Saddam’s Dead, 20,000 Troops added, Now What???

To read the reactions of Iraq’s puppet government and GWB, you would think that the hanging of Saddam Hussein will be the event that brings the insurgency in Iraq to an end and cause peace to break out in the land. One almost expected Al Maliki et al to start doing the dance of joy while signing the death warrant. His obvious joy and relish while signing the death warrant were not only unseemly, they were a disgusting display of the savagery he likes to try and hide beneath a civilised veneer.

The fact that all the players in this farce of a trial completely ignored the fact that it is against the religion of Islam to hang someone right before the Eid. Funny that, considering the fact that all of the players in the game of politics in Iraq purport to be Muslims of one stripe or another. Moqtada Al Sadr, who likes to style himself as an Islamic leader, had supporters in the execution room chanting his name. Now how tacky is that?

The above is not to say that Saddam should have been spared; he shouldn’t have. Not only was he a sadist, a butcher and a viciously brutal dictator, he was for all intents and purposes a truly evil human being. The annals of history have well recorded his butchery and it comes as no surprise that the man who lived that brutally died just as brutally. Now instead of going down in history as just a bloody butcher, he will also go down as a martyr who died for his beliefs. We can thank Bush et al for that.

In other news, the oh so brilliant Bush has decided that the only thing needed to fix Iraq is more troops. Yes, in his eternal lack of wisdom, Bush thinks adding 20,000 more troops into the quagmire that is Iraq will fix everything. Somehow, I highly doubt that. Adding 20,000 troops who don’t understand the language or culture or even the nature of the guerrilla war going on is only counterproductive. What he should be doing is trying to fix what he broke. Adding more troops will not help, trying to rebuild the country to provide basic services to the people will fix it. Once basic services come back and more security is established, people will by nature turn against those disrupting the services that are now making life easier.

This war was a mess from start to finish. It was started on a very shaky foundation of lies and cherry-picked information and has not gotten any better. It is without a doubt the greatest international diplomacy bungle in a century along with the greatest public relations bungle in at least 3 decades. The only p/r and international relations debacles that compare is Vietnam. The unfortunate thing is that the U.S. has a hapless President who can’t seem to get it.