Centerfield

Hadn't thought of Dick Morris' point about the trial as an ongoing event. That could be pretty significant.

Of course, we have yet to see if we can manage the situation in Iraq and bring it to a successful conclusion.

It does make you wonder, though. Imagine, on the one hand, commercials by the Bush folks with that quote from Dean's speech yesterday. And, at the same time, a stream of stories in the media about Saddam's war crimes.

I respectfully submit that nothing will break the "Vietnam analogy," for the simple reason that it is, and always has been, a belief irrationally held for pseudo-religious reasons and that such beliefs are by nature held in disregard of reality.

It is no more possible to break the faith of the irrational left in their obviously false beliefs (as compared to debatable or true beliefs) than it is to break the faith of the irrational right in their obviously false beliefs. (How many folks still assert Vince Foster was murdered despite copious evidence of suicide? That Ron Brown's plane was shot down by our own forces because Brown knew too much?)

Politics is religion to many, i.e., it requires unquestioning faith in the unprovable, or the obviously false. To the "religiously" political, the faithful, disagreeable facts can never trump appealing rhetoric.

Dick Morris's pseudopunditry utterly fails to realize one fact that might make some Bush Administration officials wish that some soldiers had tossed a grenade into Saddam's spider hole when they had the chance: Saddam, if given a public trial, will almost certainly reveal some very incriminating and embarrassing details about the support he received from the US (courtesy of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney) during the 1980s, especially in regard to the chemical weapons which were eventually used in Halabjah. He'll demonstrate how the US cozied up to him when he attacked Iran (which was then Public Enemy #1 for the US) and fed the fires of the Iran-Iraq war. If anything, that might confirm the hypocrisy that many have already sensed about American intentions in Iraq-- underwriting a repressive dictatorship so long as it suits them (Saudi Arabia being a perfect example these days) but then dismissing them bloodily if they don't kowtow to American wishes. Not saying that this is accurate or fair-- but it'll certainly reinforce a widely-held perception, and there is indeed some hypocrisy in supporting a dictator in such sanguinary acts during one decade, then claiming a moral crusade in purportedly deposing him for those selfsame acts a couple decades later.

So the Bush Administration now has the extremely unpalatable choice of either (a) holding a show trial or closed proceedings which will prevent Saddam’s crimes from coming to light (and thus frustrate the potential PR) or (b) holding an open, public trial which would be deeply humiliating to the US and the Bush coterie in particular. Mike Keefe of the Denver Post had a sharp, hilarious cartoon about this on Dec. 17 (it’s Saddam on trial, calling Ronald Reagan as a character witness at the stand, in case this link doesn’t work well). Dick Morris can be extremely perceptive at times and thoroughly obtuse at others, and in this case it’s the latter; many media outfits have recognized the potential damage that Saddam’s testimony could wreak upon the U.S.

I frankly think the point is moot in any case and Saddam’s apprehension, with or without a trial, to be a vastly overrated event. Obviously Saddam wasn’t running or even much impacting the guerrilla insurgency in Iraq, which is being run primarily by nationalists, Islamists, and Baathists who have melded in with them; Saddam’s capture will little affect this and may even increase the insurgency by encouraging the recruitment of Iraqis who fear an association with support for Saddam. That burden’s been lifted, and the guerrilla war will likely intensify, just as it did in the wake of the shooting of Uday and Qusay. As more Americans return home in bodybags and as the whole affair acquires the stench of Vietnam to a greater degree, political support for Bush will erode more and more, potentially to the point of political catastrophe in his case. I frankly think that Bush will be reelected at any rate, more because of the economic rebound than anything else. But over the long term, the Iraq war itself may grind on inexorably and painfully toward a defeat—even worse than Vietnam, in many respects. I've maintained as a centrist, from the get-go, that the proper course of action was to continue to concentrate military and intelligence resources on the war against al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies, who pose the true threat to the US and the Middle East. Instead, the Bush Administration seems to have taken its eye off the ball and oddly walked away from a battle it could have easily won with more persistence (the one against al-Qaeda) to one that poses a substantial danger of humiliating defeat (Iraq, with all its painful intricacies).

The British created an artificial country by piecing several disparate Ottoman Turkish territories together as "Iraq" following WWI-- chiefly the work of Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence. The objective was unabashedly to set the peoples against each other so that Britain could get its hands on the region's oil. When this strategy failed and the British were defeated in the country, what was left was a chronically divided, sectarian, ethnically tense mess that selected for the rise of repressive dictators like Saddam Hussein. Iraq isn't *designed* to stay unified and peaceful in the first place, and it'd take a decade of focused effort, at least, to overcome that legacy. It's not gonna be easy, and the British (along with their American buddies, in this case) could be defeated yet again in a nation that was a mess of their own making.

Going Certified Humane for farm animals

A more detailed look at the Spanish Armada battle and effects