Patriotically Incorrect Degrees of Happiness

Two observations about the denizens of the blogosphere, post-Saddam:

A. Many of the lefties seem a little less happy about the capture of Saddam than I would have thought they'd be.

B. Many of the righties are spending even more time fuming about the Patriotically Incorrect degrees of happiness being experienced by those on the left than they are gloating about the capture of Saddam.

For awhile I wanted to chide both the righties and the lefties, but then I realized my heart wasn't really in it. Mostly because I had to admit that, like some of the people I was getting irritated with, I, too, was feeling seemingly insufficient joy at Saddam's capture. The first signs of this actually appeared pretty quickly--in fact, about three-quarters of the way through the elated post I originally wrote about Saddam’s capture Sunday morning. I discarded it in favor of a line or two announcing the news. Part way through the initial post, the wind just went out of my sails. This is particularly weird in my case, and let me tell you why:

I’ve hated that rat bastard Saddam for a particularly long time. I was apoplectic when we didn’t take Baghdad during Gulf War Episode I. I know that there would have been problems with the coalition if we had, but we could have done it, and we should have done it. We should have eliminated that murderous SOB when we had the chance. Common human decency demanded it, but GHW Bush didn’t do it. He wasn’t willing to accept the risks even though, given the possible humanitarian payoff, they seemed more than acceptable. We also had a special obligation to take Saddam out given that we had supported him, selling him many of the weapons he used to murder the innocent. He was our—or, rather, the Reagan and Bush administrations’—boy. “Aggression is defeated,” GHW Bush announced, but it seemed to me that aggression personified was sitting pretty in Baghdad. Then, of course, Bush encouraged the Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, indicating that we’d support them if they did. Well, they did and we didn’t. And they died in their tens of thousands. You may remember the story about F-15 pilots who were ordered just to watch while Iraqi helicopter gunships strafed Kurdish refugees.

So years pass and then along comes 9/11 and then the second Bush administration makes asses of us by beguiling us into a war. They can do this because the Republicans have gone insane, the Democrats have become invertebrates, half of the media are in the pocket of the radical right, the other half are asleep on watch, and most Americans are so lazy and uninformed that they’ll do whatever they’re told so long as they don’t have to turn off their teevees or pay more for gasoline for their es-you-vees. The evidence for the self-defense case against Iraq was woefully insufficient. The case was, in fact, a joke. And when that became clear the Bush administration deployed their patented Rationale Transmogrifier (used to such great effect on their justification for cutting taxes) and suddenly we were engaged in a moral crusade to rid the world of a tyrant. Well that’d be fine with me, and only about twelve years too late by my lights. But of course that’s not what it was at all.
Can you really imagine this happening: W announces: “Although Saddam Hussein poses no real threat to the United States, and although Osama bin Laden remains at large, I have decided that we will invade Iraq, because it’s the right thing to do.”

Think that would ever happen? You can probably imagine Bill Clinton saying something like that…but you can also imagine how Republicans would have responded to it.

But despite all this, I was still torn about the war almost up until H-hour. Sure, we were being railroaded, but we were being railroaded into doing something that we should have done long ago.

And now we’ve got Saddam. And he’s going to hang. Something I assure you I’ve dreamt about for a long time. It still bothers me that Pol Pot died of natural causes, bothers me that we were so close to getting him. No, I’m not one of those people sitting around fantasizing about horrific ways to dispatch Saddam—though I predict that there’s plenty of that going on in certain quarters. But I do think that a proper respect for humanity demands that he be executed. Perhaps interestingly (perhaps not) I tend to be against the death penalty under ordinary conditions, but my opposition is based on practical grounds—our system convicts too many innocent people. But I support the death penalty in principle, and especially in cases like this, in which the crimes are unimaginably horrific and there is no question about guilt. But to explain my reasons for this would be beside the point here. What I want to explain here is why I can't be ecstatic about the fact that our boys went over to Iraq and deposed and captured one of the most evil men in the world.

Well, the answer isn’t pretty. Yes, it’s partially about the election. This administration scares me. And it sickens me. I want Saddam dead, but I am terrified at the thought of a second (make that third) Bush administration. I realize that this could be a sign of just how distorted my view of the world has become, but all I can do is call it like I see it. I look at the pictures of Saddam, and, despite intense and long-standing hatred for the man, I am not joyful. What I think about is how easily we were railroaded into a war, and how easy it was to synthesize a made-for-teevee War Chief and to call forth groundless adulation from the populace. I think about how easy it was to lie about even the most important and obvious facts. I think about the hard right, frothing at the mouth and marching in lockstep behind their front man, waving the flag, howling about freedom and justice, half-joking about laying some violence down on those who are insufficiently frothy. I think about the house in my town that was burned down because it had an anti-war sign on it. I think about how the rest of the right puts up with this in silence, and perhaps even with some approval. I think about the fact that in the past, those of us who so much as suggested withdrawing American support from Saddam were met with equally frothy denunciations. This is what makes the current lectures emanating from the right about Patriotically Correct degrees of happiness particularly galling. We hated the guy back when they were still selling him Sarin. But he was America's tyrant then, and opposing him was unpatriotic. Though still a tyrant, now he’s not ours anymore and so opposing him with anything less than frothy fervor is unpatriotic. (One thing about being anywhere this side of the rabid right, it turns out that, no matter what you do, you’re sure to be unpatriotic. Questioning other people’s patriotism is, it seems, the American way.)

So no, I’m actually not in ecstasy about Saddam’s capture. It’s not that I don’t despise the guy, and it’s not that I don’t recognize how wonderful it is that he's history. It’s just that America lost so much in getting here that it’s hard to take excessive joy in it. And one real tragedy here is that we didn’t even give up a lot to get Saddam—we simply lost things, apparently without any real consciousness that we were losing them. We didn’t nobly decide to make sacrifices in order to do what is right and bring down the tyrant. Rather, we were tricked into doing it for craven reasons. Because we were stupid and uninformed, and because we were easily frightened and overly deferential to authority, we allowed ourselves to be talked into going to war. What we did will probably, on balance, have morally good consequences (unless the administration cuts and runs before the next election, that is). But we don’t get credit for those consequences since we didn’t go to war in order to achieve them. If I’m a tad dim and easily frightened and, as a result, I shoot someone who in fact posed no threat to me, then I don’t get any moral credit for shooting him, even if I saved someone else by doing so. If my reasons for shooting were stupid and cowardly, then I’m a stupid coward--no matter what good is accomplished by my bullet. Actions are morally good or bad on the basis of intentions--on the basis of the goals for which they are undertaken--and we undertook this war not in order to bring justice to Iraq, but in order to eliminate a threat our leaders invented almost out of whole cloth. We had a morally good goal and a goal that motivated us, but sadly these were two different goals. The not-especially-noble goal of self-defense actually moved us to act, something that the morally laudable goal of deposing the tyrant never would have done by itself. The morally laudable goal was invoked only after the fact, after it became painfully obvious that our action taken in self-defense was based on irresponsibly shoddy evaluation of the evidence. Shamed, and left without a plausible reason for doing what we had done, we were all too willing to be manipulated again, especially when this time we were being manipulated into accepting an account of things that made us, not pusillanimous lackwits sheepishly obeying orders to fire indiscriminately, but brave and noble defenders of the downtrodden.

Those who are inclined to wave the flag at every opportunity and put the best face on whatever America does can be jubilant for awhile, but anybody who’s paying attention should be a little glum, no matter how much they loathe Saddam, and no matter how much they wanted to see him go