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Documentary filmmaker and scholar of terrorism Kevin Toole had an interesting piece in the Times of London in November in which, anticipating the execution of Saddam Hussein, he did the math and pronounced the American occupation both the loser
and the greater evil of the two.
Now that Saddam is hanged and Bush 2 is yammering about this (conveniently timed) "milestone" at a time when that country's
implosion into civil war is killing dozens of Iraqis and Americans daily, it is fair to ask the question: Who was worse for
Iraq: Saddam or W?
Toole's computation -- and I think it is a sound one -- is that George W. Bush wins the nightmarish distinction of having
done more to decimate Iraq than the blood-soaked dictator from whom Bush claimed to liberate the country.
The physical and moral arithmetic in comparing the destruction wrought by Saddam and W, respectively, is cruelly straightforward.
As Toole posits it, it comes down to two essential measurements:
1.) How many Iraqis died under each? It is safe to say that Saddam and Bush 2 are each responsible for the deaths of anywhere
from tens to hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, depending on which estimates you believe. Whatever the exact numbers, it appears
likely that the two men have generated comparable carnage.
2.) How has the nation of Iraq survived under each? In the case of Saddam, his brutal regime of ruthlessly paranoid operatives,
paid-off officials and well-oiled networks of imprisonment and torture managed, through a precisely-calibrated mixture of
fear and patronage, to keep the country running. The power grid worked. People went to work and came home. The wheels of secular
government -- fascist and dictatorial as they were -- turned. (And let us not forget the key role played by the United States
-- wasn't that Reagan envoy Donald Rumsfeld we saw shaking Saddam's hand in that goodwill photo in 1983? -- in propping up Hussein's efficient dictatorship.) Contrast this with Bush's Iraq, in which virtually nothing
works, national government is functionally nonexistent, unemployment is stratospheric, and order has almost entirely dissolved.
So on the one hand, you have a dictator who killed tens or hundreds of thousands and kept the country running. And on the
other, you have an invader who has, to date, killed tens or hundreds of thousands and also destroyed the country.
As I said, the math isn't complicated.
The way that Toole sums it up is that the only act crueler than gripping a nation in an iron dictatorship is plunging it into
utter chaos: unmitigated slaughter, a total absence of security, and a breakdown of any semblance of order.
So those formerly ruled by Saddam have now met the enemy. And he is us.
I suspect that this tortuous question -- of our intervention having made Iraq worse than it was before we ostensibly tried
to "save" it -- is as often quietly pondered by Americans of conscience as it is avoided by our leaders and our journalists.
Meanwhile, amid the flaming wreckage, our own presidential megalomaniac flaunts the corpse of Saddam and raises a champagne
glass to propose a toast to triumph.
Happy New Year.
© 2006 Bruce A. Jacobs (Posted 12/31/06)
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