The Meaning of a Skull By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Friday's Times carried a front-page picture of a skull, with a group of Iraqis gathered around it. The skull was of a political prisoner from Saddam Hussein's regime, and the grieving Iraqis were relatives who had exhumed it from a graveyard filled with other victims of Saddam's torture. Just under the picture was an article about President Bush vowing that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq, as he promised. As far as I'm concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war. That skull, and the thousands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me. Mr. Bush doesn't owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue). It is clear that in ending Saddam's tyranny, a huge human engine for mass destruction has been broken. The thing about Saddam's reign is that when you look at that skull, you don't even know what period it came from — his suppression of the Kurds or the Shiites, his insane wars with Iran and Kuwait, or just his daily brutality. Whether you were for or against this war, whether you preferred that the war be done with the U.N.'s approval or without it, you have to feel good that right has triumphed over wrong. America did the right thing here. It toppled one of the most evil regimes on the face of the earth, and I don't think we know even a fraction of how deep that evil went. Fair-minded people have to acknowledge that. Who cares if we now find some buried barrels of poison? Do they carry more moral weight than those buried skulls? No way. So why isn't everyone celebrating this triumph? Why is there still an undertow out there, a holding back of jubilation? There are several explanations. For me, it has to do with the nature of Iraq and the Middle East. You always have this worry that in the Middle East, fighting evil is like holding back the desert. The minute you fight off one evil, three others blow in to take its place. You always worry that maybe these countries are not real states, but are simply collections of tribes that can be controlled only with a fist, and the only options are an evil iron fist or a softer, more benign one. No sooner is Saddam gone than up pops a group of Shiite clerics demanding that Iraq be turned into another Iran. So as much as I believe we did good and right in toppling Saddam, I will whoop it up only when the Iraqi people are really free — not free just to loot or to protest against us, but free to praise us out loud, free to speak their minds in any direction, because they have built a government and rule of law that can accommodate pluralism and stand in the way of evil returning. I also think many Democrats are reluctant to celebrate because they fear — with good reason — that President Bush will be empowered by this war victory, that he and Karl Rove will use that power to drive through a radical conservative agenda that Democrats fear is erasing separations between church and state, depriving government of the tax funds it needs to maintain decent social and educational programs, and despoiling the environment. Sure, Democrats argue, we did right in Iraq, but if it will only lead to more wrong at home, how good can you feel? And when you look at the way war critics — from the Dixie Chicks to Tom Daschle — have been savaged by conservatives, it feels as if some people want to use this war to create a multiparty democracy in Iraq and a one-party state in America. France and Russia refuse to acknowledge that any good was done in Iraq because if America's war ends justify its unilateral means, their power will be further diminished. The Arab world refuses to acknowledge any good from this war, because many Arab regimes have features in common with Saddam's, and if getting rid of him was good, so would be getting rid of them. And Arab intellectuals and the Arab League won't acknowledge any good having been done in Iraq by America, because it only reminds them that they should have taken care of this problem themselves — and didn't. Bottom line: We can get rid of the sculptures of Saddam with one tug, but our job is to build a regime in Iraq that won't produce any more battered human skulls. That will be a huge task, which will need many helpers. The challenge for the Arabs, France and Russia is to get over the fact that Mr. Bush did something good, and roll up their sleeves to help make it last. And the challenge for Mr. Bush is to not take the good thing he has done and cast it in an ideological framework that will make people resent it — at home and abroad.
Did you get that from the Chronicle's Sunday editorial page. I wanted to post another editorial on a completely different subject but I couldn't find it on their web site.
Please If a majority of the country supported the war, then that means a majority of Liberals were behind it as well. Stop acting like Liberal support of this war is rare. Did you even read this article? It is very good and points out exactly how people feel. He does "Get It," but do you?
Wait...he's wrong!!! We haven't freed everyone else in the world yet....and we hadn't absolved the world of all evil prior to this. Consequently, we should not have done this.
Oski, I didn't really mean to imply that. Yes, I read the article on Sunday, got it from the Chronicle. Actually I was just gonna write "Thomas Friedman Gets it" but I figured if I threw "liberal" in there then more people would read it. How many people know who Friedman is? I know there are several left of center people who support it, Slate did a long list of people and I was surprised to see how many there war.
The quotes you cited, about the separation of Church and State on the one hand, and massive tax cuts on the other, are hardly a radical conservative agenda that will send this country down a path from which it can't return. Personally, I don't really agree with more tax cuts as long as we don't address our massive budget deficit. But taxes can be raised in the future. And his initiative regarding Church and State is pretty minor but I think can do a lot of good.
Sorry, I don't mean to pounce on you, the "Get's It" thing just bugs me and has bugged me since people started using it as an easy complaint about damn near everybody on the Rockets' roster. There's no substance needed, you just say so and so doesn't "get it." My response to that is always "WTF is It?"
Would any of this have happend in the first place if the US had not propped Saddam into a leadership position and supported his military during his rise to power?
I used to be with 'it', but then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm with isn't 'it' anymore and what's 'it' seems weird and scary
*sigh* This war has nothing to do with saving Iraqis, it has nothing to do with "helping those people." This war is about power and money. Bush and his administration are all defense hawks and/or have extremely close ties to giant energy corporations. First we float propaganda about how bad it is for women in Afghanistan, oh those poor Afghan women. And yes, life is brutal for them. For Afghans in general. So we "liberate" Afghanistan. Guess what? The new regime has turned out not to give a crap about women's rights either. So now we "liberate" Iraq, oh those poor Iraqis. Gosh, they sure did have it bad. What a brutal dictator. Now Iran wants to help the Shiites claim power and possibly elect a fundamentalist cleric to rule the country. Well, we won't let that happen; I guess "free" is in the eye of the beholder. Rwansi and Burundi. Perhaps half a million dead. Did we do anything? Did we jump in and try to keep the Tutsis and Hutus from killing each other? South African men often rape virgins because this can supposedly cure the men of AIDS. Idiotic, ignorant, brutal. And....? Saddam will not be missed but his like, unfortunately, is not uncommon. Are we really going to go smacking everybody around? Or just until somebody smacks us back? We have taught much of the world to hate our guts and we are just reinforcing this. We chose Saddam because he is a relatively soft target in a part of the world that we want to lord over. After we "freed" Afghanistan, a major natural gas pipeline was re-opened. Unocal is the company operating it. Ties to the administration. (I think Condoleeza Rice was on the board.) Iraqi oil's pumping again. YAY! But I'm sure that's just a fringe benefit of freeing all those poor Iraqi people. If I'm being such a scathing jerk, it's only because this administration has used so many pretexts (weapons of mass destruction? please!) to cover their real intentions in Eurasia. Then we go bash the French (freedom fries? please!) and the Russians because they get angry. Because they didn't help us secure billions of dollars worth of oil for ourselves? You can wipe your ass with the oil contracts those countries had secured with Iraq....because we freed the poor Iraqis from a brutal and evil dictator. If this administration wants to address evil, it should look in the mirror first. They are helping out major corporations that will wind up helping out the common person not in the least. Jobs? Forget it. Deficit? Skyrocketing. Civil liberties? No way. You want to complain? Freedom of speech? Since when? THE CONSTITUTION? What's that?! We got that one fixed, too. Education? My employer is the Department of Education. Believe what you want about George's blather about education, but the budget is being cut, cut, cut. And still people think he's a great president.
Of course not, my point is we could have made a better choice to begin with and kept better control of the situation. When he gassed his people with chemicals from American sources, his regime should have ended shortly thereafter.
Originally posted by ROXTXIA *sigh* This war has nothing to do with saving Iraqis, it has nothing to do with "helping those people." Regardless of Bush's motivations, which are debatable, this was possibly the most important outcome of the war. Yet many liberals seem more bent on examining the political ramifications than the long-term impact on the Iraqi population.
I don't think that this is an accurate characterization of the situation. Saddam rose to power with no help from the U.S. and the U.S. did not support his military. Did we give Saddam aide in his war over Iran? Yes. Did a U.S. company supply research grade Anthrax to Bagdad University? Yes. Did the U.S. arm Saddam? No. Look at all the weapons the Iraqis used in both this and the previous war, not to mention the Iran war. The vast majority was Soviet stuff with a little French and Brazilian mixed in. The U.S. has a long history of siding with questionable people (remember Stalin was an allie during WWII) but let's keep the facts straight! More info on his rise to power: BBC: Saddam Hussein - his rise to power Infor from efreedomnews.com From PBS Info on arming Iraq: Iraq Ground Force Equipment Air Force Navy
111chase111 Your reading too much into my post, thats why I put a question mark at the end. I'm not saying that we did every single thing necessary to keep him in power. We could have used our influence to direct Iraq in different ways which would have reigned him in sooner. Is that the hot new supermodel i've been hearing about?
