It
was not the first time that I had seen his face, of course. Who on our
planet had not seen it before? And yet now, how different it looked to
me. There was something, shockingly enough, almost pitiable about it.
An English correspondent on FOX compared his bearded and disheveled
visage to that of King Lear, and the comparison seemed almost apt,
until you realized that Lear's worst offense had been the vanity of
second childhood, while Saddam's had been the systematic murder and
torture of thousands of his own people.
I
watched the video of anonymous hands feeling underneath the scruffy
beard, probing the way a doctor probes a patient, and I saw that Saddam
was saying something to his examiner, and it seemed perfectly possible
that his words might have been along the lines of it, "Yes, doc, I've
been having sharp pains here for some time." And I thought, how
natural. He is in the hands of Americans, and it isn't our style to
withhold medical care even from a monster. If he needs dental care, we
will no doubt give that to him, too.
As
fallen dictators go, Saddam is lucky. He was not strung up and spat
upon by the mob, as Mussolini was, but taken out of his squalid little
hole, cleaned up and shaved, and is now, no doubt, sitting somewhere
quite warm and safe, and most of all, alive.
Thank God.
I
say this, not because I have a soft spot in my heart for ruthless
tyrants, but because only a living, breathing Saddam Hussein has the
power to destroy the illusionary Saddam Hussein that, like The Wizard of Oz,
seemed so vastly greater than life size to those whom he had so long
terrorized. Just as Dorothy and her friends needed to see the small and
insignificant little man feverishly manipulating the switches and
pulleys behind curtain, in order to free their minds once and for all
of the image of the omnipotent and angry Oz, so the Iraqi people needed
to see the small and insignificant little man who had haunted their
collective psyche, and who would have continued to haunt it for as long
as it was possible for the Iraqis to imagine that, one day, he would return. That fantasy is now dead, once and for all.
But
there is another reason to be thankful that Saddam Hussein is alive.
The man who called upon his countrymen and fellow Muslims to sacrifice
their own lives in suicide attacks, to blow themselves to bits in order
to glorify his name, failed to follow his own instructions. He refused
the grand opportunity of a martyr's death, or even that of the hardened
We
took Saddam Hussein alive, and, in doing this, we have done a great
deal more than simply knock down a statue of a dictator -- we have
vanquished a collective nightmare. We have turned the light on a
bogey-man, and revealed him to be a broken old man, hiding fearfully in
a six by eight hole.
We
can see now how foolish we were to regret not rubbing him out that
first night, when we dropped the bunker-piercing bomb on what we had
been told was his hide-out. Had we pulverized him then, he might well
have returned to claim a permanent place in the Iraqi imagination, like
a kind of Mesopotamian Freddy Krueger. But, luckily, we missed him, and
now we can see that there was a providence in our failure -- as so
often there is in our ordinary lives as well.
