Salam Pax is a blogger from Iraq who wrote about the liberation of his country. He’s also gay, a fact which is important when you realize how little Hussein’s regime appreciated homosexuals. Once liberated, he managed to get a nice job with the UK’s Guardian as a columnist. His most recent entry included this passage:
Dear [President Bush],
I hate to wake you up from that dream you are having, the one in which you are a superhero bringing democracy and freedom to underdeveloped, oppressed countries. But you really need to check things out in one of the countries you have recently bombed to freedom. Georgie, I am kind of worried that things are going a bit bad in Iraq and you don’t seem to care that much. You might want it to appear as if things are going well and sign Iraq off as a job well done, but I am afraid this is not the case.
Listen, habibi, it is not over yet. Let me explain this in simple terms. You have spilled a glass full of tomato juice on an already dirty carpet and now you have to clean up the whole room. Not all of the mess is your fault but you volunteered to clean it up. I bet if someone had explained it to you like that you would have been less hasty going on our Rambo-in-Baghdad trip.
To tell you the truth, I am glad that someone is doing the cleaning up, and thank you for getting rid of that scary guy with the hideous moustache that we had for president. But I have to say that the advertisements you were dropping from your B52s before the bombs fell promised a much more efficient and speedy service. We are a bit disappointed. So would you please, pretty please, with sugar on top, get your act together and stop telling people you have Iraq all figured out when you are giving us the trial-and-error approach?
Anyway, I hope this doesn’t disturb you too much. Have a nice stay in London, wave hello to the demonstrators, and give my regards to your spin doctors. I bet they are having a hell of a job making you look good.
Do you want my reaction to his words? Lileks stole it, almost verbatim:
Hey, Salam? Fuck you. I know you?re the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inner circle before the war, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there?s a picture on the front page of my local paper today: third Minnesotan killed in Iraq. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba?athists. You owe him.
Let me explain this in simple terms, habibi. You would have spent the rest of your life under Ba?athist rule. You might have gotten some nice architectural commissions to do a house for someone whose aroma was temporarily acceptable to the Tikriti mob. You might have worked your international connections, made it back to Vienna, lived a comfy exile?s life. What?s certain is that none of your pals would ever have gotten rid of that ?scary guy without the hideous moustache? (as if his greatest sin was somehow a fashion faux pas) and the Saddam regime would have prospered into the next generation precisely because of people like you. People who would rather have lived their life in low-level fear than change your situation.
I wish I had something to add here, but like I said, Lileks said it all. Thanks, James.
Ingrate!!
It has started to become almost a popular myth that somehow, the specifics are never mentioned, Saddam would have been removed from power without the massive employment of military force. Mr. Salam is far from alone in his opinions. In fact, I read or hear a similar viewpoint almost every day. It basically boils down to George Bush is a unilateralist idiot responsible for everything that has and ever will go wrong in Iraq, and if he had just let Kofi Anan at the U.N. and the cooler heads among our French and German allies handle things, Saddam would have quietly left office and moved with his charming sons to the French Riviera to take up sun bathing, crocket and bikini watching. And the people of Iraq would have lived happily ever after as long as they honored Saddam’s oil contracts with France and Russia and paid their off their hefty debts to those nations. Some of the people who believe this sort of thing are even running for President of the United States.
Our friend Mr. Salam shares with many others on the Left in America and Western Europe the belief that it is all well and good to see bloody tyrants removed from power, but it is somehow unseemly and rather messy to remove them with brute force. Perhaps Britain and France should have turned the Hitler problem over to the League of Nations in 1939 instead of declaring war as they did. If they had done so, and there was a significant minority in both countries that favored that policy, I have no doubt that the Nazi regime would still exist in some form today ruled from Berlin by Hitler’s successors. Besides World War II was far too messy and cost far too many lives. The present day U.N. is only marginally more effective than the League and has to my knowledge never removed anyone from power or stopped any act of aggression. Somehow that job has always been left up to the ground pounders in the U.S. and British Commonwealth armed forces and they have done it very well with little in the way of gratitude. Tyrants on Saddam’s level with an extensive secret police network, rigid media controls and totalitarian party bureaucracy are never overthrown by popular uprising and only rarely in a military coup. They rule through fear and possess no moral qualms about killing, jailing and torturing real or perceived enemies. So, I don’t really blame Mr. Salam for the survival of Saddam’s regime, but I would agree with Mike’s comment that the bastard is an ingrate of colossal proportions.