Hussein's Capture

If I could briefly part ways with my friends on the left, I just want to take a moment and savor the capture of one of our time's greatest mass murderers. Saddam Hussein is the kind of person who authorizes mustard gas to be dropped on villages in his own country. He's the kind of person who orders doctors to cut off the ears of those who have fallen out of favor with him, without anaesthesia. He's the kind of person who kills the doctors who refuse to do this.

He created a nightmare police state and propped it up for 23 years with fear, cash, and ruthless calculation. Americans have a reason to celebrate: our country has finally created a precedent for knocking down regimes like this.

Politically, it has been done badly. Bush's lies are well documented on the internet and everywhere else. The WMD issue indicates that there is a dizzying problem with intelligence, either at its collection point or in how it is used and conveyed to the president, or both. Our allies have been thoroughly alienated at every turn, and with the EU expanding annually and attempting to integrate further at every turn, America runs the risk in the long term of isolating itself out of everything but economic discussions. But then there is the Kyoto Protocol, which the Russians may yet end up ratifying, thereby causing it to go into effect globally.

Would Europe and Asia gradually move towards a punitive stance with the United States when it comes to pollution?

My country's armed forces did a tremendous thing yesterday, dragging a viscious, brutal, pompous coward out of a rat hole and arresting him. He will likely be tried for war crimes (dropping chemical weapons on the Iranians comes to mind) and genocide (Kurds, Shi'ite, aw hell, this guy may have killed a million of his own people!). In this moment of celebration, I have to ask where we are as a result.

Are we going to pursue other dictators? For instance, is President Bush going to use the propaganda machine that brought us to Iraq to encourage Americans to quit driving hulking gas guzzlers? Will he twist arms in Congress to raise fuel efficiency standards the way he twisted arms in Congress to pass a hugely expensive and topically silly prescription drug benefit? This would punish Saudi Arabia, which according the the CIA World Factbook, has no elections and no sufferage. None.

But they can bid for Iraqi reconstruction efforts.

Using the bully pulpit of the presidency to encourage fuel efficiency and intelligent consumerism would punish Kuwait, which has 60 square kilometers of irrigated land (seriously, read the link) in the entire country, and:

"Suffrage: adult males who have been naturalized for 30 years or more or have resided in Kuwait since before 1920 and their male descendants at age 21
note: only 10% of all citizens are eligible to vote; in 1996, naturalized citizens who do not meet the pre-1920 qualification but have been naturalized for 30 years were eligible to vote for the first time"

This is our ally in the war on terrorism? This is a country that we liberated over a decade ago, and they haven't gotten around to allowing more than 10% of their country to participate in government?

In 1991, I thought that George H. W. Bush was going to do the right thing following the war and announce a great initiative to investigate, produce, and promote alternative fuel sources. I thought that the 1991 war would have made the point that we can no longer trust these maniacs who have 60 square kilometers of farmland but hundreds or thousands of oil wells to detonate.

I was wrong. I know that George W. Bush isn't about to begin a campaign of global liberation, because I know that George W. Bush doesn't care if the rest of the world is democratic or not, just so long as they don't mess with us and can provide an easy target when political troubles arise for a sitting president.

Still, for a little while after seeing the news yesterday, I was able to dream of living in a country that called the free nations of the world to the great struggle of liberating mankind from the chains of dictatorships, of freeing all of us from the fear of the kind of war that can only be started by madmen. I was able to imagine what America would be like if we had a leader in charge, someone who could sit down with our allies and lay out a vision that they couldn't help but support, if not with troops then with moral voices to help a true coalition go forward.

Well anyway, it was a nice fantasy.