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Saddam Verdict a Pyrrhic Victory for Bush
Published on Tuesday, November 7, 2006 by the Toronto Star / Canada
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Saddam Verdict a Pyrrhic Victory for Bush
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by Richard Gwyn
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| As Saddam Hussein walked out of the Baghdad courtroom after hearing the verdict of guilty and the sentence of death pronounced upon him, "a small smile pass(ed) across his face."This, at any rate, was the description given by BBC-TV's veteran world affairs reporter John Simpson who watched Saddam as he walked past the press box a few feet away.In Simpson's judgment, Saddam was smiling because "He had achieved precisely what he had come to the courtroom to do." Again, according to Simpson, this was to have "given new heart to his supporters and to the insurgency" and to have "made up for the humiliation of being pulled, dirty and dishevelled, from a hole in the ground."Unhappily, Simpson is right. Saddam is going to end up the victor in his long struggle with U.S. President George W. Bush.Saddam's own end won't, of course, be in any way whatever a pleasant one. He will die, most probably early next year, after his appeal has been heard and rejected. He will die, moreover, by hanging rather than by a military firing squad as Saddam has insisted he is entitled to.But he will die a martyr. And martyrs are always remembered. A great many of his own people will be delighted by his end. They celebrated in the streets as soon as the news came out. Almost all the Shia and the Kurds whom he so brutalized and oppressed, and who constitute some three-quarters of Iraq's total population, will celebrate again when his actual end happens.He will be mourned only by his own kin in his hometown of Tikrit, and by others among the minority Sunnis.But Saddam, nevertheless, will be remembered as a symbol of Arab defiance and of refusal to admit defeat.For Bush, all that remains is little more than two years of hanging on to an ever-diminishing presidency and of persisting in the denial that the war in Iraq is not already lost — irretrievably. Once he finally steps down, Bush will spend his retirement years reading (or being told about) the virtually universal condemnation of him by historians and commentators as the United States's most disastrous president for decades, perhaps for centuries. Even Bush's own neo-conservatives are now turning on him. In the online edition of Vanity Fair magazine, in a preview of an article to be published in an upcoming issue, three of the most prominent among them, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman and David Frum (the Canadian who is linked to the destructive "axis of evil" phrase) have all recanted. As an example, Frum now blames the shambles in Iraq on a "failure at the centre," which amounts to pointing his finger right at Bush.That Saddam could preserve even a tattered shred of dignity confirms the magnitude of the damage that Bush has inflicted by every aspect of his foreign policy. That record spans everything from the war on terrorism itself (there are today incomparably more terrorists than when Bush started), to the all-time low, as measured by all polls, in the moral standing and credibility of the United States. One of the revisionist neo-cons, Adelman, admits in the Vanity Fair article that any notion of the U.S. using its power "for moral good in the world" has now been killed for a generation at least. Which does represent, as is utterly infuriating, a victory for Saddam, no matter even if only a symbolic one.Saddam ought to have been discredited totally. His crimes — specifically the murder of 148 people in Dujail — are clear beyond the least argument. His trial, while rough and ready at times, was, in context, quite fair. Far worse crimes committed by Saddam, such as his gassing of the Kurds, have not even been heard.Yet Bush has managed to give Saddam an escape hatch. Saddam's failures, the product of brutality and of plain thuggishness, will always be measured against, and so be diminished by, Bush's failures — these being, in his case, the product of arrogance and stupidity. The single glint of light on the scene is that both will be gone, soon. Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
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