It could happen to you

Now that Sadaam Hussein has received hasty frontier justice, I have a few thoughts on the functionality of barbarity and its relation to Iraq.

In days of old, judicial punishment was always public. Whether it was the pillory, whipping, dunking, branding, hanging, or beheading, it was a spectacle. There was no cable TV or NFL, but your average Theodoric or Guillaume could always count on an entertaining “dance on the air.” Entertainment wasn’t the real purpose, of course. It was a demonstration of state power over the bodies of its citizens. Even when hidden away in a dungeon, brutality became public knowledge as stories and damaged bodies eventually made their way out. It was the use of violence to create fear in order to achieve a political outcome. In other words, terrorism.

The leaky state security apparatus that divulged the cruelties of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib did not defeat the purpose of those activities. In fact, the sometimes clear, sometimes hazy knowledge of what goes on in our off-the-books international prison system enhances its power. Those that the U.S. government wishes to terrify have both a clear understanding of what could happen to them and a springboard for even more nightmarish imaginings.

The CIA believes that less than 10% of the inmates at Guantanamo are “high value,” and that most of them are either foot soldiers or random victims of tribal feuds and bounty hunters. This abuse of the innocent is no handicap. In fact, it is an asset. If the innocents are as at-risk as the guilty, then everyone is looking over their shoulders and toeing the line. The United States Government has been quite successful at demonstrating its power over bodies both foreign and domestic.

The abrupt vertical demise of Saddam Hussein had a second purpose – closing the book on U.S. government support for him and his evil doings. In fact, our government led Saddam along the path to power starting in 1959. From his beginnings as a would-be assassin through his stint as a torturer to his glory days as a despot, the CIA and State Department were there for him.

Here’s my favorite Iraq-related quote, spoken as Saddam’s armored columns lined up at the Kuwait border:

“We [The United States] have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America.” Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, July 25th, 1990, one week before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in a meeting with Sadaam Hussein.

You’d think that we were looking for a new enemy to justify military Keynesianism after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But that would be really cynical. The fact that Ambassador Glaspie’s boss, James Baker, was brought in to clean up the mess with the Iraq Study Group just adds an appropriately twisted bookend to the whole disaster.

We found him, helped to raise him up, supported him, suckered him, deposed him, and through our puppet administration, we killed him. The message to the world: It could happen to you.

Comments

[Jay]

I just saw a documentary about America's involvement with Saddam from the beginning. It was very interesting, and it was (seemingly) made pre-9/11 but post-Gulf-War, so it would be hard for anyone to write it off as political or anti-war bias. Alas, it was on You Tube under the title "Iraq" so the prospects of finding it again are quite dismal.