Blogger Wes Ide has written a brilliant commentary on Saddam Hussein and how the US handled this whole issue around him. There's practically nothing to add.

R.I.P. Saddam Hussein

Despite any atrocities the man may have committed, I personally feel that the execution of any human being is just as morally wrong as any act the executed may have committed.

For the worst kinds of humans, who believe the horrors they are committing are justified, especially by their God, they do not fear death and look forward to it. To give them that death is to make a martyr of them and reward them, as well as provide an intensely increased motivation for the executed's supporters to regroup and unite to promote the cause for which the executed stood for.

Proof paramount of this is seen in a classic and well-loved movie by many Americans, Braveheart.

Had the executed been given a life sentence in prison, even in extremely poor conditions, he would then have had years to consider his actions and thus truly be punished. Instead, he gets off easy.

This is how I feel about any execution but, in this specific case, the damage done is exponential.

For one thing, we Americans armed this man. Our dealings with Iraq in the past 25 years have been ridiculous; the country is a sovereign nation but we continuously have meddled with it.

After we gave the country weapons, we were aware of the atrocities being committed, but we thankfully minded our own business here at home during that time; we did not meddle in another country's affairs.

Just because we are the world's most powerful nation does not give us the authority to be the world's police task force. Now, if our country was immaculate and poverty non-existent (as well as so many other issues), then we could henceforth set out to address other nation's business and help stabilize the world as well. But our nation has so many internal problems that we are not appropriately addressing because we continuously funnel money into meddling in other nation's affairs. Other nations don't do it, at least not to the degree that we do. And this is not a sign of greatness in our nation's character, but an empirical fault.

I have no qualms about us helping out nations, but we need to help ourselves out first.

Now, as pertains to our helping out Iraq. We did not set out to help Iraq. That never was the initial reason for what is now termed as Iraq's Liberation. No, it was the Weapons of Mass Destruction. People grow tired of hearing of that term because WMD was used so much in the media to proliferate the mentality that Iraq was planning to use WMDs against us in order to bolster domestic support for a full invasion of Iraq. Sadly, it worked.

I will gladly admit to not being brainwashed by the media. I followed the news at this time, like responsible Americans did, but, unlike too many, I analyzed the news. Time and time again, we heard Iraq had WMDs. But the United Nations (whose job it is to police the world, not us) said they did not have conclusive evidence of WMDs and wanted us to give them time to inspect some more before we invaded. We, of course, ignored them, thinking us better than them. If your sister thinks she may have gotten raped, but isn't sure, and the cops tell you they are still investigating, you don't go out and just unleash hell upon who you suspect to be the aggressor.

But that is what we did. We invaded Iraq after our leader delivered an ultimatum that Saddam leave his country within a certain time frame. How ridiculous! Why wasn't there more of an outcry at this insane utterance of our President? Can you imagine if a leader of another nation decried that our President (no matter who he was) had to leave the country within 48 hours, or face invasion? Of course we wouldn't accept it, as we have a strong policy of not accepting orders from terrorists. So why did we think Saddam would just up and leave his own sovereign nation he was running? We couldn't have; the ultimatum served as instant justification of invasion.

And it went so well! We got reports that Saddam's own troops were not even fighting us, and we pressed on, and everything seemed all good. Meanwhile, Saddam went into hiding, as we toppled his capital and his own statues. We were filled with imagery of celebratory Iraqis, glad to have been liberated. Which was great, because when no WMDs were found anywhere in the country at all, this imagery was a great way to convert those that intially bought into the war into a new justification of "the Liberation of Iraq."

Here's some facts about the "liberation:" In our 3+ years in Iraq, we have not only lost more American soldiers than we did in 9/11, but we have also been responsible for over 650,000 Iraqi civilians! That's insane! Saddam today hung for killing several thousand after an assassination attempt on him. While I do not defend that act, and it seems heinous to you and I of this culture, a separate culture from ours already existed in Iraq where it was known that kind of retaliation was a possibility, and the aggressors proceeded anyways. I am not saying they signed 20,000 of their citizen's death warrants, I am saying that their culture and ours are different. We are taught in schools to respect other cultures, but see in practice that if cultures exist that we do not agree with, well, then that is wrong and must be stopped.

But if you take the pure numbers at face value, devoid of circumstance, our own nation is responsible for over a half a million deaths of the citizens of a nation. Who are we to punish a man who was responsible for 00.3% of the amount of people we have done?

And that whole period of everything being all good in Iraq and things looking so well that "Mission Accomplished" was declared a couple years ago? Yes, we all know that Iraq is still a mess, and that we continue to fight a persistent enemy. We call them the insurgents, because that connotation carries with it a feeling of insolence and insubordination. "Bow down to us! We may have invaded your homeland, but we are your new leaders, with our "elected" officials for your new form of Iraq, and you must accept this or be justifiably killed!"

Flip the situation here. Remember when I compared our leader's ultimatum to if that had been given to us? Well suppose we had been invaded following that, as we did to Iraq. Suppose on television we watched our national monuments in D.C. toppled. Don't you think there would be a number of people that would band together and fight our invaders? Much like the cold war era movie Red Dawn, these people would be freedom fighters to their homeland, but insurgents to the invaders. Yes, the Iraqis fighting us are killing our troops but, all in all, they are fighting for their homeland, just as we would do if the situation was reversed.

Just like Sir William Wallace did in Braveheart. And when he was martyred, it rallied his troops who eventually went on to win the war. And this is another reason that the execution was such a bad idea.

Twenty minutes after Saddam was hanged, a bomb exploded in a Madrid airport. We have now invigorated the insurgency. I presume more attacks will come, and I can't say I don't understand them taking place.

That is not to say I agree with them, but events like todays are what create Osama bin Ladens and even Timothy McVeighs. Unbeknownst to the world population, today may have been the final catalyst in creating the next generation's next Osama bin Laden. And we did it.

Oh, sure, technically Iraq tried him, and so forth, but we were ultimately responsible. We found him hiding and handed him over to a new Iraqi government created with our supervision.

When we invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, for the first time in my life, I was embarrassed to be an American. I even looked into becoming a Canadian citizen to shed myself of the shame that being an American is.

You know why other nations hate us? It isn't because we're better than them. It's because we arrogantly think and portray that we are better than everyone and that our way is definitively the only way things ought to be done. And we will enforce that on anyone that says otherwise, for they are an enemy of ours.

About a year or two ago, World Wrestling Entertainment, a corporation that adores our military's actions carte blanche with a constant stream of bolstering support for our milatary, is a great offender in blind acceptance and conformance. They admittedly push stereotypes to the edge on all open opportunities with their wrestlers, who are merely portraying over-the-top characters. I bring the company up because one of their characters did go over the edge.

In late 2004, WWE introduced a new character named Muhammad Hassan. Though the man playing him was actually Italian, he was introduced as an Arab-American playing up on the fact that so many Arab-Americans were being discriminated against. He was immediately billed as a bad guy, even though everything he spoke was true. He was booed by the crowd when he spoke of injustice, and the announcers themselves (whose job in wrestling it is to establish who is a good guy and who is a bad guy so the audience knows who to cheer for) even cut him down verbally. You can read about this character here in full detail, but I bring him up because, in a televised debate between Hassan and his manager and the two announcers, Hassan behaved very cordially, speaking eloquently to defend his beliefs (whether they were agreeable or not), while the two American announcers ("good ol' boys, one from Memphis, the other from Oklahoma) retorted with such offenses as "well I think you're a big idiot" and the always-offensive "if you're not with us, you're against us," which I despise so because such argument leaves no room for dissent, by virtue of which this very nation was founded upon.

Some may call my beliefs un-American, treason, mutinous, etc. The same disaparraging remarks used for those against the Vietnam War initially, who of course were vindicated in their belief when we pulled out. But to dissent is American. To conform is not. I look at things with a global perspective and how events that take place can benefit or harm the world.

Today, for the second time in my life, I am ashamed to be an American.

I thank God for people like this.

Submitted by The Sphinx on Mon, 2007-01-01 23:50

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