The Heinous Dictator (Again)

On a thread ostensibly devoted to listing George W. Bush's successes as president, a poster at Beliefnet recently wrote, ...he rid the world of a heinous dictator.

Ah yes, the heinous dictator again. It wasn't so long ago that he was our heinous dictator, as this picture of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with His Satanic Majesty in 1983 clearly will remind those of us who suffer from short memories and adolescent gullibility.

But, as George Orwell has pointed out, "he who controls the present controls the past." And if we can alter our memories so as to delete any recall of the years we supported Saddam Hussein, and urged him on in his Reagan-era war of aggression against Iran (which killed a million), then we can feed our fantasies of being the pure and virtuous angels of freedom and democracy, and and at the same time maintain our ignorance of our bloody crimes. After all, "Ignorance is strength."

At least the realpolitik cynics of the Reagan years were knowledgeable enough to be practical. Fearing the gathering power of Iran, they used Saddam and his Batthist Party as a practical counterweight against Shi'a fundamentalism, in Iran, in Iraq, and elsewhere. For that reason, the Reagan team tilted toward Iraq in the Iraq-Iran conflict, even though Saddam was the aggressor and in the wrong, and went so far as to funnel supplies to him to help with his weapons of mass destruction program. (See the excellent Wikipedia entry for "Iraq-Iran War.")

Pragmatism went out the window with the accession of Cowboy George and his idiot team of neocon maroons. Riding into Iraq like the James Gang robbing a train, they aimed to set up a "Fort Apache" style government in the middle of enemy territory, secure the oil supply, and gain the love and everlasting gratitude of the Iraqis in the bargain.

What happened instead? With the "heinous dictator" deposed and secured in a cage, the gang that couldn't shoot straight called for elections. They were hoping for a power-sharing arrangement among the country's various feuding tribes, sects, and ethnicities. Unfortunately, the Shi'a Imam Sistani, probably the most powerful man in the country, demanded a one-man, one-vote style election, and threatened to withhold support if he didn't get it.

So, Voila! Bush has succeeded! He's succeeded in establishing a Shi'ite government which has now initiated a warm and cuddly relationship with guess which powerful country next door?.

Now here's the latest news from Iraq. Our man, Iraqi P.M. Ibraham Al-Jaafari, recently seen at the White House hugging and kissing with the Great Satan himself, is now in Tehran, laying flowers on the grave of the founder of the Islamic Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Sometimes you just can't win for losing.

On the other hand, I'm sure we would have done a lot better if we hadn't turned our foreign policy over to a bunch of cowboys, yahoos, thugs, ignoramuses, clowns, arrogant sons of bitches, and garden-variety morons.