IR/Am. Gov't -NY Times Article from Thomas Friedman

The meaning of a skull

By Thomas L. Friedman
Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times
Sunday, April 27, 2003 Posted: 8:11 AM EDT (1211 GMT)
Friday's Times carried a front-page picture of a skull, with a group of Iraqis gathered around it. The skull was of a political prisoner from Saddam Hussein's regime, and the grieving Iraqis were relatives who had exhumed it from a graveyard filled with other victims of Saddam's torture. Just under the picture was an article about President Bush vowing that weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq, as he promised.

As far as I'm concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war. That skull, and the thousands more that will be unearthed, are enough for me. Mr. Bush doesn't owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons (even if it turns out that the White House hyped this issue). It is clear that in ending Saddam's tyranny, a huge human engine for mass destruction has been broken. The thing about Saddam's reign is that when you look at that skull, you don't even know what period it came from his suppression of the Kurds or the Shiites, his insane wars with Iran and Kuwait, or just his daily brutality.

Whether you were for or against this war, whether you preferred that the war be done with the U.N.'s approval or without it, you have to feel good that right has triumphed over wrong. America did the right thing here. It toppled one of the most evil regimes on the face of the earth, and I don't think we know even a fraction of how deep that evil went. Fair-minded people have to acknowledge that. Who cares if we now find some buried barrels of poison? Do they carry more moral weight than those buried skulls? No way.

So why isn't everyone celebrating this triumph? Why is there still an undertow out there, a holding back of jubilation? There are several explanations. For me, it has to do with the nature of Iraq and the Middle East. You always have this worry that in the Middle East, fighting evil is like holding back the desert. The minute you fight off one evil, three others blow in to take its place.

You always worry that maybe these countries are not real states, but are simply collections of tribes that can be controlled only with a fist, and the only options are an evil iron fist or a softer, more benign one. No sooner is Saddam gone than up pops a group of Shiite clerics demanding that Iraq be turned into another Iran. So as much as I believe we did good and right in toppling Saddam, I will whoop it up only when the Iraqi people are really free not free just to loot or to protest against us, but free to praise us out loud, free to speak their minds in any direction, because they have built a government and rule of law that can accommodate pluralism and stand in the way of evil returning.

I also think many Democrats are reluctant to celebrate because they fear with good reason that President Bush will be empowered by this war victory, that he and Karl Rove will use that power to drive through a radical conservative agenda that Democrats fear is erasing separations between church and state, depriving government of the tax funds it needs to maintain decent social and educational programs, and despoiling the environment. Sure, Democrats argue, we did right in Iraq, but if it will only lead to more wrong at home, how good can you feel?

And when you look at the way war critics from the Dixie Chicks to Tom Daschle have been savaged by conservatives, it feels as if some people want to use this war to create a multiparty democracy in Iraq and a one-party state in America.

France and Russia refuse to acknowledge that any good was done in Iraq because if America's war ends justify its unilateral means, their power will be further diminished.

The Arab world refuses to acknowledge any good from this war, because many Arab regimes have features in common with Saddam's, and if getting rid of him was good, so would be getting rid of them. And Arab intellectuals and the Arab League won't acknowledge any good having been done in Iraq by America, because it only reminds them that they should have taken care of this problem themselves and didn't.

Bottom line: We can get rid of the sculptures of Saddam with one tug, but our job is to build a regime in Iraq that won't produce any more battered human skulls. That will be a huge task, which will need many helpers. The challenge for the Arabs, France and Russia is to get over the fact that Mr. Bush did something good, and roll up their sleeves to help make it last. And the challenge for Mr. Bush is to not take the good thing he has done and cast it in an ideological framework that will make people resent it at home and abroad.

Thomas L. Friedman is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times.