The Tawdriness of Hubris:
The Hanging of Saddam Hussein

January 8, 2007

It was hard to resist watching the final moments of Saddam Hussein's life. The initial video, posted by the New York Times, seemed sedate.. a mysterious hooded man whispering into the ear of the former dictator. Then came the rougher cell phone video, posted on YouTube.. with its testy verbal exchanges. This video clip did not politely fade away for the hanging.. and we witness Saddam in the fall that will break his neck. Amid much shouting he is there again, head snapped back. Right at the conclusion of the film, out of the darkness, there is a momentary illumined view of the head. It is strangely affecting.

Throughout the flawed trial of Saddam Hussein it has been easy to imagine better ways to handle the trial. (If you don't believe the trial was deeply flawed, then check out this dossier put together by Human Rights Watch.) Instead of using the trial as 1) an opportunity for Iraqis to learn about their brutal past, 2) a tool for encouraging national reconciliation, and 3) a useful international precedent, we got instead a spectacle which was ushered ASAP to its tawdry end.. and took on the undeniable trappings of revenge. It is hard to imagine the trial of Saddam Hussein ever standing as anything but a negative precedent.. a memorable example of how not to conduct a trial of a dictator.

No matter how easy it might have been to imagine a more useful and ultimately just trial for Saddam Hussein, our leaders did not have that kind of moral imagination. They were motivated by one overriding imperative: keep out the international community. We went into Iraq alone and the last thing they wanted to do was to give credence to the idea that the United Nations could lend a helping hand.. or that those Europeans could add anything to our own sterling morality. That was pure hubris. Arrogance. And the result was a trial that contributed zero to the stabilization of Iraq and which ended in tawdry fashion.

Someday it is possible that historians will settle upon the lack of imagination as the besetting sin of this administration. Its actions have been consistently blind to perceptions. We did not bother with United Nations support.. after all we know we were right!.. and we were surprised when the Arab world in general, and Iraqis in particular, did not consider our occupation legitimate.. and even more surprised when the insurgency gained strength because of that lack of legitimacy. One of the recent recommendations of the ISG was to renounce the permanent occupation of military bases in Iraq.. an unclarified issue which convinced many Iraqis that we were in their country to stay. After all these years, we have, incredibly, still not clarified that basic unsettling point.

But who cares what other people think or suspect about us? or so it seems this administration believes.. still! From early on in this struggle our work should have been to build legitimacy and to deflate suspicions. It would have taken an active imagination to try to see the world through different cultural lenses.. but such an active imagination could have saved us from this terribly unimaginative use of 500 billion dollars.. and this unimaginative loss of over 3000 men and women.