Saddam Captured; Iraq War Still Stupid
Saddam has been captured, huzzah! Meanwhile, the war was still a profoundly stupid idea, sold to the public via a systematic campaign of lies.
Winston Smith at Philosoraptor sums up my feelings exactly with this item: A humble prediction.
The right acts as if it has accepted the following inference: Saddam is terrifically evil; Bush opposes Saddam; so Bush must be good. The left acts as if it has accepted this one: Bush is a very bad man; Bush opposes Saddam; so Saddam must not be that bad.
But both inferences are defective. Note also that, though both inferences have true premisses, both have false conclusions.
Saddam is evil and Bush is merely awful, but Bush’s awfulness hits closer to home for Americans. If we ignore either Bush’s awfulness or Saddam’s black, bottomless, inhuman evil, we’re ignoring something important about the world.
Finally, ymatt lends his Photoshop skills to answering the question on everyone’s mind: What was Saddam thinking with that beard? One possible answer: He was working on his costume for the local Return of the King line party.
December 14th, 2003 at 8:16 pm
Saddam the Grey. Too funny. Does that make George Bush the Balrog? Sauron? Reminds me of the picture on the net of George Bush sporting the ring of power, with the headline “Frodo has Failed! Bush has the Ring!” Crap, that means Saddam will come back as “Saddam the White,” even more powerfull than ever.
December 15th, 2003 at 12:34 am
Well, since I don’t like LotR I think I’ll be leaving that alone. I’ll go after the meat of the article.
Bush: Leader who makes bad decisions, denies some civil liberties to his citizens, and declares wars. Leads with a “father knows best” attitude. Crappy person to have in charge.
Saddam: Leader who makes bad decisions, denies most/all liberties to his citizens, and declares wars. Leads with a “KILL dissenters” attitude. Crappy person to have in charge.
Yes, they’re both bad leaders, but really it’s for the same reasons — Saddam was just more of an extremeist and didn’t have the ability to economically sanction those who didn’t support him. America is a bully of a nation, evident in its gung-ho attitude of “if you don’t support us we’ll go ahead anyway”.
We shouldn’t have taken Saddam out of power — if the Iraqi citizens wanted him out of power they should have done it. Why? Because without someone the Iraqi citizens WANT in power, some other ruthless dictator is going to seize control. Plus we’ve insulted the Iraqi people.
Whoever takes over now will have a primary agenda of doing harm to America — I’d rather have Saddam in power, who was much too egotisitcal to have his army fight “for a cause”.
What if Germany suddenly decided Bush is a bad president, and they capture him? How would the American citizens react? Sure, we may not have particularly cared for the guy but it’s comparable to any grade school altercation where your parents talk to the other kid’s parents and he gets in trouble. You look like a chump.
We’ve given a whole lot of people a whole lot of reason to hate us. This is going to create more anti-America backlash than the world has ever seen. Irony, no?
December 15th, 2003 at 9:54 am
I think that the capture of Saddam is one of the most positive things to come out of this awful war. Sadly, many of the left-leaning web sites and news sources are making themselves quite absurd pretending that this event is no big deal, or even a bad thing.
Part of the reason we ended up with this war in the first place is because the anti-war left hasn’t done its job very well from the beginning. By coming out in great force against an invasion of Afghanistan just after the United States was attacked and months before a single shot was fired in retaliation, the anti-war movement paved the way for its own dismissal as pacifist reactionaries lost in a Viet Nam-era time warp. They didn’t help their cause much more by advancing their movement with internationalist rhetoric the masses flatly don’t understand or agree with and personal attacks against George Bush nobody outside of the movement took very seriously. Once the war started, the movement made itself increasingly more irrelevant by denying the existence of a Middle East threat altogether (thank you, Michael Moore,) or pretending that no progress has been made or grousing about every development, no matter how potentially positive it might be.
This seriously damaged the case against Iraq – a situation where the call against war should have seemed quite reasonable, were the public not so polarized against anti-war talk by the shoddy mishandling of the Afghan situation. Once again, the anti-war faction portrayed itself as collection of mindlessly anti-Bush partisans as unable to react to the terrorist situation in an unbiased, practical manner as they portrayed Bush to be. The War in Iraq may not have ultimately made sense, but it made more sense to the average American than the same internationalism, oblique pacifism and personal attack that superceded the more sensible, albeit less dramatic, arguments against a war that could have been averted.
After listening to NPR on the way to work this morning, and visiting a few of my favorite web sites (Common Dreams, Antiwar.com, Michaelmoore.com, Lies.com) I’m sore afraid that the anti-war movement’s handling of the continuing Iraq war is stumbling down the same path with its coverage of Saddam’s capture.
The US military has captured a man who may safely be called one of the worst despots in the world today. This is an event that, while it won’t end the violence against our troops immediately, is a huge step towards taking American troops out of harm’s way and getting thousands of them back home a lot sooner than was imagined a few days ago. It is also a great milestone towards the ultimate rebuilding of Iraq.
You would never know this from reading all too much of the aforementioned left wing media, whose reaction to the capture ranges from “this really isn’t that big of a deal,” to “they’ve captured Saddam – this is the most horrible thing that could have happened!” Some sources, such as the Mother Jones site, have, laughably, refused to even cover the event – “maybe if we ignore it to go away…”
The majority of Americans, who continue to support this war, read or hear these reactions, or catch the aroma of them in some more mainstream coverage, and are reminded why they didn’t listen to the anti-war movement in the first place. They perceive yesterday’s capture as a triumph for America and the world, not just the Bush administration. They are pretty aware of the fact that most of those disgruntled about that capture are upset because it might make Bush look good or because it might harm Howard Dean, or that it might fly in the face of the leftist proposal that we are losing this war – a proposal that is becoming harder and harder to swallow as events unfold.
The President’s trip to Iraq was a fairly minor occurrence – a cheap photo op. No one would have, or should have, paid much attention to it had a certain anti-Bush strain in the media not harped on it as if it was the most distorted, despicable action by a world leader since the publication of Mein Kampft. What was so evil about this trip? You couldn’t blame a lot of people for concluding it did too much injury to the anti-war cause. At a time when anti-occupation commentators were busy selling the notion that we barely held control of Iraq, and fairly couldn’t launch an airplane without getting shot down, the President of the United States flew in and out of Baghdad in broad daylight. At a point where the argument was first emerging that the army is turning against George Bush, several hundred service men stood up and cheered him on international television. To many Americans, leftist arguments suddenly seemed as bogus as Bush’s turkey, with not a lot outside of bitterness from the left to counter that impression. Suddenly, the U.S. seemed a lot more in control of the situation than the left was letting on.
Now, just as the anti-war column is taking some ground in their casting of the Presidential visit as so much smoke and mirrors, Saddam is taken prisoner and the ball seems ever further in the American court than it had been on Thanksgiving. While no responsible observer could argue that the shooting will stop tomorrow, or that there’s not still a lot of blood to be shed, the war has become, suddenly, a finite proposition. The arrest of Saddam will have a demoralizing effect on those holdouts who thought violence could bring him back to power. The changeover of Iraqi money, which will make the Saddam-faced bills used to pay off violent insurgents and suicide bombers worthless, will have a big effect on anti-American activity in Iraq within just a few months. This war will be over a lot sooner than the doomiest of us have predicted, even if a less eventful occupation continues for years. That the anti-war left seems so determined to depict this is a bad thing or an illusion puts them at odds with an American public that is already conditioned to question the movement’s ability to shoot straight, mainly by the movement itself.
December 15th, 2003 at 10:06 am
Haha, did you just write that up and paste in into the post boxes of all your favorite lefty blogs? If you’re going to attack a position, at least attack the one being put forth where you’re posting.
To quote:
Saddam has been captured, huzzah! Meanwhile, the war was still a profoundly stupid idea, sold to the public via a systematic campaign of lies.
I don’t think any reasonable pundit thinks capturing Saddam is a bad thing. Many of us just think it’s of relatively small significance as there are a large number of extremists carrying out attacks in Iraq that could give a shit less about Saddam. And it also doesn’t change the argument that invading Iraq was a poor idea.
And to answer your charge that the left (as if some large organized body) has lost credibility, it’s tempting to find the most outlandish argument put forth by somebody on “the other side” and go after it, but those aren’t the people you should care about. It’s the ones who seem to be making well-reasoned arguments, but are coming to different conclusions than you are. Maybe then useful argument can take place.
December 15th, 2003 at 10:13 am
Bush flew in and out of Baghdad “in broad daylight”? Um, sorry, no.
While some of what you say sounds sensible, the overall argument is weak, I think. I’ve seen plenty of lefty/antiwar web writers waxing ecstatic over the capture of Saddam. I haven’t seen any of them claim it is a bad thing, though I tend to limit myself to sites (whether left wing, right wing, or harder to classify) that don’t offend me by being gratuitously one-sided.
Yeah, it’s good that Saddam Hussein was captured. But “a huge step… a great milestone… a triumph for America and the world”? I think that’s the Kool-aid talking.
December 15th, 2003 at 10:26 am
John- why would the capture of Saddam not be a victory for America and the world? How would Saddam’s remaining at large be more beneficial for America or the world?
Yes, YMatt – I have submitted this post, via email to some of my targets. As someone who cares for the continuance of a valid left wing while being dismayed at the position in which it has placed itself, I felt compelled to. I merely posted it here because I geenerally find this blog to be, by far, more reasonable and less flip and insulting than any other blog I regularly visit. i value this blog a great deal, and did not feel my posting here was entirely out of place, even if it didn’t concern this particular site as much as it did some others.
December 15th, 2003 at 10:30 am
More over, as a careful reading of my post, ymatt, which might take more than the few minutes you have allowed it, should make it clear I was not attacking jbc’s point here. I was making a general opservation that is quite germain to the present point, if that is allowed.
December 15th, 2003 at 10:38 am
It’s a victory. It’s good news. Congratulations to the people who did it.
I wasn’t arguing that it would have been beneficial for him to remain at large. I just don’t think, as a practical matter, that his capture is going to turn out to be as significant in terms of the larger war as your comments implied.
But time will tell on that. In the meantime, thanks for the nice comments about lies.com, and for including the site in the list of places where you choose to participate.
December 15th, 2003 at 10:42 am
No problem – and thanks for your fine site!
December 15th, 2003 at 2:25 pm
“The anti-war movement” isn’t a large organized body with long-term goals. It’s merely a bunch of people whose opinions range from “killing is bad” to “killing is bad for business”.
As far as my comment goes, I think it deserves a bit of clairification — Saddam being out of power is not a bad thing in itself, but we must be VERY ATTENTIVE as to how the power struggle goes for Iraq leadership now… and as the Bush administration has shown, it doesn’t particularly care too much about such things as “aftermath”.
My saying that I’d rather have Saddam in power is based on the idea that, as has been done before, the U.S. is just going to neglect the now-leaderless nation. In doing so we merely pave the way for someone worse — it seems that America doesn’t particularly learn from past mistakes.
Finally, regarding Tom’s post, aside from the first paragraph here… methinks that in order to avoid the same kind of reputation-damaging blanket rhetoric you wrote about you should take the extra hour or so to individualize your posts for the site you’re submitting it to. Just my $.02
December 15th, 2003 at 3:46 pm
A Metafilter comment reposted on Mike Benedetto’s site is relevant here, I think:
“Well, we got him. Now what do we do? We can put him on trial, but that would backfire, since he’s not guilty of the things we went to war over. We could shoot him in the head, but that would make us look even worse then we do now.”
I think the “he’s not guilty of the things we went to war over” is the important phrase there. And don’t even start with the “WMD wasn’t the reason for the war.” That dog won’t hunt.
The fact is, a lot of right-wing sites are talking about how they wish Saddam was killed; in addition to revenge, I think that comes from worrying about what he might say.
I’m wondering too if right-wingers who supported Reagan and Bush I are feeling at least a little complicit in Saddam’s atrocities, since they were committed when the U.S. was supporting him (and Rumsfeld himself was meeting with The Evil One).
December 15th, 2003 at 3:51 pm
And as one of those lefties who said Saddam’s capture was a good thing, I’m sorry I went negative just now. But “Tom’s” Dean-Esmay-ish “I must destroy the lefty village in order to save it” claptrap angried up my blood.
December 15th, 2003 at 4:43 pm
Adam- Be it far from my humble station to destroy the lefty village, although I do believe it would be of more use to everyone if it cleaned house from time to time. If the lefty house, or the righty house, or any ideological structure is worth saving, or burning, or even paying attention to, it has to be questioned and held up to criticism, or even ridicule, by those who care.
Why were you angered by my post? Is the issue I expound on just my imagination, or does the way I expounded on it rub you the wrong way?
I’ll have to check out Dean Esmay, as I must profess ignorance of him and his views
December 15th, 2003 at 11:16 pm
I did in fact read your post, Tom, but when you start it off with:
“Sadly, many of the left-leaning web sites and news sources are making themselves quite absurd pretending that this event is no big deal, or even a bad thing”
… and post it to a left-leaning website, it sounds like an attack. But I really don’t mean to get all up in your face here.
(And besides, but bringing up Mein Kampf you played the Hitler card and thus automatically lose the argument :)
And yeah, why does there have to be this liberal village at all? Certainly both the Democrats and Republicans these days don’t seem to be sticking to their respective villages, why should I?
And more importantly, we’re missing the greater point here that we now know Saddam is a wizard.
December 15th, 2003 at 11:16 pm
I did in fact read your post, Tom, but when you start it off with:
“Sadly, many of the left-leaning web sites and news sources are making themselves quite absurd pretending that this event is no big deal, or even a bad thing”
… and post it to a left-leaning website, it sounds like an attack. But I really don’t mean to get all up in your face here.
(And besides, by bringing up Mein Kampf you played the Hitler card and thus automatically lose the argument :)
And yeah, why does there have to be this liberal village at all? Certainly both the Democrats and Republicans these days don’t seem to be sticking to their respective villages, why should I?
And more importantly, we’re missing the greater point here that we now know Saddam is a wizard.
December 15th, 2003 at 11:20 pm
… and I look like a neophyte loser.
December 16th, 2003 at 2:16 am
I didn’t want to say anything, ymatt… wait a minute, for you photoshopping or your double-post? :D
j/k of course, I love you, man.
December 16th, 2003 at 4:00 pm
The double-post. I’m profoundly proud of the photoshopping job.
December 16th, 2003 at 8:25 pm
As you should be!
December 18th, 2003 at 4:21 pm
do you believe all those lies?
how stupid is that?
i,m still here bush!
i,m coming to give your country freedom and piece!
December 18th, 2003 at 4:27 pm
i,m one of those who strongly believe that the capture of saddam husein is the biggest lie about that war.
The whole world is used to many such lies and misleading of the our government.
its all lies!!!!!!
December 18th, 2003 at 4:27 pm
i,m one of those who strongly believe that the capture of saddam husein is the biggest lie about that war.
The whole world is used to many such lies and misleading of our government.
its all lies!!!!!!