. And in Iraq, when principle met practice in the form of an American invasion, real mistakes were made. I cannot cheer the American removal of Saddam because the consequences have been so wholly terrorizing to thousands more Iraqis. When we decided to occupy a sovereign state to remove their ruler, we took on the solemn duty of making things better for the people involved. We certainly shouldn't have made things worse. And despite the assurances of the Bush Administration, it is clear that we have failed on all fronts. Daily Iraqi life has not improved. The potential terror of Saddam's regime has been replaced by a regime characterized by instability, ethic cleansing, and civil war. This is not good.

Despite our good intentions, and I do believe we sincerely hoped to do well by the Iraqis, we made things worse for the Iraq and by extension the entire region. Now all of the Middle East and beyond suspects our motives and the cherished ideals for which we must stand: the defense of human rights, liberty, self-government and the right be to truly free. Though I often fear that Americans no longer understands the meaning of those ideals, they are meaningful and they do matter.

India is a democracy --- a system like our own, the kind of system we were so eager to bring to Iraq and are to eager to spread around the world. The Indian nation is filled with people who once respected America and Americans. Many probably still do. But as I listened to crowds of people cheering on a morality play that placed Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush in the same moral category, I realized the depths to which George W. Bush's foreign policy has brought the United States. And I am truly afraid for the nation of mankind.