Adam's blogbox: Saddam sets example – are the Democrats man enough to defund the war?

A friend of mine observed about the surge speech that he thought Bush looked like a dog that had peed on the carpet: “I haven’t been good, but I still want to eat.”

Now that Bush has shot his last pathetic wad into the faces of the American people, the Democrats are faced with a challenge. Are they man enough to defund the surge? Even more, are they man enough to defund the war? Will they vote for funds to bring our troops back home, and not vote for funds to keep them there? It’s their constitutional right to defund the war, but do they have the balls to exercise it?

They have an example of acting like a man in a certain Saddam Hussein. He died like a man. Will they live like one? They talk a good game, but where’s their walk?

A friend of mine who runs a huge international company tells me: “There are no men anywhere. People don’t do the right thing just because it’s the right thing to do.”

Say what you want about Saddam, he was a man of principle. Screwed-up principles for sure, but he acted on them.

I have no tears for Saddam. Not because I think he was evil. In fact, I don’t think he was. If he was evil, so are Bush/Cheney and the Democratic Party.

I have no tears for Saddam because he was a man who lived by the sword and died by the sword. His death matched his life. He was killed by his own rules. So be it. Rules are rules. Power has its privileges, but with great power comes great brutality. And when you lose power, there comes brutal retribution.

Saddam Hussein followed his rules because of his belief in the destiny of his country, which he saw embodied in himself. “L’etat, c’est moi.” He created a workable Iraq. Those who toed his line were assured of a good education, an OK suburban life, and health benefits -- the accepted advantages of a stable middle-class existence.

I wish our politicians had the same belief in their principles. Maybe if they saw the state embodied in themselves, they would. Maybe if they saw themselves as an embodiment of our Constitution, they’d act out their constitutional rights.

Yes, Saddam made big mistakes – he started a war with Iran. He was also winked into another war against Kuwait by the US, who then went back on the wink.

None of these Saddam actions was evil. What they were was spectacularly bad statecraft. Our own President has committed the same Saddam-like mistake with his own war. Our Democratic Party will be making the same big mistake if they don’t defund the war.

As for the evil that Saddam did to his own citizenry, there are two ways to look at it. One is from outside, from the West, from a posture blinkered by self-righteousness. Christ, the man HAS to be evil to gas his own people, and to kill over a hundred people in reprisal for an attack on his life.

Yet there’s another way to look at it -- as successful statecraft. These actions are what it took for a strongman to rule as a member of a minority, and to keep a fractious country together. Saddam acted out of principle.

Moreover, actions such as these are not rare interruptions into the placid fabric of moral life by some evil agency. They are the received and consensual currency of power in much of the world since time immemorial. When the current Syrian dictator’s father escaped an assassination attempt on his life, he had the village his would-be killers came from razed to the ground. Not a single soul was spared.

That’s what dictators do to survive: it’s the habit that comes with the job. Those who take up arms against the dictator know what to expect if they don’t succeed. Those are the rules. Those are the principles involved. Saddam Hussein followed them religiously. They worked for him for many years.

Was he evil? Or was he merely practical? Did he school his sons to be evil -- or did he introduce them to the practical uses of brutality they would need to rule after him?

When Bush attacks a country that’s no threat to us, or when the Democrats don’t have the balls to defund the war, we do not call them evil. Even though the Bush/Cheney grab for profit -- for oil exploration revenue -- has caused the death of over 3,000 Americans and over 600,000 Iraqis, most of them women and children. Even if the Democrats keep on causing the deaths of women and children if they keep on voting for funds to keep our troops there.

Those children who are dead – in which court can their killers be charged? Who in fact has the right to lynch our Administration or the Democratic Party? Nobody. There’s as little reason to lynch Bush/Cheney or Nancy Pelosi as there was to lynch Saddam.

What makes Saddam evil and Bush/Cheney moral? Where is the non-equivalence that makes the one good and the other bad? Is it in the number of deaths they caused?

No.

Both of them followed their cultural customs – Saddam the habit of dictatorial power in the Middle East, and Bush/Cheney the habit of military-industrial capitalism in the West. They followed their respective rules.

They may be tremendously foolish, but not evil. What they suffer from is not a surfeit of Satanism, but an obesity of hubris. They bear the burden of too much morality: the morality of the man who sees a worthy end and will employ any means necessary to attain that end. Even when it includes the death of many innocents, the breaking of many eggs to make an omelet, the torture of many perceived enemies. In Saddam’s case the end was a workable, secular Iraq, with solid benefits for all who obeyed him. In Bush/Cheney’s case, it was a democratized Iraq with a privatized oil industry that would benefit Texas oil companies.

The manner of Saddam’s death reveals precisely this. It was not the death of an evil man, but the ending of a man on the losing side of a power game.

Since he was the one doing the dying, he had the opportunity to display dignity, which he did. His death befitted a man who fought by the rules as he understood them, and as understood by his killers, too. The men doing the killing had the same opportunity, but they blew it. They did not lend dignity to the occasion. Neither did we in our orgy of self-excusing. Neither will the Democratic Party if they don’t defund the war.

Saddam took his death like a moral man. He won the final battle of his own death.

In his last moments, Saddam asked a good question of the behavior of his killers. “Is this manly?”

It’s a question we might ask ourselves. Invading Iraq – was it manly? Killing innocent Iraqis by the hundreds of thousands for oil profits – is it manly? Refusing to defund the war – is it manly? Is our President manly? Is the GOP manly? Are the Democrats manly? Are we Americans manly? Are our troops manly?

Saddam’s question should be ringing in our ears if those same ears weren’t stopped by the fatty reality-clogging sausages ground out by our 24/7 propaganda machines.

With this question, Saddam nailed our leaders. He nailed America. Dismissing Saddam as evil doesn’t answer the question. If we want an answer that cloaks us in morality, a burning fire rages before us -- the heat of self-examination, the boiling blood of guilt, the ashes of morality, the muddy slate of a total change of heart.

Are we man enough to stand in that fire, to drink that blood, to taste those ashes?

Over to you, Democrats. Let’s see if you’ve got the balls to match your rhetoric.