Don’t know how they managed it, but the Bush administration appears to have found a way to evoke sympathy for one of the biggest mass murderers in modern Middle East history (in the same league as Bush himself, in fact). The ugly spectacle of Saddam’s hanging was somewhat reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib images — dim, shabby, shameful. As regular readers of this sorry blog know, I am no fan of the death penalty, even when it comes to war criminals like Saddam and, well, George Bush. This goes beyond the question of basic humanity, though. If you’re going to execute someone, that should be punishment enough without making a circus of it. As it was, they (i.e. the American idiots who decided on this policy) made Hussein seem dignified by comparison and, in so doing, further inflamed the Sunni community in Iraq and throughout the Middle East by allowing the deed to be performed on the day Sunnis celebrate Eid. I can’t entirely blame the Shi’a execution squad for behaving as they did — that’s to be expected. But don’t tell me no one in the Green Zone knew that particular detail wouldn’t be shot through with militia people.

There’s an even more critical issue here. The execution of Saddam Hussein closes off a rich source of critical testimony regarding crimes committed during his rule and the accountability of those associated with him during those years. That includes whatever light he could shed on American and European complicity in the war against Iran, the use of chemical weapons against Persians, Shi’a Arabs, and Kurds, and so on. As Richard Falk pointed out on Democracy Now!, Hussein was put to death for an act of collective punishment that had nothing to do with the U.S. If he had been prosecuted for his serial chemical attacks from 1983 forward, we might have learned more about our role in facilitating those attacks, apologizing for them, covering them up, etc. Not that any of those details would make it into the mainstream American press, which has essentially expunged the U.S. role in supporting Hussein from their various retrospectives and timelines.

Such are the fortunes of those who benefit from U.S. covert operations — some retire to Florida (Orlando Bosch); others dangle from the end of a rope. The CIA apparently fostered Saddam’s early career as a torturer and assassin, quietly supporting his participation in 1959 in a notorious attempt on the life of the Iraqi president (who was a communist). After he became Iraq’s leader (something like Lee Harvey Oswald becoming president), he received crucial support from the U.S., particularly during the Reagan / Bush I administrations, who unfailingly portrayed him as a “moderating influence” in Middle Eastern affairs right up until his invasion of Kuwait. While they turned against Saddam at that point, it was in such a way as to allow him to carry out one of the greatest atrocities of his career — putting down the Kurdish and Shi’a uprisings George Bush Sr. had actively encouraged, as the army of “Stormin’ Norman” Schwartzkopf looked on just a few miles away. Aside from resulting in probably half a million deaths, the Clinton era sanctions only strengthened Saddam’s grip on his nation, forcing ordinary Iraqis to rely on the central government for subsistence. Now, of course, we are busily compounding the heinous errors of past administrations with even more heinous errors, including a Bush surge strategy that will focus on targeting the denizens of Baghdad’s poorest neighborhoods and the most vulnerable portions of Iraq’s majority Shi’a community.

If nothing else, we are demonstrating that you can kill hope if you try hard enough… but stupidity is a lot more resilient.

luv u,

jp

It’s always a momentous occasion when an ex-president dies. Invariably, the major news media provide us with a highly instructive look back at our political history — through a fun-house mirror, you might say. It’s a particularly odd phenomenon in the case of Gerald Ford because, as unremarkable a leader as he was, he seems like a freaking prince compared to the current numbskull-in-chief. (Who wouldn’t? Reagan? Polk? William Henry Harrison?) I had to laugh this week when it was announced that Ford had expressed his contempt for the war in Iraq in a recorded interview with Bob Woodward that was embargoed for release until after Ford’s death. So even as Bush tried to glom onto Ford’s relative popularity as an ex (and essentially forgotten) president, the guy was dropping a bomb on him from beyond the grave. Ouch! Dubya’s becoming more than a bit like that Bifflestick guy in Li’l Abner who always had a dark cloud over his head.

What about the Ford presidency? Well, he had a defense secretary named Don Rumsfeld and a chief of staff named Dick Cheney, for one thing. He also had a secretary of state named Henry Kissinger, who was very busy over Ford’s brief tenure. None of the various news timelines thought to make mention of it, but it was during Ford’s presidency that Indonesia invaded East Timor and began a brutal occupation that continued for the next 25 years and resulted in the deaths of 1/3 of that nation’s population. The invasion began practically the moment Kissinger and Ford flew out of Jakarta after meeting with Indonesian dictator Suharto and giving him the green light to proceed. Other highlights of the Ford era include the “dirty war” against South American dissidents pursued by various tin-pot dictators the U.S. had helped to install — a bloody campaign of torture, disappearance, and assassination that stretched from the Chile to Washington’s Embassy Row, where former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American associate Ronni Moffitt were blown up in their car by agents of Pinochet in 1976. Then there was Ford and Kissinger’s backing (in coordination with apartheid South Africa) of madman Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA rebels in Angola, resulting in probably half a million casualties over the following 20 years.

Devil’s in the details. Still, even with all that, Ford’s brief tenure seems statesmanlike in retrospect, at least by U.S. standards. But how much praise can we heap upon a president — or anyone, for that matter — for what he didn’t do? Is absence of a vice a virtue? Is Ford a man of integrity because he didn’t trash the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and a raft of international treaties all in a row? Is Ford to be honored because he didn’t order illegal surveillance of Americans or authorize the detention and torture of individuals on the basis of secret evidence (or lack of same)? Is Ford a Lincoln because he didn’t start a major war on patently false pretenses by knowingly deceiving the American public? Perhaps all in politics is relative… or maybe it’s like that old Richard Farina title: we’ve been down so long, it looks like up to us.

Saddamned to hell. Guess they were in kind of a hurry to execute Saddam after all. I’m sure he wasn’t expecting a square dance. Still, they will be burying a lot of crucial history with him… and maybe that’s the idea. Breathe easy, unindicted co-conspirators.

luv u,

j

With very few exceptions, it appears the U.S. political class is opting for a strategy of blaming Iraqis for the mess we’ve gotten them into. The administration has been taking this line for some time, but now we find the Democrats — as they inch closer to the levers of power — making the same kinds of noises. It’s what they consider political expedience, as the conventional wisdom suggests that no one in America wants to take responsibility for this “catastrofuck”, as Jon Stewart calls it; that defeat is always an orphan; that no politician can succeed by being the bearer of bad news, even if it is the truth. Now that Iraqis are dying in the hundreds of thousands, our “leaders” are encouraging us to weasel our way out of our obligations as an occupying power and a nation that has committed an extremely grave breach of international law. This phenomenon includes people like Democratic presidential hopeful Tom Vilsack, who speaks of breaking the Iraqi’s “culture of dependency” on American power, applying the language of self-help to a major conflagration for which we are primarily responsible. (What… is this some kind of co-dependent abusive relationship?)

Then there’s the top leadership of the Dems, like “give ’em hell” Harry Reid, who seems to have signed onto the president’s turkey of a plan to send more troops in a final “surge” to victory. I mean, what the fuck — are these people mental or something? What, do we have to remind them every day of the week that we want out of this bloody war? My new congressman-elect Michael Arcuri says that he is against the surge option, but I have no doubt that we will need to keep the pressure on these people in order to see the kind of result we pulled the lever, punched the card, or touched the touch-screen for this past November. No, friends, denial is not just a river in Egypt — it runs through the heart of Washington D.C., too, and the desire is great amongst those living along its banks to be on the “winning” side.

Evidently, there’s still plenty of neocon Kool-Aid to go around in our nation’s capital. Dubya himself is getting, if anything, more bizarre than ever in his various public appearances, this week lurching from the possibility of defeat to the certainty of victory. Dick Cheney described his former mentor Rumsfeld as the finest secretary of defense America has ever had — a comment even Bill Kristol thought was over the top (and he’s obviously out of his mind to the point where he apparently thinks this is the only time Cheney’s been wrong about anything). Meanwhile, over on PBS, Condi “supertanker” Rice was talking about how Syria could stop destabilizing Iraq anytime they want by simply not allowing weapons and fighters to enter via their border. I mean, that just has to be destined for some kind of world-class irony award. What a bunch of freaks! How could even our own flabbergastingly credulous media take anything they say at face value? Even so, I think the handwriting is finally on the wall for this war, as a substantial portion of the permanent establishment is slowly beginning to catch up with the super-majority of Americans that thinks this is a hopeless mess.

Sadly, I think once that “handwriting” fully appears, it’s going to read something like “it’s their fault, let them fix it.” We can — and must — do better than that.

luv u,

jp