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New Frontiers in Authoritarian Gibberish

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Following up on Josh Marshall’s take, Jim Henley notes:

And it’s also true that the US and its Iraqi allies chose to try Saddam on one of his relatively minor crimes because if they did so they could get him safely hung before they had to try him for the major ones, the gas attacks and massacres that happened during The Years of Playing Footsie with the United States. The Dujail reprisals were a war crime, no doubt about it, a bigger sham of justice than Saddam’s own trial, by two orders of magnitude. They were also the sort of war crime that people like Ralph Peters and a hundred other pundits and parapundits think the United States should be committing. Every time you read a complaint about “politically correct rules of engagement” you are reading someone who would applaud a Dujail-level slaughter if only we were to perpetrate it. Those are the people who are happiest of all about tonight’s execution. Smells like – victory! It’s the pomander they don against the stench.

And, as if on cue, Jeff Goldstein shows up to claim that the fact we haven’t stopped sectarian violence is “the fault of a military strategy that has been too introspective and politically circumspect.” If only we had learned more from Hussein before he was executed! This is followed up by his familiar stab-in-the-back routine–apparently Iraq would look like Belgium if only the United States were a little less democratic and showed a little more uncritical reverence for a failed President’s catastrophic policies–but my very favorite part has to be this:

Let them, for one brief moment, bracket their partisan aggressions and reflect on what the US and its allies have done in removing this butcher from power—which, contrary to received wisdom, has made Iraq a far better place, if only for the moment potentially.

And as the year ends, I will reflect on and celebrate the fact that I made a trillion dollars this year, if only for the moment potentially.

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