“Good riddance, the world is a better place without you,” says Bush about the recent capture of one of world’s tyrants, Saddam Hussein. There is indeed much cause for celebration. While I agree wholeheartedly with the US president’s statement, we should remind ourselves of a number of things:
1) My government has put into power, funded, and supported militarily far more tyrants than it has overthrown (including Saddam). Let us not, in our euphoria, believe for a second that we are a benevolent empire.
2) There are hundreds of cruel men holding power in infamous regimes all over the world. These include many of America’s regional allies and Saddam’s neighbors. It once included Saddam himself. As has been the case throughout history, we befriend evil men when it suits the interests of our empire and we destroy them and denounce their atrocities for the same. Whatever the motives of the individuals who fight and die for them, nations are not and never have been the agents of justice.
3) The security of the Middle East is better without Saddam than with it. However, it is not entirely clear if the security of the region is net increased by the new presence of a US client state. It may well be that the new configuration will be ultimately more destabilizing, but this depends on a number of as yet unresolved variables.
4) If we rejoice for the capture of Saddam, let us at least not fool ourselves into thinking that we have attained the US goals of the conflict (though a personal goal of the Bush family and the dreams of millions of others have been realized). We have not found WMDs and more importantly, we have almost singlehandedly self-fulfilled the prophesy of violent opposition on almost a civilizational level. We have literally fed the flames of terrorism. We might as well have been spraying oxygen instead of water.