Tish Durkin on Iraq

I'll never forget the day Saddam Hussein was captured. I was on the phone with a family member who'd not only been, in his day, a recognizable figure in print journalism but also a consultant to the Kennedy administration. He's one of the most intelligent men I've ever known, even if he thinks Julius Rosenberg never smuggled atomic secrets to Moscow and JFK's halo remains uncracked and incandescent as ever. We got to discussing Saddam, thrown up there on CNN looking like a farouche homeless man, prodded by doctors. "Well, I'm glad they got him," said this relative of mine, "but I hate how this is going to help Bush."

Norm Geras calls this the yes-butter syndrome of the antiwar left. "Yes, Saddam was an awful man, but…" What follows is something like: "What about Robert Mugabe? There are a lot of awful men in the world. We used to help him." If you're really dealing with someone special, you might have even heard: "I really don't know who's worse — him or Bush."

That formulation, the yes-butter, was invented to stay a war that, by the time I was kibitzing with my good ancestor, was an accomplished fact. So by then the yes-butter syndrome had evolved to account for good news out of Iraq. It's good, sure, sure, but it's also bad because it ups George Bush's political currency.

Got that? Swish it around for a bit. Then try what I try. Imagine how a Kurd whose family was gassed at Halabja might respond to this sort of shrewd American book-keeping. Then put it to a hypothetical Iraqi widow, whose husband Uday Hussein had hung upside-down on a hook (perforating his flesh), the base of his feet whipped, then shoved into a burlap sack filled with starved, feral cats. You can go whole hog: Add to your imaginary rap Halliburton and yellow-cake and Valerie Plame and Hans Blix and tax cuts and social security reform and Kyoto and Arctic wildlife preserve drilling and Dick Cheney's Marvel Comics-like villainy and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Knock yourself out.

Then read this: 

It is not true that the Americans invaded Iraq against the will of the Iraqi people. They did so against the will of Saddam, against the will of those who flourished under Saddam, and against the will of numerous Sunn'is and Christians, most of them utterly blameless for the crimes of the regime, who feared what would happen to them after the Shi'ites got out from under Saddam. This last is not an inconsiderable group – except as compared to the Shi'ites and the Kurds, who overwhelmingly wanted the invasion and welcomed it.

I know that these anecdotes will sound as if Karen Hughes or somebody paid me to cook them up, but they all really happened: The day I met Riyadh, he told me what he had been doing before the war. He and his family would sit around and listen to underground BBC radio. And if the French or somebody else in the U.N. seemed to come up with something that would offer the world a glimmer of hope that war could be avoided, their reaction was not, "thank God." It was: "Oh shit."