Disappointed by the vengeful manner in which Saddam Hussein was executed, the leading American commander in Iraq told reporters last week, “if you’re asking me, ‘would we have done things differently,’ yes, we would have.”
The implication was not that the US would have spared Saddam’s life. It was that an execution held by the US would have been more professional and consistent with norms of justice. There would have been no sloganeering taunts (“Moktada, Moktada, …”), no personalized insults (“go to hell”), no residue of festering vendetta politics that have plagued post-Saddam Iraq.
But how much differently would the US have acted vis-Ã -vis this perpetrator of crimes against humanity? Would it have guaranteed Saddam additional due process, possibly by ensuring his other trials were brought to completion? Would it have postponed the execution until after the holidays? The US had its chances, and it delivered Saddam – on Washington’s orders – into the hands of his impatient executioners.
Yes, previous attempts by the US to assassinate Saddam suggest that the US would have done things differently, but it may be worth recalling that several of those attempts failed miserably. The US has not always been able to extricate itself from the logic of unfortunate consequences, especially in its efforts to eliminate Saddam.
In April 2003, for example, the US dropped two 2000-pound bunker-busting bombs and follow-up detonators from the skies on a restaurant in a middle-class neighborhood of Baghdad where Saddam and his sons were believed to be hiding. The bombing left a 60 ft. crater and reduced the restaurant and several adjacent homes to rubble. CIA officials were reported to be “euphoric,” confidant that Saddam had been killed. He was not, though some local residents were. According to one reporter, photographers on the scene used “a chilling term they picked up from the military in Afghanistan to describe what might have happened to a dozen or more people thought to have died in this missile attack. They have become ‘pink mist’.”
This execution attempt was indeed carried out very professionally – based on credible intelligence, constitutionally ordered by the president, and conducted by highly trained fighter pilots. One pilot underscored the impersonal character of the operation, saying he didn’t even know Saddam was the target. “We’ve got ten minutes to do it. We’ve got to make a lot of things happen to make that happen. So you just fall totally into execute mode and kill the target.”
While the operation was very different from what Saddam faced at the gallows – no masked men in different leather jackets, no clumsy noose and clanging trap door, no embarrassing footage – it shows that highly professional processes do not always guarantee just outcomes.
What would it take to do things differently in Iraq? According to reports, President Bush believes this requires a “troop surge for victory.” The new congress is right to scrutinize this plan, for a surge implies intensified confrontation between the US and the most militant opponents of its presence in Iraq – highly mobilized forces also seeking “stability” and “victory,” each, no doubt, with surge, in-surge, and counter-surge tactics of their own. Among them, the prominent Mahdi militia seems especially determined to struggle to the end. Its name, “Mahdi,” roughly means “Messiah” and conveys its belief that it is bringing God’s ultimate justice by liberating God’s communities in Iraq from their oppressors (Saddam, the US, etc.).
A surge is thus unlikely to reduce resistance to the US in Iraq and the region more generally.
So, what might it mean to “do things differently” in Iraq? Perhaps abandoning false hopes of ultimate victory through the forceful imposition of one’s will upon the other parties to the conflict, the US included. Sadly, each has bad blood on its hands; each has performed poorly at times in relation to norms of justice.
It’s time to prioritize the extremely difficult processes of sustained negotiation between the combatants, to mobilize the negotiating powers of the most informed and communicatively dedicated interlocutors of each party to the conflict. A political solution has been the consistent emphasis of several US senators, like Joseph Biden of Delaware. No one doubts its necessity, while many doubt the wisdom of the surge. There are no guarantees, but intensifying direct negotiations would be doing things differently, because it would mean abandoning reliance on the logic of force that has, demonstrably, failed to bring stability, peace, and viable governing institutions to Iraq.
Andrew Davison is associate professor of political science at Vassar College where he teaches courses in political theory and politics in the Middle East. His latest book is Conquering Hearts and Minds:The American War Ideology in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, 1990-2003. For more, see Andy Davison.