Sadaam and Bush's Law...

I really wanted to mention something about Sadaam’s execution, but I couldn’t figure out a good way to write a full post of it. All I had to say on it was, “Only Dubya and his people could turn the one thing we (basically) got right into another giant screw-up.” Well, that wasn’t really insightful enough to post, was it? Luckily for me, Digby and Matt Taibbi (and scores of others) were on their A-game for this one. Not that you haven’t already read these, but for those of you who don’t actually read other blogs, I’ll post them anyway.

First, in today’s “Low Post” column (and seriously, I’m really ticked that I never came up with “Hussein in the Membrane”), Taibbi successfully summarizes the whole debacle in one paragraph...

And so this is how we got where we are. You get a whole nation full of people who spend 99 percent of their free time worrying about their lawns or their short iron game, you convince them that they know something about something they actually know nothing about, and next thing you know, they're blundering into a 1,000-year blood feud between rival Islamic groups, shooting things left and right in a panic, and thinking that they can make it all right and correct each successive fuckup by "keeping our noses to the grindstone" and "making lemons out of lemonade."

And then he continues...

The whole war has been characterized by this kind of behavior. The Americans continually make ghastly mistake after ghastly mistake, and they keep responding to their mistakes by digging down and seeking the aid of the same homespun American pseudo-folk wisdom that got them into this mess in the first place. Our foreign policy initiatives in the area resemble attempts to mend fences with a neighbor whose lawn has been mussed by bringing him a tuna casserole cooked specially by wifey; only in Iraq, when casserole-presenting Dad ends up with his eyes gouged out and his skull charred black, hanging upside down from a telephone wire and impaled on the shards of the casserole dish, the neighborhood committee convenes and...decides to bake a bigger casserole.

And then he nails the newest debacle (I apologize for this giant blurb...I just didn’t know where to cut it off)...

The execution was a complete and utter fiasco. When what is supposed to be a P.R. coup for the United States devolves into a situation where a crowd of Shia fanatics is chanting "Moqtada! Moqtada! Moqtada!" under the swinging feet of a new Sunni martyr, something has gone horribly wrong.

Not only did Saddam's execution serve notice to the entire world that the United States has essentially become the easily manipulated muscle for Shiite extremists in Iraq, but it infuriated the entire Sunni world by its timing -- the execution coincided with the Islamic holiday Eid.

Moreover, the U.S. even managed to alienate Shiites around the world by intervening in the execution process -- not enough to stop or slow the execution, mind you, but just enough to take Saddam's body away from the Shiites and force them to deliver it back to Saddam's home city for a "decent burial."

Now we've pissed off both the Shiites and the Sunnis and gotten both sides markedly more pissed off with each other (not just in Iraq but around the world), and we've done so by accelerating the execution of a prominent Sunni politician whose fate was the one card the United States was really holding with a Sunni minority already deeply upset at being made the subjects -- at the end of an American bayonet -- to a Shiite-led government.

Not only that, but the execution put the finishing touches on the "democracy lesson" we've supposedly been giving the Iraqi people, who, thanks to this move, still have yet to experience a government where a leader can leave power without losing his life. That is some interesting-tasting lemonade, I must say.

Rhetorical question: if you're going to offend the earth's entire Sunni population by letting a Shiite mob hang a prominent Sunni politician on a Muslim holiday -- on television on a Muslim holiday -- why bother interfering in the burial question? Seriously, why? To curry favor with the Sunnis? Because it's "the right thing" to do? What kind of deranged lunatic hangs "the Sunni sword" at the end of Ramadan and then tries to make up for it with the world's Sunnis by allowing a "civilized" burial? "We will all become a bomb," is how one Palestinian responded to this latest act of decency and goodwill on the part of the United States.

I'm not saying Saddam Hussein deserved to live. Fuck Saddam Hussein. The point is that his execution is a symbol of America's cultural blindness. America has one gear in its head: Saddam was a monster and a mass-murderer, so he should be executed and everyone should love us for doing it. Right? I mean, who doesn't like a tuna casserole?

The whole thing is that good. I promise I didn't post all the good stuff.

Digby tackled the Sadaam issue pretty much immediately, with this post from Monday:

Saddam Hussein is the the man I would have thought was least likely to be turned into a martyr, but damned if they didn't manage to do it. Bush's Law. And here's the great thing about it --- the US, which claims rather unconvincingly that it had no say in this because Iraq is a sovereign country, gets blamed for this right along with the Shi'a government and Moqtada al Sadr. Terrific. Lose, lose for us --- as usual. Heckuva job, Bushie.

...

What a horrible, stupid cock-up on top of all the other horrible stupid cock-ups. The United States simply cannot do anything right in Iraq. Nada.

...

Leave it to an atheist to see the glaring religious symbolism:

You know, foreign occupying power, powerful religious group agitating for the execution of a hated, charismatic competitor, promises of who will bear the guilt for the deed, metaphorical washing of the hands…jebus, if I know what a counterproductive PR disaster that was for the Pharisees and the Romans, what's the matter with the American leadership in Iraq? Don't they read the bibles they thump? Add to that that they've apparently done the execution at a time when it is "religiously unacceptable", and we've got a situation that makes Pontius Pilate look good.

Salon’s Joan Walsh chipped in, too. They all said basically the same thing, but they all said it well.

It was impossible not to notice that the Democrats came to power against the backdrop of two widely watched deaths -- Saddam Hussein's execution, which divided Sunni and Shiite in Iraq, and former President Gerald Ford's quiet passing, which briefly united this country. The symbolism was powerful. The controversy over Saddam's taunting, and what came to look like his lynching, at the hands of the Mahdi Army was a perfect microcosm of our can't-win situation in Baghdad. We couldn't execute him ourselves, so we handed him over to the Shiite-dominated al-Maliki government, which defied the U.S. and rushed to execute Saddam at dawn on Saturday, while Sunni Muslims were celebrating Eid-al-Adha. (For Shiites, the holiday didn't start until Saturday evening.) But that's self-governance; the Iraqis stood up, the Bush administration had to stand down, and together they managed to make a Sunni martyr out of a murdering tyrant.

By contrast, the lovely pageantry that followed the death of President Ford inspired an understandable yearning for a more bipartisan era. But if President Bush felt his heartstrings tugged, it didn't show. He came straight from the funeral and talked bipartisanship while promising no surrender -- he wants his temporary tax cuts to be permanent, he wants more troops in Iraq, he wants Democrats to balance the budget. Democrats should spurn the White House's insincere advances and develop an aggressive plan to end the war with as little carnage as possible.

We're only one day or so (and as I said earlier, a few of the thousands of tests) into the new Congress, but on Democrats and the Iraq issue, so far so good, I guess.