MMike
12-15-2003, 02:25 PM
Nothing really to debate I guess... But I thought at least few of you would like this....
http://www.cbc.ca/national/rex/rex_031214.html
Miserable, brutal and grandiose leaders: The capture of Saddam Hussein
Dec. 14, 2003
The year is drawing to a close and the capture of Saddam Hussein will certainly be the image of the year, the capture of the tiger of the Euphrates, as he liked to style himself, Saddam Hussein.
We've all now seen the hiding place, the so-called "spider hole", where the man who once built palaces in the splendour of marble and gold, commanded an army disposed of life and death, spent his final days in a kind of freedom, hiding from the Americans whom he once challenged, scorned or outwitted.
The really crucial images were the first, that of this emperor of cruelty and murder placidly moving his head, opening his mouth at the whispered command of the military doctor after he was taken from the dirt cellar yesterday. So this is what it comes to in the end, the great man, the self-nominated man of Arab destiny and fate, who started wars with Iran and Kuwait, who rained terror on the Kurds and gas on the town of Halabja, who had family, relatives and political opponents murdered with equal facility, squatting under a sheet of styrofoam in a hole in the ground. I don't find it hard to have a response to his capture.
We had enough, in the last century, of examples, big and small, in Europe, Africa and Asia, of tyrants and despots, the Hitlers, Mussolinis, Idi Amins, Pol Potts, Stalins and Ceacescus, and every one of these miserable, brutal and grandiose leaders left the world full of murder, pain and death. Hussein was, is, just a mid-sized version of the same pernicious pattern. He was willing to set the Middle East aflame. He committed the ecocide of the century with the oil wells he couldn't steal. He littered Iraq and Baghdad with the super-sized tacky sculptures and portraits of his demented idea of his own magnificence.
Like Stalin, his own great role model, there was no limit to the idea of his own magnificence, and no limit too to what he was willing to do from way of fear, torture and murder to keep power. We've really had enough of these monsters, and if today, December 14th, 2003, the world has just one less of them, if we have subtracted from the list of its tyrants and dictators just one, then this world is a better, cleaner place. It's good, too, to see, when shorn of his guns and guards and army, how pathetic one of these really terrible figures is. The man of all the splendid suits and uniforms coming forth to the eyes of the world like some out-take from a bad Cops special; shabby, inert, docile and weak. Is this what held a nation in fear and the world at bay?
Some will say the film of the examination probing his hair and checking his mouth was too humiliating even for a Saddam Hussein, or they will view the worth of his capture through the prism of their distaste or admiration for George Bush. Count the bodies he, Saddam Hussein, is responsible for in Iraq, and start asking the relatives of the dead about humiliation, and whether his capture helps or hurts George Bush is insignificant, it is irrelevant, when set aside the irresistible fact that the career of a tyrant and murderer has been brought to an ignominious and unquestionable end. It's justice giving a Christmas present to itself.
For "The National," I'm Rex Murphy.
http://www.cbc.ca/national/rex/rex_031214.html
Miserable, brutal and grandiose leaders: The capture of Saddam Hussein
Dec. 14, 2003
The year is drawing to a close and the capture of Saddam Hussein will certainly be the image of the year, the capture of the tiger of the Euphrates, as he liked to style himself, Saddam Hussein.
We've all now seen the hiding place, the so-called "spider hole", where the man who once built palaces in the splendour of marble and gold, commanded an army disposed of life and death, spent his final days in a kind of freedom, hiding from the Americans whom he once challenged, scorned or outwitted.
The really crucial images were the first, that of this emperor of cruelty and murder placidly moving his head, opening his mouth at the whispered command of the military doctor after he was taken from the dirt cellar yesterday. So this is what it comes to in the end, the great man, the self-nominated man of Arab destiny and fate, who started wars with Iran and Kuwait, who rained terror on the Kurds and gas on the town of Halabja, who had family, relatives and political opponents murdered with equal facility, squatting under a sheet of styrofoam in a hole in the ground. I don't find it hard to have a response to his capture.
We had enough, in the last century, of examples, big and small, in Europe, Africa and Asia, of tyrants and despots, the Hitlers, Mussolinis, Idi Amins, Pol Potts, Stalins and Ceacescus, and every one of these miserable, brutal and grandiose leaders left the world full of murder, pain and death. Hussein was, is, just a mid-sized version of the same pernicious pattern. He was willing to set the Middle East aflame. He committed the ecocide of the century with the oil wells he couldn't steal. He littered Iraq and Baghdad with the super-sized tacky sculptures and portraits of his demented idea of his own magnificence.
Like Stalin, his own great role model, there was no limit to the idea of his own magnificence, and no limit too to what he was willing to do from way of fear, torture and murder to keep power. We've really had enough of these monsters, and if today, December 14th, 2003, the world has just one less of them, if we have subtracted from the list of its tyrants and dictators just one, then this world is a better, cleaner place. It's good, too, to see, when shorn of his guns and guards and army, how pathetic one of these really terrible figures is. The man of all the splendid suits and uniforms coming forth to the eyes of the world like some out-take from a bad Cops special; shabby, inert, docile and weak. Is this what held a nation in fear and the world at bay?
Some will say the film of the examination probing his hair and checking his mouth was too humiliating even for a Saddam Hussein, or they will view the worth of his capture through the prism of their distaste or admiration for George Bush. Count the bodies he, Saddam Hussein, is responsible for in Iraq, and start asking the relatives of the dead about humiliation, and whether his capture helps or hurts George Bush is insignificant, it is irrelevant, when set aside the irresistible fact that the career of a tyrant and murderer has been brought to an ignominious and unquestionable end. It's justice giving a Christmas present to itself.
For "The National," I'm Rex Murphy.