A rchive Date
[ 18-12-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Iraq ]
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[http://www.canoe.com/Columnists/mansur_toronto.html
At least Shakespeare's tyrants went down fighting
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the Toronto Sun
December 18, 2003
LONDON, Ont. -- The words of Maj.-Gen. Raymond T. Odierno of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division may well be the final epitaph for Saddam Hussein.
The general said, "He was just caught like a rat."
This is what tyrants are: despicable, petty human beings. And when denuded of the ill-gotten power with which they terrorize the weak, the innocent and the defenceless, they are unmasked as slinking cowards.
As Saddam's dreadful image filled our television screens, I reached for my copy of the complete works of Shakespeare.
It is instinctive to seek the Bard's advice, comfort, insight or wisdom on any situation, for he was one who seemingly had conceived of all possible situations in which men and women by design or ingenuity, by luck, fate, ambition, deceit or by whatever myriad of means might find themselves in.
Nothing surprised Shakespeare, for he had plumbed the depths of human psychology and dissected motivations from the meanest to the most sublime that drove individuals to act their roles on "The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,/ The solemn temples, the great globe itself" before being dissolved into thin air.
But not even Shakespeare - the most complete and towering secular intellect of all time, as described by Harold Bloom, the wonderful critic and interpreter of the Bard - imagined, at least in my reading, a more inglorious ending of a hated tyrant being brought out of a hole as a cowering rat.
Macbeth is Shakespeare's grim exploration into the blood-filled mind and deeds of a tyrant for whom there is no excess in being cruel in his drive for power. Macbeth's hands are so steeped in blood, as are those of Saddam, that no ocean will wash them clean, rather "The multitudinous seas incarnadine,/ Making the green one red."
And yet Macbeth, his fateful end closing in upon him, sword in hand and with a final melancholy soliloquy that almost humanizes him, dies fighting on the battlefield.
Then there is the evil and conniving Richard the Third, as bloodthirsty as Macbeth, as heartless as Iago, and driven with as huge a lust for power as Saddam.
Richard also meets his end in battle. His final cry as he exits - "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!" - is not a plaintive appeal for mercy, but for more battle.
But there is nothing even in Shakespeare that prepares us for the banality of a gangster surrendering so meekly as did the butcher of Baghdad.
Saddam also exemplified the most grotesque and diseased characteristics of secular Arab nationalism that floated on slogans and produced mass graves for his people.
Moreover, he was just one-half of the equation of Arab-Muslim fascism. The other half, Osama bin Laden, either still dwells in some cave plotting his evil, or has bitten the dust and lies in some unmarked hole.
Saddam will be tried in Baghdad, as was Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, so that those who were his most terrorized victims may find closure with the judgment he deserves.
We will need distance, however, to put in perspective the nature of the man and his regime that brought so much death and destruction to Iraq and its neighbours.
Hence, the big question remaining for some time will be to what extent the people of Iraq and the Middle East have learned from this sordid history, purged themselves of its poison and turned a new page for a better future of reconciling themselves with the modern world of democracy and individual rights and freedom.
There will always remain those in the region - and their liberal-left sympathizers in the West - resplendent in their politics of resentment, who never met a Stalin, or his prototype, without admiring him and denigrating the United States and the values of freedom, democracy and the rule of law it represents.
Such politics of self-delusion and loathing might well find its terminal point in Iraq.
This will be proper given the hopes of a majority in the land of two rivers never again to be terrorized by another Saddam.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Thursdays Letters to the editor
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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