Crocodile Tears

Michael Ubaldi, May 10, 2004.

The threat of terrorism and dictatorship feeds like any other evil, reliant on the weakness and failure of free will.

We are at another juncture where the decision to remove Saddam Hussein and build a democratic Iraq faces an aggressive challenge. The question has never been answered to satisfy those who opposed this action outright or those who supported it under President Clinton but oppose it under President Bush. It nags those who say they are "reconsidering," as if events could be undone, that Iraqis and Arabs didn't need freedom so much after all. National Public Radio correspondent Juan Williams sniffed at a ten-minute segment run by Chris Wallace of Fox New Sunday on one year's accomplishments in postwar Iraq. "That's not why we went into Iraq," he insisted, brushing aside "knapsacks full of school supplies" for Iraqi schoolgirls; instead hammering on weapons of mass destruction, which he said the Allies hadn't found. Odd that Williams' politics lead him to support massive admissions of public welfare for Americans, who literally enjoy the most freedom and opportunity on Earth, and he would shrug at the federal government's subsidies channeled to the truly destitute.

Set aside the former Iraqi dictator's clear — if not politically satisfying — research, possession and use of catastrophic weapons and connections with terrorism, the ultimate nexus for city-sized doses of Armageddon against an increasingly paralytic civilized world. Twenty-five million Iraqis lived in a fear so omnipresent that few of us can and, hopefully, will ever palpably understand. Hundreds of thousands of them were dumped into mass graves after their arbitrary murders. Hundreds of thousands more died in Saddam's ill-fated wars, his maintenance of order through compulsion and the criminal betrayal of the Iraqis and the world's trust known as Oil-for-Food.

That the United Nations' consummate moral failure is handed news status secondary to a few dozen fool soldiers in Abu Ghraib, and that those highly visible public figures who have barely let out a squeak on the first injustice is troubling — but unsurprising. That these same parties resolve that one sadistic soldier out of every few thousand in Iraq is enough to condemn the United States to solitary confinement and the Iraqis to a brief time of chaos before another long period of slavery is disgusting, carelessly said or not, and denies them much of any moral authority in the matter.

When I was in early elementary school, those universal images of African or Latin American children with distended stomachs — walking in the mud with flies crawling about on their faces, all above a graphic inset of a pledge amount and phone number — puzzled me. What's the matter with the lot of these people, I wondered. Why is their suffering so acute, their poverty abject? Charity advertisements never moved beyond this grotesque film footage: for all I knew, Ethiopia, say, was a large, flat expanse of people living in squalor, sitting in filth, eating mush out of clay bowls. That's just what they did all day long, punctuated only by NGO food drops.

The institutions asking for my five cents to feed a child for seven weeks did not bother to tell me that every one of these countries was lawless, tightly in the grip of thugs, each taking his turn to consolidate a country's power and wealth in the latest turn of bloody successions. Where then, I wondered when old enough to understand, were the pleas by these charities to alter the circumstances under which millions suffered, calls for democratization — recognizing that American "privilege," the source of funds for foodstuffs, was begat by the rights and freedoms protected by the United States Constitution? Where were the calls to give these masses the power to control their own country, their own lives? Ethiopians weren't simply unfortunate. They were made, by men, to suffer. For all that the commercials and blow-ins in Maryknoll put up, food drives would continue indefinitely, and those living under tyranny maybe might not starve as much. How would their situation change? Not much, though the benefactor and charity might feel better about themselves as they tucked themselves in that night, probably not understanding that in the faraway place, people would wake up the next morning with a little more food in the same, horrible place. The disconnect between symptom and cause startled me, repelling me as shallow philanthropy does — like someone giving a beaten child a candy bar instead of working to incarcerate the abusive father. No one inherits nor deserves a dictator, and anyone who believes so is only a hop, skip and a white hood away from beliefs with which few would normally wish to associate.

That hasn't stopped some from trying to twist Abu Ghraib into yet another reason to withdraw and abandon the Iraqis — dear God, never mind that many of these people wanted to prevent Operation Iraqi Freedom because America left uprisings to be crushed in 1991 or reached out to Hussein in 1982. Let's just use their fractured argument to make a point. The prevailing convoluted thread of logic goes like this: American soldiers disobey fundamental military and civilized laws and codes. The entire complement of Allied forces, nearly 200,000 of them, are complicit in the offenses by association. Allied forces, their respective countries and cultures are morally incapable of teaching the Iraqis to live freely and democratically being, as the saying goes, "no better than Saddam." Resolve to leave Iraqis to the region's cannibals, who, having expressed insult, would feel much better if they could bring the Iraqis under a new totalitarian banner.

So out of respect for the human rights of men killing soldiers and innocents to prevent Iraqi democracy, in mockery of the Geneva Convention claimed to protect them, we are told to pack up, even if it means guaranteeing the institutionalization of cruelty seen at Abu Ghraib — and far, far worse treatment. Sound ridiculous? It is. The trial of Abu Ghraib shows democracy's strength in adversity, not fraudulence. That's coming from the other corner. Eager to pounce on vulnerable opponents, those indifferent to Iraqi democracy have let slip an impression of their own investment in human rights — if they keep talking, they may very well be asked to issue apologies of their own.

LAYING IT DOWN: Rich Galen, who was in Iraq for some time and saw Abu Ghraib, weighs in.