Saddam's Inglorious End

"The enemies of a free Iraq have lost their leader," said George Bush following the capture of Saddam Hussein. To many people's eyes, the lone derelict crouching in a six-foot-deep "spider hole" hardly seemed the mastermind of the insurrection. Yes, his capture is good news for the Iraqi people. Their ex-dictator can now be held to account for the fearful crimes and atrocities that pocked his reign--hanging innocent Jews in Baghdad in 1969; ordering a third of Baath Party officials shot in 1979; invading Iran and decimating a generation of young men; gassing the Kurds in 1988; massacring Shiites and marsh Arabs after the first Gulf War; ceaseless arbitrary arrests and executions.

That said, Bush's incipient triumphalism seems an attempt to inflate the arrest of Saddam into a justification for his illegal war. Saddam's capture does nothing to justify the war, said Senator Robert Byrd in a speech (full text at www.thenation.com) at the December 14 Nation Institute dinner: "As each day passes and as more American soldiers are killed and wounded in Iraq, I become ever more convinced that the war in Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place for the wrong reasons." Bush used his press conference to announce his run for re-election and tout his "extraordinary year" of achievements. He got a temporary boost in popularity out of the capture, and his political strategists are already devising ways to put Democratic critics of the war on the defensive. But neither Howard Dean, who warned that Saddam's arrest "has not made America safer" (polls say 60 percent agree), nor Dennis Kucinich, who called for ending the occupation and bringing in the UN, was intimidated by slams from the Administration, other Democrats or the punditocracy.

Even the ebullient Bush felt constrained to warn that the fighting in Iraq will not soon be over. (In the twenty-four hours after Saddam's arrest, at least twenty-six Iraqi police and civilians were killed by car bombs.) Nor will the arrest of Saddam hasten the capture of Osama bin Laden or eliminate a single Al Qaeda cell.

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