Another Opinion

Despite the Washington Post's reporting on the latest manufactured outrage in the "Arab street", Richard Brookhiser, writing in the New York Observer points out one indisputable fact about Saddam Hussein's hanging: He will not be coming back. And Brookhiser says that not to be snarky or cruel, but to point out a fact about dictators and their regimes.

Whatever happens in the wake of President Bush’s new Iraq strategy, one thing won’t: Saddam will not come back. This is not a statement of the obvious, or a lame joke. The power that dictators and their supporters acquire by actual acts of violence is augmented by fear—fear of their omniscience, their omnipresence, their indestructibility. In the worst cases, fear is transmuted into a servile love: If only Stalin knew, thought many prisoners of the gulag, I would be saved. The aura of fear is born as dictators rise to power, and lingers after they are deposed, so long as the dictator does. Saddam’s followers, and even the man himself, no doubt believed that he might come back, even from prison. And who could say they were wrong? If the final Götterdämmerung came to Iraq, who might make what deals with whom to save his own skin? Saddam’s skin is now past saving; his sons’ skins shriveled a while ago.