Captured dictators

Just by way of anecdotal support for how well received this is, a couple of people who heard me speaking english around central Paris this afternoon spontaneously came up to ask if I’d heard the news, and say how great it was. Even people who didn’t support the war are grinning from ear to ear to hear that Saddam’s been captured.

Alive is definitely trickier than dead, so here’s hoping justice is done and seen to be done.

My guess is that Atrios has in mind Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan. Probably he’s wrong–I don’t think Karimov has committed mass murder on Saddam’s scale. Also, it doesn’t seem relevant. In short, hooray.

Atrios shouldn’t have said that, for a variety of reasons (for one thing, naysaying and quibbling never look good).

However, rulers who might have been as bad as Saddam include the rulers of Burma, Mugabe in the Congo, the Indonesians in Timor, and various people in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ruanda, and other African states. It’s hard to sort out the various sorts of wrong: victims of wars and civil, internal repression of a police state, and murder of helpless civilians during peace time. Atrios point would be that US support of, indifference to, or opposition to dictators seems unrelated to the magnitude of their evil, but determined entirely by convenience.

The “used poison gas against his own people” meme isn’t one the US can use against Saddam with much comfort, since we remained friendly with him knowing that he was doing that. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush rely heavily on American amnesia about anything that happened more than a year ago.

But, no, Atrios shouldn’t have said that. By now he’s effectively a Democratic spokesman, even though no one pays him anything. I can say what I’ve just said because I’m just a dog in a comic strip* and no one really cares what I say.

*Mark Alan Stamaty reference

A mistake on Atrios’ part; he’s about to get blasted to hell and back in the blogosphere, and to some extent, it’s going to be his fault for an inept formulation.

Frank, I think saying that someone like Saddam Hussein is *no more* than the sum total of a totalitarian mass movement is as meaningless a statement as saying he alone is responsible for Ba’athist misrule. To say that there was a structural and institutional infrastructure to Hussein’s rule is true and important, but he is also uniquely and individually morally responsible for much of what happened during his time in power. More importantly, he is an important part of the causality of those years, and that goes also for all the other figures we tend to name in such a summary. I can tell you it is certainly true for Robert Mugabe: you cannot possibly understand contemporary Zimbabwe without being willing to understand that Mugabe’s decisions as a unique, particular agent have had a unique impact on that nation’s current state, both in matters of relatively peripheral importance (say, for example, the ruling party’s attitude towards homosexuality, which comes very strongly from the Catholic-trained Mugabe) and on centrally determinate issues.

It’s worth reminding people that Hussein was supported by a system, not the least so they understand that this isn’t “Return of the Jedi” and that the old regime doesn’t just turn over and quit because the bad guy at the top gets nailed. But let’s not overcorrect. Hussein is uniquely morally culpable for what happened in his name, and it is just and fit that he stand trial for it. Everyone should be willing to agree to that baseline proposition.

Ok, here’s a question – how does one express the sort of joy I feel about Saddam’s capture via the Interwebnet? Text just cannot compare, even the shift+various numbers effort doesn’t carry it.

Therefore….big hugs and muchos joyous drunken hurrahs, possibly with tongue etc! (At this point, please play the tune to “Agadoo” in your head) Everybody conga!

It’s worth reminding people that Hussein was supported by a system, not the least so they understand that this isn’t “Return of the Jedi” and that the old regime doesn’t just turn over and quit because the bad guy at the top gets nailed.

I think paradoxically Saddam has made Baathism in Iraq effectively extinct. On his rise to the top he exterminated anybody in the Baath party who was a threat, intellectually or otherwise. In Iraq the Baath party had effectively become a mafia run by Saddam for Saddam, not a political party or belief system.

People with nothing to lose may carry on fighting, and the various extremists elements who want to have a go at the Americans and who cannot afford to let a democratic nation develop in the Middle East may continue fighting. That is however no basis upon which to argue that the war should not have been fought.

Saudi Arabia’s in the “Coalition of the Willing.” And it’s pretty
clear that the country most responsible for 9/11 is Saudi Arabia
(unless you’re one of those wackos who believe Saddam was behind
9/11) and it’s equally clear that Saudi Arabia is the primary
country behind the spread of Wahabbism and anti-American Islamic
Fundamentalism. Therefore the leader of Saudi Arabia is certainly
worse than Saddam.

Where does Frank Wilhoit read his history ? Im bemused to see he adds in Cromwell with Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Very bizarre.

The point of my comment about Mr. Bush was that he is NOT a historical actor. So the comparison that is thought “mad” is that between the Republican Party on the one hand, and on the other the Nazi Party, the CPSU, the Falange, ZANU-PF, etc. etc. etc.

I decline this reproach utterly and with confidence. Only those could offer it whose knowledge of America is outdated, or derived from propaganda, kindergarten textbooks, and perhaps the occasional visit to New York or San Francisco.

The descent of America into totalitarianism is *the* story of the 20th and 21st Centuries. By comparison, the events of 11 September 2001 are a bottle rocket in the shadow of Krakatoa.

Speaking of ‘lone gunmen’ and other conspiracy theories, this is mine – I prefer to call it an interpretation. Globalization is accelerating faster than bumper cars driven by kids taken off their medication. The advance team is economics – the opening of new markets that hold the promise of cleaner, safer, healthier, and, hopefully, ultimately, more productive and fulfilling lives. The sudden emergence of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism created an obstacle to modernization, not so much because the culture did not choose to participate, but because the culture was literally riddled with religious thought that demanded an aggressive removal of alternative societies that, by their very existence, implied options or temptations that threatened the authority of the Islamo-centric perspective.

I think it is not productive or informative to think in static terms of ‘totalitarianism’ because the post-communist world is in a state of remarkable transition that cannot be well captured by the old terminologies and distinctions. Possibly a tortured sentence but my point is that I am constantly reading about modern events being filtered through the vocabulary of political science than is half a century old.

So-called neo-conservative thought has taken an enormous beating in the public forum and I am not at all convinced it was deserved. Part of my ambivalence is the failure of the Left to articulate an alternative position of sufficient credibility to be debated and refined for implementation as policy. Furthermore, my belief is that the Left has worked itself into the untenable ideological corner of Identity Politics, fueled by the post WWII embrace of the post-modern thinking of philosophers such as Foucault. The politics of special interest groups is a direct refutation of the utopian aspirations that failed so badly in WWII with the eruption of corrupt communist and fascist states.

Now that the Left has redefined itself by fragmented special interest groups whose authenticity is derived from the ‘relative’ conditions that produce a unique set of values and morality, the Left is faced with the philosophical problem of integrating this vision into a coherent foreign policy, and, more to the immediate point, a foreign policy that addresses issues of terrorism and threat with a muscular substance that presents a serious imposition on our attention. I do not think it can be done, which explains the absence of the Left voice at the table during the development of neo-conservative thought. The Left is literally in a very deep hole.

How does this relate to anything? The Saudis are now aware that they are dealing with a very different America – one that is no longer inclined to tolerate duplicity for the sake of stabilizing resource supplies and/or economies. That is a major change in the calculus of the Middle East and one that I seriously doubt will be overlooked by any ME country exposed to the temptation or coercion of supporting terrorism as a religious commitment that subsumes the economic commitments of improved living standards and improved opportunities.

How does this affect Bush and the present administration. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I seriously doubt, anyone within this administration is losing too much sleep over your condemnation of them as ‘totalitarians.’ There is too much wittier comedy on TV.

actually I think Islam Karimov really is as bad or Saddam, or could be if he had the resources. Just like Saddam could have been like Hitler if he had the resources to overrun Iran and indulge his other fancies.

Yes.

W. Kiernan writes:

_I posted this same question elsewhere but they’re too busy there calling each other names to answer: does anybody think that these “insurgents” in Iraq actually blow themselves up out of loyalty to_ Saddam_?_

Yes, actually. Or, rather, to the “renormalized Saddam” of the collective night sweat: which of my neighbors might mark me as a traitor, to hedge _his_ bets against a hypothetical Ba’athist resurgence, and (knowing that we don’t know the odds) who would stand up for me if he did? Given that uncertainty, how can I better protect my family than by acting as I would if Saddam resurgent _were_ on proximate view?

The bad thing about renormalized terror is that it can take years for the air to clear: how long was Mao (or Deng) dead before anyone had the courage to tell him so to his face? The good thing is that once you reach the “ding, dong” tipping point, the news that the witch is dead is equally infectious.

Branding Saddam a loser and a coward must be visceral and irrevocable; after that, it doesn’t matter what we do with him. Shaving him on camera was an _excellent_ move.

Then you need to think through what it will mean for the United States to plunge downwards into the bloodiest genocidal civil war in all of human history: because the propaganda has been botched and the size and courage of the out group were underestimated. Think a hundred million dead, fifty million refugees. Think of the American military disintegrated, and its inventory dispersed and unaccounted for. What will you do? What can you do? What could any combination of nations do, either to prevent this or to cope with its effects?

Ah, I missed this wonderfulness from Mr. Wilhoit who is, it is clear, a lunatic.

‘Just as bad’ has an application in politics that might just be different from its application in ethics. The idea that Stalin was just as bad as Hitler, from an ethical point of view, doesn’t mean that it was a matter of indifference if the U.S. allied with Hitler or with Stalin in WWII. Those who come into politics motivated, primarily, by ethics have to rejoice in the bringing down of a mass murderer. But that the mass murderer was brought down by a group consisting, in part, of Pentagon officials who were all too happy to supply him with the means of murder in the eighties (knowingly, too) does tend to weaken the ethical purity of the capture. Of course, there are those who have opposed Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein, and they can rejoice in their complete innocence — but also in their complete impotence to effect any real change in Iraq. Which is only to say, there’
s a lot of bad faith mixed into any moment of center of moral triumphalism

“9/11 is worse than everything that Saddam has done combined. Number of deaths is irrelevent.”

Why?

>Well, aside from you being a patronizing asshole, there’s no
>particular evidence that Crown Prince Abdullah knew about or was
>responsible for September 11 in any way.

His complicity with Al-Qaeda (and hence 9/11) and the fact that Saudi
Arabia is the primary country behind the spread of Wahabbism and
anti-American Islamic Fundamentalism is more than enough to make him
worse than Saddam.

>Saddam has been responsible
>for thousands of needless deaths, both in the various wars he started
>and in suppressing dissent within Iraq (I refuse to use the term “his
>own people”).

Crown Prince Abdullah’s complicity with Al-Qaeda (and hence 9/11) and
the fact that Saudi Arabia is the primary country behind the spread of
Wahabbism and anti-American Islamic Fundamentalism is more than enough
to make him worse than Saddam.

>So far as I am aware, Crown Prince Abdullah, though
>ruling autocratically, has generally not been a bloody tyrant.

His complicity with Al-Qaeda (and hence 9/11) and the fact that Saudi
Arabia is the primary country behind the spread of Wahabbism and
anti-American Islamic Fundamentalism is more than enough to make him
worse than Saddam.

>The spread of Wahhabism certainly doesn’t compare with killing
>thousands of people.

Obviously Wahabbism is what Al-Qaeda teaches to its members
and uses to justify its attacks. Wahabbism is fundamentally
anti-American and anti-Western. By teaching it to its own
people and spending billions of dollars around the world to
spread around it around the world, Saudi Arabia has become
the primary recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda. And Al-Qaeda obviously
was behind 9/11 which killed thousands of people.

>As to Al Qaeda, doesn’t it depend what kind of
>connections were had, assuming that Crown Prince Abdullah himself had
>any (which I tend to doubt – I think it was other figures in the
>government who were mixed up in that)

Crown Prince Abdullah is the effective head of the Saudi Arabian
government. He could stop the Saudi government and people working
for the government from giving money to Wahabbism and hence create
new recruits for Al-Qaeda. He justs chooses not to.

I think that ‘son of a bitch’ line was actually uttered by FDR about Somosa (sp?); I guess George Snr could have been quoting him…

As for the Jalaba attacks, while I agree that the reason they keep getting dragged up is almost wholly for their emotive effect, it’s worth bearing in mind that back in 1988 the US government claimed that Iran was actually responsible.

They have since claimed that that was a mistake (i.e. a lie), but it’s curious that Stephen Pelletiere, the CIA’s senior political analyst on Iraq during the 1980s, came out this year and said that he still believed that Iran had been to blame for this.

ok. now that saddam has been captured the troops are able to come back home. but what about bidladen? that’s the only question i have!

Pakistan is a pretty tricky situation, considering the country possesses nuclear weapons and still engages in a long-running conflict with India.

Given that the US turned a blind eye towards nuclear weapons acquisition until they didn’t need ISI in Afghanistan anymore, before they whipped out the Pressler Amendment; I feel less than charitable about this.

Uzbekistan could be on the list.

Ahem, could be ?!

My point is that it is a very good thing that we are coddling fewer dictators now under the Bush administration than at any point in recent American history. Hoo-ray!

Celebrations are a bit premature here I think; from what I can determine the US policy towards regions where it has traditionally backed strongmen – the Middle East and Latin America, has not changed all that much. In so far as democratisation has proceeded in these places, I am unaware that it has been the direct result of Bush II admin’s policy; the sole possible exceptions are Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither of which look all that promising at the moment.

Of course, why should this matter, is beyond me. Nations are meant to look after their own interests first and everything else second; promoting democracy is a good soundbite but you have to insane to base a substantial part of your foreign policy on directly creating democratic regimes in other states through force.

Sure Saddam was evil and it’s wonderful to see him captured, but it’s hardly logical to say, as so many do, that because Saddam was evil therefore the USA is virtuous.

Bombing, sanctions and the most draconian war reparations the world has ever seen combined to increase child and maternal mortality in Iraq to a point where an estimated 500,000 extra children died. All courtesy of the USA. Check out harpers.org if you want to read about it.

And sure, the US had no problems with Saddam using chemical weapons against the Kurds who were joining Iran in the fight against Iraq. Any more than it had any problems with the extensive killing of Mayan villagers by the Guatemalan military, and so on with various unpleasant regimes with which it was expedient for the US to be allied.

The US is just another ruthless self-interested great power, no worse than any other ruthless great power. It’s the claim to moral suoperiority and overwhelming goodness that’s really irritating.

A critical observation like that made by Atrios is technically correct, but where does it leave us at the end of the day – or the end of the war? This question goes directly to the heart of my disillusionment with Democratic thought. There is no doubt in my mind that the moral high ground over this war was viciously sought by both Democrats and Republicans. But it seems to me that the Democrats had the easier path because, given the lack of innocence in the modern world, there was no course of action that would have been immune to charges of moral deficiency. The Republican administration chose the more difficult path in deciding to actively do something in spite of the fact that this country lacks a history of perfect behavior in the global community (which itself often does, but shouldn’t, negate the commitment, strength, sacrifice, and endurance during WWII that helped to save an entire planet from who knows how many wasted generations languishing under the Left ‘utopia‘ of communism.) I am one of those who believe the chosen option was ’bold’ and it was obviously soundly criticized.

I hesitate to speculate why this is, but the modern Democrat is moving toward a politics of rhetoric that is very distinct from the traditional embrace of activism. The endless volley of vituperative criticism leveled at the Bush administration is but one example of this rhetoric. It is enough to make one question the ability of the Democratic Party to engage in anything but rhetoric, which is an important concern when citizen security and state sovereignty are threatened. This is not bombast. This is an important issue when a group of people are charged with having the judgment and the wisdom to make crucial decisions on behalf of the country. I have serious doubts about the ability of Democrats to engage in such decision-making without languishing forever in a debate about morally superior alternatives, not to mention the vulnerable intellectual positions to be derived from accommodation of relative values over absolute beliefs. Democrats will have to do much more than nibble at the periphery of difficult issues if they ever hope to participate in political leadership.

RE: John Wilhoit’s comments on Republican totalitarianism. I would ask that you reconsider your position. My apologies for the length of this post, but it seems to me that emotions are being spun and facts are being sacrificed – to the detriment of all.

The United States is not threatened by totalitarian forces from within. This country is experiencing yet another round of shifting public opinion as the ideological dialectic seeks a balanced perspective, which demonstrates yet again the rather astonishing power and flexibility of the institutions of democratic governance bequeathed us by the Founding Fathers.

By the end of the 1970’s the American sense of strength and self respect was at a peacetime low. Domestically, Vietnam left gaping wounds that were physical, psychological, institutional, and cultural. The war was a prolonged, wrenching, divisive, and bitter defeat. Economically, inflation threatened to spiral out of control, hitting 12% when Reagan took office in 1980. American businesses were downsizing and restructuring to better compete with the rising Japanese economic power. Internationally the country was being assaulted in embassies and cruise ships.

Politically, the country had just emerged from a two-decade long expansion of federal regulatory programs in a what has been labeled the Third Wave of progressive capitalist reform that was largely driven by consumer advocacy groups as new players on the political landscape. The prevailing thought (and there was considerable evidence to support the position that emerged from the FDA alone) was that capitalist markets are not inherently structured to protect the consumer from potentially harmful business practices. In fact, at that time, the inherent conflict between value, morality, and quality of life (so-called ’non-material’) issues versus the pure profit-seeking objectives that drove the economic markets was considered indisputable.

Hegel’s Owl of Minerva flew in with the election of Reagan. The violence of the 60’s, the difficult transitions of the Civil Rights movement, the decade of assassinations, the economic weaknesses, the vulnerability to ME resource manipulation, the physical assaults on Americans overseas, and the insecurities of American economic competitiveness all conspired to the rise of New (Evangelical) Right political thought. But this is where history diverges from reality in the usual complex interplay.

The New Right believed that America’s public stress fractures were the result of losing the centuries old debate between those who believed in discovering our reality through experience the gathering of empirical evidence as opposed to those who believed that knowledge was an inherent form of value that was divinely inspired and accessible only through God. That was one schism

Enter the Libertarian concept of free market economies not subject to the regulatory burden imposed by centralized political bureaucracies. Voila! This explained America’s loss of stature and strength. Too much regulation and too much reliance on rational empiricism to the exclusion of divine faith.

The truly interesting part of this particular Hegelian cycle lies on the other side of the aisle with the Democrats who were experiencing philosophical convulsions of their own. The emergence of genocidal communists and fascist states during WWII very clearly demonstrated that Left ‘utopian’ thought for socialized societies was gravely dysfunctional. The replacement thinking has been subsumed under the historical label of ‘post-modernism’ and is generally credited to the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, who provided the theoretical basis for the rise of ‘power politics’ among a dispersed group of special interests, each of whom derived political authority from the unique ‘relative’ constraints of their socio-political environments. In other words, the bourgeois class struggle of Marxism was replaced by the power struggle among special interest groups – what today is called Identity Politics.

The problem with Identity Politics is the inability to build a unified political voice from the fragmented groups. There is no way to construct a ‘meta-narrative’ that reflects a common interest and therefore, as a political power, Identity Politics lacks cohesion and commonality of purpose.

There was no such weakness among Republican thinkers and, IMO, this largely explains the astonishing rise of conservative thought, in general, and New Right thought, in particular. There was a political void screaming to be filled.

Three final points. The Democrats are split not only philosophically among the traditional electoral base of labor and ethnic minority groups, but are now split politically between Clinton supporters and Dean supporters. There is some attempt to align this political split with the philosophical split, but it is not at all clear to me that the two divisions are correlated. In fact, I suspect it is not all clear to operatives within the party. Doesn’t matter. Democrats have clearly demonstrated that they no longer speak with a single coherent voice and that they are not capable of effectively resolving internal power struggles. Both of these failures play large on the public stage and I very much that any amount of money from George Soros or anyone else will cure what ails this party at this time – unless money can buy discipline and thought.

Secondly, the Republicans have surprisingly and ironically sponsored the development of what I think is an impressive amount of very defensible scholarship to support their political issues. This is in spite of the New Right position in defense of divine knowledge at the expense of rational empiricism. My personal opinion is that the so-called New Right is not as powerful as the alarmists might think simply because a commitment to reason and rationality is not as easy to dismiss as the more extreme among us might wish. I believe the more rational members of the Republican Party have re-established a very solid empirical foundation for public policy and decision-making that is in stark contrast to the faith-based epistemology of their far right brethren.

And finally, the rather astonishing failures of corporate governance, coupled with the exposure of deep levels of corruption within the trading and mutual fund markets, suggests to me that the strength of so-called ‘faith-based’ initiatives within the economic sector is rather shallow, if not non-existent. The dynamic energy of business will not tolerate the constraints of any pseudo-philosophical commitment to ‘divine’ direction. It is a consistent and universal truism in history that extremism contains the seeds of its own demise. We are constantly in a state of rebalancing ourselves.

In the meantime, the Democrats will attempt to make peace between the Clinton-Dean people in an exercise that will be of little consequence to the American people.

None of this is even close to any form of totalitarianism. This is an active demonstration of democracy – American style – in action. When the Democrats accuse the Bush administration of foolish jingoism on the world stage by taking cheap shots about the blood that is on everyone’s hands, I can only thank God (privately of course) that this administration had the intelligence and the courage to attempt to clean up an ugly cesspool of a situation – one that threatened the security of American citizens and the sovereignty of the American State. To use America’s imperfect past as an excuse for inaction in the face of preserving a dangerous status quo is to my mind an ultimate folly. It is true – moral arguments tend to try the patience of anyone who is old enough to drive, but practical arguments about security and quality of life under institutions that overtly value and defend freedom are received with enthusiasm by people who are old enough to remember.

Shorter tomd:

I get your point. Now try to get mine. Criticism loses validity and therefore cache with the voter when it has to slither through a tunnel of whining petulance disguised as moral superiority. Did that work for you as a kid? I understand the irritation within the Democratic Party at the kid/adult/grown-up debate, but consider this: for some reason, and my personal opinion is that it might be complicated but I withhold giving you that degree of intellectual evolution without further evidence, the Democratic Party is subject not simply to the abuse and ignomy of being an opposition party but it is suffering from something else – and I am not sure what it is because the focus that could bring back the Party as a robust and viable voice within the domestic landscape is very clear to me. I am not going to repeat them here because I have already abused this site with lengthy postings – but think in terms of economics, if your hands don’t start shaking and you don’t break out into a cold sweat, that is.

End sarcasm. Begin Thinking.