Blood Sacrifices

Sharing Out Saddam. It's now emerging that the execution of Saddam Hussein served as a blood sacrifice carried out by the Iraqi government for the benefit of the Shiite people. Prime Minister Maliki expedited Saddam Hussein's execution in a manner contrary to Iraqi law so that it could serve as an Eid "gift" to the Shiite people. According to Wikipedia, the Eid ul-Adha holiday is known as the feast of the sacrifice in which Muslims sacrifice their best animals to honor the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Ismael to God. The meat from the sacrifice is then shared out among the family and the community. In this sense, Saddam's death was like a sacrifice being shared out among the Shiite community.

Vaunting Over the Dead. When the guards began to shout "Moqtada! Moqtada!" as Saddam was being arranged for execution, Saddam Hussein responded with a sneer, "Moqtada. Is this how real men behave?" The Bush administration would have agreed. In the U. S. , vaunting over the criminal is limited to the moment of capture or to weak and questionable men. After that, ceremony dictates silence for police, judges, prison officials, and executioners as they grind the criminal into dust. Not having to talk is the true expression of the state's power. By arranging the execution of Saddam as a sacrifice for the Shiite people, the Maliki government denied the Bush administration the satisfaction of performing Saddam's execution according to American protocol. The Bush administration and the American right desperately wanted to enjoy Saddam's death as a consolation for the disappointment of the war. Now the manner of Saddam's death is just one more in a long series of disappointments.

The American Dead. In American Christianity, the only blood sacrifice that counts is the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. However, the basic communion ceremonial has the same purpose as Eid in the sense that it is a sharing of Jesus' blood and body among the religious community. In the U. S., other kinds of sacrifices are often categorized under the heading of "useless sacrifice," indicating that they have no purpose or positive outcome. As the headlines today announce that 3,000 American troops have died in Iraq, the implication now is that their death has been a useless sacrifice by the Bush administration. Bush officials have been determined in their efforts to ensure that the death of American soldiers do not become a public symbol of Bush's failure and incompetence. That's why there have been no pictures of dead American soldiers on Iraqi battlefields, only a few pictures of flag draped coffins, and very little in the way of pictures of funerals for American soldiers. The Bush administration wants the soldier's deaths to be defined as a private loss for families rather than a public loss for American society as a whole. They don't want the "useless sacrifices" of American soldiers to be a public symbol of the uselessness of the war itself.

The Surge as Public Sacrifice. The Bush administration is getting ready to increase the number of American troops in Iraq by 25-35,000 despite opposition from the military, public opinion, Congressional Democrats, and the recent report of the Iraq Study Group. In fact, it's hard to find anybody outside the right-wing echo chamber who supports an escalation of Aemrican participation in Iraq. Like conservatives in general, the Bush administration thinks of manhood in terms of defying both institutional and broader public opinion in the United States. Not caring about what people think is part of what makes conservatives more virtuous than the rest of American society in their own minds. But Bush officials may be at a more crucial turning point than they think. More troops in Iraq are going to mean more fighting for American troops, more deaths, and more pressure to make dead American troops into public symbols of the futility of the Iraq War. I can't help but wonder if there's also a greater possibility that the American public will turn on the Bush administration in revulsion over all the "useless sacrifice" in Iraq. There are a variety of ways to grind repudiated leadership into the dust--refusals to serve in Iraq, civil disobedience, protesting appearances outside presidential compounds. However, my own opinion is that the American public will be quietly taking out their revulsion on Republican candidates for several elections to come.