History Forum / General / British History / December 2003

Krauthammer At His Best....
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"Killing Him Softly"

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, December 19, 2003
The Washington Post

"The race is over. The Oscar for Best Documentary, Short Subject, goes
to . . . "Saddam's Dental Exam."

Screenplay: 1st Brigade, U.S. 4th Infantry Division.

Producer: P. Bremer Enterprises, Baghdad.

Director: The anonymous genius at U.S. headquarters who chose this clip
as the world's first view of Saddam Hussein in captivity.

In the old days the conquered tyrant was dragged through the streets
behind the Roman general's chariot. Or paraded shackled before a jeering
crowd. Or, when more finality was required, had his head placed on a
spike on the tower wall.

Iraq has its own ways. In the revolution of 1958, Prime Minister Nuri
Said was caught by a crowd and murdered, and his body was dragged behind
a car through the streets of Baghdad until there was nothing left but
half a leg.

We Americans don't do it that way. Instead, we show Saddam Hussein --
King of Kings, Lion of the Tigris, Saladin of the Arabs -- compliantly
opening his mouth like a child to the universal indignity of an oral
(and head lice!) exam. Docility wrapped in banality. Brilliant. Nothing
could have been better calculated to demystify the all-powerful tyrant.

It was a beautiful sight. But it was more than that. It was a deeply
important historical moment. More than the fate of a man is at stake
here. At stake is the fate of an idea, an idea of singular malignancy
that has cost the Arabs not just countless innocent lives but a
half-century of progress.

Hussein was the most aggressive and enduring exemplar of a particular
kind of deformed Arabism, a kind that arose in the post-colonial era,
appealed to the greater glory of the Arab nation and promised a great
restoration. Ironically, its methods and ideology were imported from the
West, the worst of the West. The Baath Party was modeled on the fascist
parties in early 20th-century Europe. Its economics were Western
socialism at its most stifling and corrupt. Hussein then created the
perfect fusion of the two, producing a totalitarianism of surpassing
cruelty modeled consciously on Stalin's.

Hussein's destiny is important because he was the last and the greatest
of these pan-Arab pretenders, though he gave it a psychotically sadistic
character unmatched anywhere in the Arab world. This stream of Arab
nationalism brought nothing but poverty, corruption, despair, torture
and ruin to large swaths of the Arab world. The mass graves of Iraq are
its permanent monument.

This is why it was important not just to capture Hussein but to
demystify him -- and with him, the half-century spell that radical
pan-Arabism had cast over the entire Middle East. It was important that
the god-king of pan-Arabism be shown as the pathetic coward he was. It
was important to finally shatter what Fouad Ajami called "the dream
palace of the Arabs." And to banish the grotesque fantasy, perpetrated
by Hussein and his acolytes in the Arab intelligentsia, that Arab
greatness -- once built on a magnificent civilization of science,
culture and tolerance -- is to be rebuilt upon blood, power and cruelty.

It seemed as if that fantasy had been dealt a fatal blow when Baghdad
fell so suddenly on April 9. Instead of the promised Battle of Baghdad,
confronting and perhaps even stopping the Americans in heroic
street-by-street combat, there was nothing. Just ignominious collapse.
The Arab media, particularly the al-Jazeeras that had long lionized
Hussein and promoted "Baghdad Bob's" comical claims of Iraqi war
victories, were shocked and humiliated. They themselves had to admit
that this was the greatest psychological blow to Arab nationalist
pretensions since the similarly vainglorious Gamal Abdel Nasser was
routed by Israel in six days in June 1967.

But then came the Iraqi insurgency: the bloodying of the Americans, the
doubts at home, the charges of "quagmire," the visions of Vietnam, the
notion that the United States might in the end be defeated -- tire and
leave the field once again to Hussein.

On the run, Hussein enjoyed one final moment of myth: the
ever-resourceful, undaunted resistance fighter. Perhaps, it was thought,
he had it all calculated in advance, fading silently from Baghdad like
the Russians withdrawing from Moscow before Napoleon, to suck in the
Americans only to strike back later on his own terms in a brilliant
guerrilla campaign masterminded by the great one himself.

And then they find him cowering in a hole, disheveled, disoriented and
dishonored. After making those underground tapes exhorting others to
give their blood for Iraq and for him, his instantaneous reaction to
discovery was hands-up surrender.

End of the myth. It is not just that he did not resist the soldiers with
the guns. He did not even resist the medic with the tongue depressor."
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D. Spencer Hines

Lux et Veritas et Libertas

Vires et Honor