The Death of Saddam and Other Metaphors

By William Christie

Special to Defense and the National Interest

January 2, 2007

Metaphor: something considered as representing or symbolizing another (usually abstract) thing.

If you had told me a year ago it would have ended this way I wouldn’t have believed you. I never would have believed that, stripped of the power to do violence and the all-encompassing propaganda machine that’s the essential item in every dictator’s toolbox, anything on this earth could make Saddam Hussein look heroic. But it happened. And we were the ones who did it.

For the record, and the benefit of angry readers, I could list no living man who deserved execution more than Saddam. I’m not here to write his epitaph. I’m here to use his death to write the epitaph of all our efforts in Iraq, because the execution of Saddam Hussein is the perfect metaphor for our intervention in his country. We haven’t been able to do anything right there, even kill Saddam.

How fitting the way it was done: A frantic, disorganized rush in the middle of the night, and afterward everyone slinking away from the carcass as if it was an embarrassing mess no one wanted to take responsibility for.

Guilt will do that because we made Saddam, just as surely as the twisted tribal culture he was raised in. Without the billions of dollars of oil money and credit we poured into his pockets, that paid for the arms and technology we later spent billions more trying to strip him of, without the careful inflation of his megalomania in those pre-Desert Storm years when his actions served our interests, without all our years of effort, Saddam would have been just another two-bit tyrant, like those jowly thugs who run the former Soviet Republics, men no one has ever heard of because they were never able to get their hands on enough money to match their ambitions.

It was a debacle from the moment we dragged him out of that dirty little tunnel. However imperfect the Nuremberg Trials were after World War Two with the specter of Soviet judges and selective justice, they were still a model for the disposition of vanquished tyrants.

Of course we wanted no part of anything like the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague. But that was justice on the European model, with the creation of its own tenured bureaucracy that never wanted the proceedings to end, and the idea that perfect fairness demanded that the dictator be allowed to talk his court to death. If the defendant hadn’t misjudged his medication, it would still be going on.

But could we not have done better than trying to create an Iraqi court of justice in a land where 34 years of Saddam’s own rule had rendered that term meaningless? After all, we didn’t ask German judges to try Goering and Himmler.

Our ideal turned out to be a never-ending cavalcade of new judges, frequent recesses for assassination, and clown college proceedings where the cameras had to be turned off whenever things became too embarrassing. We had a chance to create a new template for bringing dictators and mass murderers to justice, and we blew it.

But the only thing more embarrassing was yanking Saddam out of his second trial when the Iraqi government decided (for its own reasons) that it was time for him to go. From the moment of his capture we kept Saddam in our custody, because we knew in Iraqi custody he would either die trying to escape or actually make his escape following the transfer of a large sum of money.

But for his execution, we very carefully transferred him to the Iraqi government (on an American base) and then ensured there were no Americans present – another perfect metaphor, unable to influence events yet perfectly positioned to take all the blame for what transpired.

Transferred to the former headquarters of the Istikhbarat, Saddam’s military intelligence unit. A torture chamber, perhaps an appropriate metaphor for Saddam’s victims, but certainly not one for the impartial execution of justice. In one brilliant stroke we rendered our justice equivalent to his.

Transferred to a “newly trained unit of the Iraqi National Police,” who, from the video of the event, were not wearing the formal uniforms of a sovereign state in order to carry out one of the most solemn functions of a state. Rather, they were dressed in black ski masks and suede and leather jackets and were looking very much like militia enforcers. Next to them, Saddam looked like Saladin in full armor.

I’d like to be able to say that I intended “militia enforcers” to be a metaphor. But as everyone in the room, including Saddam, prayed, “Peace be upon Mohammed and his holy family,” the two guards, within hearing of the assembled witnesses, appended that traditional blessing with, “Supporting his son Moktada, Moktada, Moktada.” They were referring, of course, to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shia cleric whose Mahdi Army militia is currently committing the worst of the anti-Sunni ethnic cleansing, and who are thought to have widely infiltrated the Iraqi security forces.

And then they proceeded to taunt Saddam. To make a mass murderer and torturer look like an exemplar of dignity and courage being taunted by a raggedy street mob instead of the officials of a sovereign government is a singular achievement.

If I can figure out that Saddam was executed by the Mahdi Army, everyone in the Middle East certainly can. And you’d better believe that the Mahdi Army is out in the streets of Iraq today letting every one know they did it. According to The New York Times, two witnesses joked that they gathered that the goal of disbanding the militias had yet to be accomplished.

So we’ve made it clear to the Arab world, whose democratization was supposed to be our strategic priority, that the death of Saddam was about vengeance, not justice. The result is indistinguishable to them from the usual aftermath of a Middle Eastern coup d’etat, where the losing team disappears into night and fog.

And if they were in fact our target audience, what better day to allow this to happen than just before Eid al-Adha, the feast of the sacrifice, one of the holiest days in the Muslim calendar, when Islam (as in Judaism and Christianity) commemorates the willingness of the Prophet Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael for God?

A lamb was slaughtered instead.

We won’t, but there are people in the region who will consider that an apt metaphor.

As is the sad, shabby, chaotic, ill-planned, poorly-managed end of Saddam Hussein. The perfect metaphor for the United States in Iraq.

Happy New Year.

William Christie is a former Marine Corps infantry officer who left the Corps as a First Lieutenant in 1987. He is the author of six novels, most recently The Enemy Inside, just published in paperback from Pinnacle Books/Kensington Press. He can be contacted at .

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