Saddam Hussein:
In desperate pursuit of a hero
Khaled Diab
The
US-UK occupation of Iraq is succeeding in achieving the once implausible feat
of turning a reviled dictator into something of a cult hero. This demonstrates
the utter failure of the Anglo-Saxon military adventure there. It also reveals
the desperate need in some Arab quarters to find a hero amongst the villains
who pass for leaders in the region and to salvage some pride amidst all the
humiliation and defeat.
January 2007
Part II – Champion or
villain of the Arab cause?
Part III – The dead don’t
talk
Part IV – Emulating
history
Anti-heroics and wishful thinking
Saddam Hussein, the man who has embroiled Iraq in
non-stop conflict since he officially took over the country’s leadership in
1979, has been executed in what amounted to a US-backed Iraqi show trial. I am
against the death penalty and object to the questionable legality of the entire
process, but I harbour no sympathies for the ex-dictator.
His corpse has barely grown cold in its grave
and already the man is being airbrushed either to appear more monstrous or
heroic than he was, depending on which ideological camp is holding the palette.
Some Arabs seem to be suffering from a
desperate need to find a hero amongst the villains that pass for Middle Eastern
leaders and virtue among the carnage in Iraq. In Morocco, Libya, Egypt,
Palestine, Jordan, Yemen and other Arab countries, a surprisingly large amount
of people expressed their grief at the execution. In the eyes of some, it would
seem that defiance is its own reward, no matter how stupid, ill-informed and
costly it is, and regardless of the selfish reasons for which it is carried
out. During a recent visit to Egypt, I was surprised when a relative expressed
admiration for the ultra-conservative and anti-reformist Iranian President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, simply because he dared to defy the will of America in a
highly visible and populist fashion.
Some respected top Arab journalists who ought
to know better are already eulogising Saddam Hussein as if he were some sort of
hero from the 1,001 Arabian nights. “Saddam Hussein approached the gallows like
a mountain, his head held high,” Al-Quds al-Arabi’s editor-in-chief
Abdel-Bari Atwan wrote in a front-page editorial on 2 January 2007.
In fact, Atwan places Hussein in the same
league as Omar al-Mukhtar who led, for two decades, the Libyan rebellion
against Italian rule and was hanged for his resistance, and praises the
ex-Iraqi president’s “faith in Arab unity [and] his confrontation of the Arab
world’s enemies”.
“He embarrassed and dwarfed them [the US-backed
Iraqi government] as he stood like a spear in the court… His nationalism and
pan-Arabism shamed them in their efforts to plant the seeds of abhorrent
factionalism,” Atwan continued.
Part II – Champion or
villain of the Arab cause?
Part III – The dead don’t
talk
Part IV – Emulating
history
Further reading
How I learned to start worrying and hate the bomb
November 2006 – With North Korea’s recent
nuclear test and Iran’s suspected nuclear designs, Khaled Diab explains why he
learned to start worrying and hate the bomb and suggests how the proliferation
of nuclear weapons can best be arrested – and reversed. Read on
Extraordinary
renditions –
The
playwright and the president
January 2006 – Jeff Sommers,
Khaled Diab and Charles Woolfson explore the dynamics between playwright and
president as American foreign policy stands in the dock. Read on
Extended
analysis
Dressed
to kill –
Under
the cloak of Bush’s foreign policy
December 2005 – Jeff Sommers, Khaled Diab and
Charles Woolfson expose what lies beneath the cloak of US President George W
Bush’s foreign policy. Read on
The price of war
October 2002 – Whether or not Iraq, after more than a
decade of ‘containment’ and sanctions, poses a threat to the United States and
its allies, any military action would most likely have serious economic and
political ramifications for Europe. Read on
ã2007 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.