A Step Too Far
Has the insurgency finally overplayed his hand?
by Shelton Hull
It may be foolhardy to hope that the videotaped murder of Care, International head Margaret Hassan denotes the start of a new phase in the occupation of Iraq. The killing is evidence which emerged near the end of a Fallujah offensive from which the senior insurgent leadership escaped (but not before making a tape urging the remnants to earn their deaths, on the pretense that “victory is just around the corner”), and it underscores the subhumanity of the enemy and the futility of pursuing a humanitarian agenda there.
The facts, repeated, never cease to be appalling: of nearly three-dozen hostages killed in Iraq (out of roughly 170 abducted), the only woman to die was someone who’d been in Iraq helping to feed and clothe the less-fortunate for years before this war began, a woman from a country whose citizens overwhelmingly opposed the war, a woman who had married an Iraqi back when Saddam was a mere mid-level Baathist bureaucrat. She died after being made to beg for her life and reiterate her opposition to the war, after which she was dressed in Abu Ghraib orange and shot through the head.
The biggest losers are the people of Iraq, who would find themselves being cut off from humanitarian aid altogether if not for the world’s residual guilt for the support they provided to the Hussein regime and their shameful failure to dissuade US policymakers from pursuing this war. Whatever one may say about the war itself, it can now be said that any civilian aid workers who set foot in Iraq have let their hearts overwhelm their minds, and they should consider themselves unarmed adjuncts of the coalition.
Time and again, the Iraqi people – at least, the more vocal segments – have acted against their own interests. They accepted dictatorial rule from the Baath, allowed their children to die in the hundreds of thousands in support of their master’s adventure in Iran, starved under his sanctions with nary a cross word. Now, when someone has tried to “liberate” them for the first time in generations, they not only form militias to kill US troops, but they truck-bomb the UN out of town, use car-bombs against their own people, execute their own policemen en masse, shoot translators and washer-women and now, just to reinforce their point, they kill a woman motivated purely by altruism.
What is the lesson? That the only thing the Iraqi people respect, it seems, is force, broadly applied. Kindness and brotherhood only seem to work for those Iraqis who have an interest in the future, but there is a massive segment of the population, larger than the insurgent class, who have internalized their own inferiority and cannot be counted upon to stand up for their rights. They would have the US out of Iraq so they can be enslaved again. Radical Islam, like Christian Fundamentalism, is a set of doctrines designed for the perpetuation of the very domination these religions arose in opposition to.
Unfortunately, US interests do not mesh with the return of such values to the seat of power in Iraq, because the void created by Iraqi weakness only encourages the spread of an ideology rooted in the certainty that America must be destroyed, and that can’t happen. The irony of this situation is that, all things considered, we may have been better off allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power, ruling the Iraqi people with the iron fist they seem so attached to. The good heart of Margaret Hassan has stopped beating, and here’s hoping that no one arrives to take her place. Let the bastards fend for themselves. Let them have a taste of what they would return themselves to, and maybe then they will understand. But probably not.
The videotaped killings of civilians has an undeniably powerful effect on our country: it exposes that we are not as desensitized as we think we are. Hopefully the savagery displayed toward Margaret Hassan makes clear once and for all that the people fighting coalition forces (who are hardly above reproach) have no regard for the best interests of the Iraqi people. They view them as mere pawns in a global game, and that appears to be a role they are comfortable with. ◼
