The Saddam in the Mirror

Hanging Saddam. It appears that Saddam Hussein is going to be executed by hanging at about the same time that President Bush is going to announce plans for his mini-escalation of the war in Iraq. No doubt Saddam will richly deserve this death and many more besides. Mass executioners like Saddam, Pinochet, or General Suharto of Indonesia deserve more deaths than they can suffer.

Hanging with Saddam. It's hard to over-estimate what the execution of Saddam Hussein means to George W. Bush and the other gunslingers in the Bush White House. The toppling of Saddam's statue and the capture of Saddam confirmed the Dubya's image of himself as a frontier sheriff who is stronger and tougher than both the bad guys and the critics who worry about the rights of defendants, whether the death penalty is cruel and unusual, and all the complexities of invading and occupying. The execution of Saddam will do the same. It will prove that Bush is stronger than Saddam, stronger than all his "pussy" liberal critics in the United States, and stronger than global opinion.

Of course, the execution of Saddam has a special poignancy for Bush because he has his own version of Saddam's special kind of problem. For Saddam, the problem is how to keep thinking of himself as the strongest man in the world even as the hangman comes to his door. Of course, there will be no hangman at Bush's door, but the spectre of a definitive, unmanning defeat hangs as heavy about George Bush as the hangman looms over Saddam. Bush has already suffered a stinging defeat at the hands of his liberal enemies, been rebuked by a collection of his dad's friends, and abandoned by most of his neo-con allies. The invasion of Iraq that was supposed to be the enduring testimony to the president's manhood is now seen as a monument to blundering incompetence and immature egotism. Like Saddam, George Bush did not turn out to be such a tough guy at all.

The Damage Done. The second analogy between President Bush and Saddam Hussein lies in the enormous damage they've done to Iraq. Saddam Hussein will be known primarily by his pogroms against the Kurds and Shiites and his legacy will be the tens or hundreds of thousands Iraqi men, women, and children who died at his hands. Such is the price of tyranny. George Bush will also be known by the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have died as a result of the American invasion. The U. S. is spending 2 billion a day in Iraq and the American military has lost almost 3,000 men and women, but the most important testimony to the horrific failure of the American mission in Iraq will be the mounting number of dead civilians. Such is the price of having a fool at the head of the most powerful nation in the world.