Posted on 04/11/2006 3:31:57 PM PDT by Incorrigible
BY DEBORAH JEROME-COHEN
As she was being tossed out of the courtroom recently for "not behaving well," a defense attorney for Saddam Hussein, Bushra Khalil, brandished some of the notorious Abu Ghraib photos and shouted, "I want to show you what Americans do to prisoners."
There was a moment of sick comedy in this -- the judge telling Khalil "You are not disciplined," Khalil waving the pictures -- as there have been at other points in Saddam's trial for crimes against humanity in the murder, torture, execution and banishment of hundreds of people from the village of Dujail in 1982, allegedly in response to a plot against Saddam's life.
But there was also a damning charge against the United States. In Abu Ghraib, in Guantanamo, at Bagram, as well as in the evidence of the Bush administration's eagerness to broaden the war against terror to include Saddam, an enraged public here and abroad sees American arrogance and perfidy. They see moral equivalence made more damning by the U.S. posture as a beacon of liberty and human rights.
It's exactly that kind of equivalence that British playwright David Hare seems to favor in "Stuff Happens," playing at the Public Theater in New York City. The play's title is taken, of course, from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's jaw-droppingly dopey comments when rioting broke out after the American conquest of Baghdad in 2003. You remember the press conference: Rumsfeld standing there saying, hey, "Freedom's untidy."
Hare's play was first performed in London in 2004, when the vastness of the Bush administration's -- and, to be fair, the international community's -- miscalculation regarding Saddam's weapons of mass destruction was becoming clear.
That the U.S. and its coalition of the willing was risking blood and treasure on a false premise, one which the administration didn't care to seriously check out before launching an attack, seemed then and still seems chillingly willful. Couple that with the innumerable other miscalculations, the errors of judgment and execution made by the administration, and it's easy to empathize with the almost universal anger and despair about the war in Iraq, the sense among many Americans of seeing our country and values debased and our security diminished.
"Stuff Happens" is full of indignation toward the administrations of George W. Bush and Tony Blair. At points, particularly in the first act, Hare nods to what Bush might call the "nuance" thing. Early on in the play, a journalist rants: "Saddam Hussein attacked every one of his neighbors except Jordan. Imagine ... a dictator in Europe murdering his own people, attacking his own neighbors, killing half a million people for no other offense but proximity. Do you really imagine ... that the finer feelings of the international community, the exact procedures of the United Nations, would need to be tested ... before we rose, as a single force, to overthrow the offender?"
Well put (until you consider the Balkans, where there was no rush to intervene; and let's not even mention such other post-Holocaust genocides as Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur, which are on other, darker continents), but Hare, along with so many others who question the war, is quick to dismiss the hard facts of murderous tyranny with rage toward the hypocrisy of the hapless, unilateralist, trigger-happy Bush administration.
That rage may be well-deserved. But where's the rage toward Saddam?
Another British writer, Ian McEwan, puts it this way in his 2005 novel "Saturday," when neurosurgeon Henry Perowne sympathizes with a group demonstrating against the Iraq war but can't quite join them. A patient of his had been tortured by Saddam, and Perowne knows the scars on the man's skin and on his soul.
Perowne acknowledges that "if he hadn't met and admired the professor, he might have thought differently, less ambivalently, about the coming war." He notes of the marchers, though, that "it's likely most of them barely registered the massacres in Kurdish Iraq, or in the Shi'ite south, and now they care with a passion for Iraqi lives. They have good reasons for their views, among which are concerns for their own safety ... but Perowne can't feel, as the marchers themselves probably can, that they have an exclusive hold on moral discernment."
On the way home from Hare's play, I was listening to the radio. There was Saddam, saying that the identity cards of 28 boys executed at Dujail were "hostile propaganda." There was Saddam, asking how the judge could "judge the president of Iraq, who stood as a spear" against anyone who plotted against the country.
There was the announcement that a special criminal court was ready to prosecute Saddam on charges of genocide, in a separate trial, for Operation Anfal, the 1988 campaign in which an estimated 100,000 Kurds were murdered. The Anfal campaign, said a memo released by the tribunal, included "savage military attacks on civilians," including the use of "mustard gas and nerve agents." (Note that this trial doesn't include the March 1988 mustard gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja, in which 5,000 people were killed.)
True, Hare's play isn't about that. Neither, really, was the war against Saddam -- although the spread of democracy and the fight against despots were tagged as secondary arguments for the war and gained emphasis as the WMD arguments crumbled. But the Bush administration's wrong doesn't diminish, even pales before, the wrongs of Saddam.
What we choose to do about the mass murderers who seem to crop up with reliable frequency in human history is a real question, because the price of war is always vast and bitter. When it comes to genocide and crimes against humanity, though, the price of pacifism is vast and bitter, too.
Such dilemmas are the stuff of inevitable tragedy, one way or another. Conflating Abu Ghraib with Halabja or Anfal, though, pretends there's no difficult choice at all, rubs out any hierarchy of distinctions, makes the aggressor and the would-be liberator one.
"Stuff Happens" is perilously close to being guilty of that astigmatic vision, but that just makes it ineffective drama. When people like Saddam's attorney summon those kind of equivalences in real life, and others agree with them, it's a form of cowardice.
April 11, 2006
(Deborah Jerome-Cohen is deputy editorial page editor for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. She can be contacted at dcohen@starledger.com.)
Not for commercial use. For educational and discussion purposes only.
Here's some FR threads on Rumsfeld's comment. I think he was right on!
Riots? Looting? "Stuff Happens"
Rumsfeld on looting in Iraq: 'Stuff happens'
In every case, in a war against evil, pacifists have sided with evil.
Their supposed pacifism, at the end of the day, is just a pose. They weren't prepared to speak out when Saddam mowed down Kurds by the hundreds of thousands, and they couldn't be roused from their slumbers while he slaughtered the marsh arabs or the shias.
No, their venom and their hate are reserved for the man who put an end to it. Their attitude reminds one of the judge who sets free the psychopath with the trunk full of bodies, and reprimands the cop who didn't have a warrant.
Except that this cop did have a warrant, he had 18 warrants and a smoking gun to boot. And, now, a pile of bodies from here to as far as you can see. There is no courage in opposing a war by speaking out against people who won't harm you, while ignoring the ones who would film themselves sawing your head off. No courage at all.
I looked him square in the eye and told him that the communists built the wall to keep the people inside, and in slavery. We were building walls to keep out invaders. Big difference.
Attack the moral equivalancy argument wherever you find it. Abu Graib is not about being fed feet first into a plastic shredder... it's about panties on the head.
/johnny
Yeah. I explained to a fellow once it's like the difference between a lock on a jailhouse cell door and the lock on your home's front door.
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