The Arab Humiliation That Is Saddam

You just knew that it wouldn't be long before the gnashing of teeth began about the humiliation of Saddam's capture. It is the humiliation endured by Saddam that they all vocally deplore, but it is their own personal sense of humiliation to which they are truly referring.

Now I can understand there being a degree of shame associated with the capture of your national leader. Regardless of just how evil the man was, for many Iraqis he was the only leader they ever knew. A sense of shame and/or humiliation is not only reasonable, but to be expected to a degree.

What concerns me more, however, is the constant expressions of discontent with his Saddam's "last stand." Regardless of the shame of Saddam's capture they should take solace in the fact that Saddam will get a fair trial - and a correspondingly fair punishment. But, to this point, the concept of fairness is still unknown.

Guilt is a societal issue, not a personal one in the Middle East. A trial of Saddam is feared not because it might detail out his crimes, but because it will rehash his crimes in a public manner, reminding the people of what they allowed to occur. Saddam's guilt is viewed as all of their guilt and they still wish to remain in denial that there was ever a real issue.

And so they decry Saddam's capture. They complain that he lost the nerve to commit suicide. They despair that he hadn't the nerve to stand up to the Americans. They rail against the 4th ID for taking him alive. So upset are they that Saddam is still alive, that they accuse the Americans of using non-lethal weapons to capture him.

They simply cannot accept that it is possible that Saddam was more fearful of death and the afterlife than he was of facing the Americans and the Iraqi court. They do not want to face the fact that they allowed a murderer within their mist. And they most certainly don't want to admit that their "fearless leader" might have actually been human.

Some Arabs are starting to realize with the capture of Saddam that the US has taken a different stance than years past. We are engaged and in for the long haul. This bothers them. They want to pretend that his death in a "blaze of glory" might have precluded us from taking this stance. But in doing so, they fail to recognize that the actual shift in US policy took place in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Saddam was irrelevant, dead or alive; suicide, execution, or death in battle. We are in the Middle East, for good or for bad, until such time as we feel that they have come far enough along that another Saddam or Osama or Mullah Omar is extremely unlikely to ever be spawned by the region again.

Saddam's capture by the Americans is and should be a humiliation for the Arab world. Not because of the way in which he was apprehended, not because of the lack of fight in him, not because of a lack of machismo on his part, but rather because they allowed him to persist in his reign of terror against his own people, his neighbors, and the region. They should be humiliated simply because it took the Americans to come in to police their own.

The capture of Saddam should be an Arab humiliation, just not for the reasons they proclaim.