Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Even those opposed to the war should celebrate a shining moment in the history of freedom -- the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Apr 11, 2003 | "Paris is shooting all her bullets in the August night." Those are the words with which Albert Camus opened "The Night of Truth," the soaring essay from the collection "Resistance, Rebellion and Death" written during those hot nights in summer 1944 when Paris was liberated. "In this vast setting of stones and waters, all around this river that has reflected so much history, ... once more justice must be bought with the blood of men. We know this fight too well, we are too involved through our flesh and our hearts to accept this dreadful condition without bitterness."
The next night, Aug. 25, the Allies entered the city. Camus wrote, "In the most beautiful and hottest of August nights, the eternal stars over Paris mingle with the tracer bullets, the smoke of fires, and the colored rockets of a mass celebration. The unparalleled night marks the end of four years of monstrous history and of unspeakable struggle in which France came to grips with her shame and her wrath."
The liberation of Paris. The fall of Mussolini, of Ceausescu, of Milosevic. The end of the Khmer Rouge, of Idi Amin. These are shining moments in the history of freedom, of mankind's long and bitter and never completely achieved struggle to resist tyranny and evil, to make a world where torture and rape and murder and war and injustice and savage lust for power and all the other ancient, all-too-familiar demons are pushed back into the darkness. No one, whether on the left or the right, can look at the faces of those who have been liberated, whether in Paris or Bucharest or Phnom Penh or in the American South in 1865, without feeling one's heart quicken: We did it, we won one.
"We" is not America, or France, or the Union Army, or Cambodia, or blacks, or whites, or Arabs or Jews: "We" is mankind. To stand in solidarity with humanity on those few occasions when it lurches forward is more than an honor, it is mandatory if you have a soul, like keeping faith with those you love.
And so, at this moment, as the Mordor shadow of Saddam Hussein, a truly evil man who, like a sociopathic murderous husband, killed everything that he could not control, lifts from the long-suffering people of Iraq, all of us, on the left and the right, Democrats and Republicans, America-lovers and America-haters, Syrians and Kuwaitis and Israelis and Palestinians, owe it to our common humanity to stop, put aside -- not forever -- our doubts and our grief and our future fears, and for one deep moment, celebrate.
Celebrate the 6-year-old boy -- he exists, there are thousands of him, he is running down a street in Karbala right now holding a candy bar -- who will not grow up in a world where his father, and his uncle, and his cousin are taken away by anonymous men one night and never come back.
Celebrate the young woman who will no longer be taken off the street by Saddam's agents to a house where she will be gang-raped, and a film of the rape used to blackmail her into becoming an informer.
Celebrate the Kurd who can return to the house his grandfather built without being killed.
Celebrate a world that no longer contains a regime willing to torture small children to force their parents to confess.
Why should we celebrate? Because what happens to those Iraqis is more important than our political beliefs. Even if -- especially if -- we opposed this war, even if we are disgusted with and deeply suspicious of the U.S. administration, we should celebrate. Their fate matters more.
It is a strange celebration, and not an easy one. It is tinged with sadness, and for some of us with bitterness. The new Iraq is coming into being because of a war solely initiated and largely fought by my country, a war fought not for liberation but for other reasons, none of them convincing or good. It killed many thousands of people, almost all of them Iraqis, most of them innocent. To destroy the tyrant, we also had to destroy much or most of his wretched, doomed army -- untold thousands of semiliterate peasants and poor young men from the cities, conscripts, decent men who might have become auto mechanics or teachers but never had a chance before they were sent out onto the killing fields outside Baghdad. We killed many, many civilians. And then there are the American and British dead, young men and women, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters who would be alive today had the United States not invaded a foreign country that posed no threat to us.
And it is a celebration haunted by fear. Fear that celebrating at all might be the sentimental diversion of a fool. Fear that the new Iraq could slip into anarchy or a new tyranny. Fear that the United States will fail to rebuild the shattered nation. Fear that even if we do everything right in the months and years ahead, we have already sown the seed of hatred from which terrorism springs. Fear that the Bush administration will not act to save the Israelis and the Palestinians from their tragic death-grip by forcing Ariel Sharon to give up the occupied territories, while ending Palestinian terrorism. Fear that Bush, emboldened by this victory, will embark upon a series of imperialist adventures, few if any of which will have the laudable collateral effects of this one, and which will bring down upon us even more of the world's hatred and contempt than it presently feels.
All of these regrets and fears are real. They are why those of us who opposed this war did so. Yet they are only part of the universe that is literally being born in front of us. And what we need to do is try to see everything. Yes, that means looking with unflinching eyes at not just the Iraqis we have freed from tyranny but those we have slaughtered. But it also means not just worrying about what could go wrong but acknowledging what has gone right.
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