No triumph in Saddam's execution

The toppling statue of Saddam Hussein has become the iconographic marker for the 24/7 TV news outlets of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But the real symbol of the misadventure in Iraq are the grainy, secretly taken images of the dictator's last moments, the rush to the gallows, the exchanged insults and taunts, the sense of chaos. They are images that won't go well with a triumphal soundtrack.

In fact, there is a diminishing store of archival footage, one imagines, that would fit now with the kind of musical fanfares and displays of military might that served as backdrop for the unquestioning "news" coverage we saw during the early months of the war.

The failure in Iraq goes well beyond mistakes about troop levels and military strategy. Shame has overshadowed triumph the whole length of this miserable undertaking: from the pretense under which we invaded, to Abu Ghraib, to the wholesale unraveling of a society and destruction of its infrastructure, to the sham trial of a dictator, to his execution, more a ritual act of tribal revenge than an act of justice.

The Vatican, which has repeatedly condemned the war, now condemns one of its principal consequences. "Capital punishment is always tragic news, a motive of sadness, even when it's a case of a person guilty of grave crimes," according to a statement released by Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office.

"The execution of the guilty party is not a path to reconstruct justice and to reconcile society. Indeed, there is the risk that, on the contrary, it may augment the spirit of revenge and sow seeds of new violence.

"In this dark time in the life of the Iraqi people," the statement continued, "it can only be hoped that all the responsible parties truly will make every effort so that, in this dramatic situation, possibilities of reconciliation and peace may finally be opened."

Those possibilities appear impossibly remote at the moment. The quick execution of Saddam Hussein short-circuited a legal process that, had it been conducted with any semblance of order, would certainly have included an examination of U.S. willingness, in an earlier era, to supply the dictator with components for chemical weapons. It would certainly have covered U.S. support for Saddam's eight-year war in Iran, even though we knew of the atrocities that accompanied that period. Saddam, a brutal actor well before he became a regional threat in Baghdad, became a sinner in our eyes when his war making threatened the stability of our oil supplies.

In an essay on the Electronic Iraq Web site, John Collins, associate professor of global studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., poses the question: "If journalism is the first draft of history, then what is journalism that denies history? Is it still journalism?"

We'll leave that to a philosophy class, but a point made repeatedly on this page--during the period of vicious sanctions against Iraq through the various stages of bombings and full-scale invasion--is that the U.S. role in Iraq's history prior to the 1991 war is rarely part of the story in the mainstream media.

Collins writes, "It seems that the initial coverage of Saddam's execution has served as a collective ritual hand washing designed to reassure Americans that they really are the blameless leaders of a cosmic struggle against 'evil.' And the answer to the existential question comes into view. Today's mainstream journalism, even 'live' TV, is a far cry from the first draft of history. Instead, it functions largely as a transmission of selective history that has been drafted--and airbrushed, sanitized, rearranged and distorted--long before it ever reaches our eyes and ears."

Who knows what history will make of all this. In the distance of history, however, it is difficult to imagine that the incident of Saddam's being brought to "justice" will do much to balance the scales of the enormous destruction of a culture and its people that unfolds daily. For 15 years we have applied military pressure, sanctions that the United Nations says were directly responsible for the deaths of more than 500,000 children under the age of 5, and finally a full-scale invasion that has led to a civil war and untold thousands of dead Iraqis. Peace and reconciliation are a distant dream. Perhaps, in the short term, we can finally come to grips with the limits of our power and the awful price we pay for preemptive military adventures.

COPYRIGHT 2007 National Catholic Reporter
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