This is heady, heady stuff. I woke up this morning to the scenes of US troops pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. This is joyous stuff, scenes of oppressed people tearing down the symbols of oppression. The question I have — it’s the critical question, I think — is how these scenes play in the rest of the Arab world. Of course, whether such scenes continue ranks pretty high up there too. But we’ll deal with that later. (Here’s a great Reuters story with on-the-street reactions around the Arab world: “Arabs Watch Hussein’s Demise in Disbelief.”) More broadly, how will it play in Europe and elsewhere? (We don’t, after all, live in Iraq. We live in the world.) Will they see this the way we do? Will it be reported in
Germany and France, Riyadh and Cairo the way it’s being reported here? In one of the interviews I did for my “Practice to Deceive” article, I spoke to a neoconservative very close to the White House who described the great hope thus: if Iraqis welcome their liberation and you have a stream of books penned by Iraqis coming out over the next several years on how horrible Saddam’s regime was, perhaps the collision between this testimony and the certainties of Arab nationalist anti-Americanism will force a basic rethinking, perhaps it will break the back of those orthodoxies. If the testimonies are so clear, he supposed, perhaps Egyptians will ask themselves what could have led them to defend Saddam from a US invasion when he was oppressing Arabs more awfully than anything the Israelis ever did to the Palestinians.
The above-noted Reuters article contains at least one quote reconcilable with that view. An Egyptian engineer told Reuters: “It seemed that Iraqis were all with Saddam, now it looks like many didn’t like him. Maybe those destroying the statue are rebels against Saddam’s rule.”
This is a very good day for that hope. And if that hope is vindicated it will be a wonderful thing. I don’t think we’ll know today or tomorrow or next month or even next year. The challenges in the way of our success are vast, challenges that could quickly snuff out all of this, challenges that I don’t believe many who are guiding this effort truly understand. But today was a good day.
