Theater of blood

Bush wanted his Iraq war to be a lofty Shakespearean history. He got a vicious, corpse-strewn revenge tragedy.

By Gary Kamiya

Read more: Saddam Hussein, Gary Kamiya, Opinion, Iraq War

Jan. 9, 2007 | Even his critics cannot deny that George W. Bush is a master of staging. His "Mission Accomplished" landing on an aircraft carrier was worthy of Cecil B. DeMille, and his reign has consisted of one glittering patriotic masque after the next. In the words of Frank Rich, his Iraq war was "The Greatest Story Ever Sold." But reality has overwhelmed Bush's stagecraft, and what he once dreamed of as the majestic climax of his mighty drama, the execution of Saddam Hussein, has revealed his entire Iraq spectacle to be a grotesque theater of blood.

Bush wanted Saddam's execution to follow classical precepts and take place offstage. In his "Poetics," Aristotle wrote that it was preferable for the dramatist to describe a death, rather than depict it. Aristotle's reasoning, of course, was the exact opposite of Bush's. He wanted to enhance the audience's feeling of pity and terror at the death of a tragic hero, while the Bush administration wanted to make sure that Saddam's death did not turn him into such a hero. In fact, Saddam had become a bit player, his villainy swallowed up by the horror show of Iraq, but still Bush intended his execution to allow the audience to contemplate Saddam's sins, give thanks for America's actions in removing him, and experience a patriotic catharsis. Then Bush could return to playing his favorite role, former wastrel turned war hero Henry V, and urge us "once more unto the breach, dear friends."

But something went wrong. Saddam's final performance, in which he showed dignity in the face of the taunts and curses of his Shiite killers, erased memories of his humiliating capture and made him a pan-Arab hero, a symbol of resistance to the hated Americans. And the entire macabre scene revealed Bush's war to be not a triumphant Shakespearean history but a nihilistic Jacobean revenge tragedy, a corpse-strewn tale in which blood simply begets blood.

All but the most ghoulish war supporters have condemned Saddam's disgraceful execution, which resembled a revenge killing more than it did a dignified judicial process. It was impossible to reconcile this degrading spectacle with the Bush administration's lofty rhetoric about justice and democracy. Saddam's sordid end was simply one more example of Iraq's descent into a hellish pit of vengeance and sadism. And it made a mockery of Bush's purely theatrical plans to "surge" troops into Iraq: The fact that America's "allies" were capable of behaving like this shows that their agenda is different from ours, and that we have no capacity to influence it militarily.

But overlooked in the disgust over the primitive, vengeful nature of Saddam's execution is the fact that Bush's entire Iraq war, like most wars, was ultimately an act of revenge. There is no such thing as a clean war: As Goya said in the title of one of his horrific etchings of war, "This always happens." When you set out to kill people, you cannot control what happens afterward; as in revenge tragedy, death inspires more death. Saddam's ugly end is no unfortunate anomaly, it is a hideous microcosm of the entire war -- one started by Bush, but supported by a large percentage of the American people, who were driven by the same primitive passions that led Muqtada al-Sadr's men to curse a man about to die. Before we throw stones at the Iraqis for their tribal vengefulness, we would do well to contemplate the degree to which we share it, and think again before we launch a vengeful war.

America has always been obsessed with revenge. The angry god who holds sinners in his hands is a national archetype going back to Jonathan Edwards. Melville's Ahab wants to smite the White Whale out of vengeance. And the aggrieved hero who seeks vengeance continues to dominate our popular culture, from "Dirty Harry" to "Death Wish" to "Kill Bill." "Payback is a bitch" and "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" are our watchwords, only slightly checked by "Don't get mad, get even."

But if revenge is a universal American obsession, its true home is on the political right. Fear, resentment and calls for revenge are closely related, and these qualities -- together with a belief that "real" Americans and "authentic" emotions and beliefs have been pushed aside by phony elites -- have long driven right-wing politics. The 1930s demagogue Father Coughlin, whose enormously popular broadcasts combined anti-capitalism, anti-Communism and anti-Semitism, utilized them; so did Joe McCarthy. The rise of the "Reagan Democrats," working-class and lower-middle-class whites whose racially tinged resentment of do-gooder social programs drove them to the right, reshaped America's entire political landscape.

Religion, too, plays a role in the rise of vengeance-based politics. Many American conservatives identify themselves as evangelical Christians, which might lead one to think they would favor the turn-the-other-cheek teachings of Jesus over the vengeful ethos of the Old Testament. But for various reasons -- perhaps the most significant being that many evangelicals see themselves as fighting a rear-guard battle against a corrupt, secular culture -- most have embraced an angry Christ closer to the implacable Old Testament Father than the forgiving Son.

Resentful populism continues to be one of the most powerful cultural forces in America. Demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter have gotten rich by spewing resentment of "liberal elites," "feminazis" and murderous Muslim fanatics, and offering vicarious fantasies in which these villains -- or simply the entire Middle East -- come to a bad end. Indeed, it cannot have escaped attention that the execrations hurled at Saddam by al-Sadr's followers bear more than a slight resemblance to the triumphalist gloating and bloodthirsty ravings of certain right-wing war supporters.

Which is where Iraq comes in. Bush invaded Iraq in large part to take revenge for 9/11. Revenge was obviously not his only motivation: There is a murky zone in which ill-conceived but arguably rational notions of deterrence -- "we must teach the Arabs a lesson they'll never forget" -- are indistinguishable from reflexive vengeance. And revenge was never officially acknowledged as a legitimate justification -- such atavistic emotions never are. But the fact remains that Iraq was a counterpunch, the enraged reaction of someone who had been mugged and lashed out -- but lashed out in slow motion. Indeed, the peculiarity of the Iraq war, its historical uniqueness, lies in the fact that it was simultaneously driven by the most primitive, hotblooded emotions and was almost mind-bogglingly abstract and coldblooded. It was like spanking a 5-year-old six months after he broke the cookie jar. (By comparison, the war against the Taliban was retributive and served a legitimate deterrent purpose.) This split motivation allowed the Bush administration to deflect all criticism: accuse it of being too emotional, and it soberly pointed to its strategic rationale; attack that rationale, and it waved the bloody banner of the World Trade Center.

And that bloody banner was a very effective rallying cry. Bush could never have sold the war to the American people had it not been for their post-9/11 desire for retribution.

The lead editorial in the Philadelphia Daily News on Sept. 12, 2001, summed up the visceral feeling so many Americans held after the attacks, fanned by right-wing pundits, and opposed only by reviled apostates like the late Susan Sontag: "REVENGE. Hold on to that thought. Go to bed thinking it. Wake up chanting it. Because nothing less than revenge is called for today." Muqtada al-Sadr's supporters couldn't have said it better themselves.

Next page: Jacobean revenge tragedy is a gloomy and shockingly obscene literary form