Word: saddamism
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...days after Saddam Hussein was captured, there was much talk of the way in which he might be brought to trial and of the effect his detention might have on Iraqi insurgents. All this was speculation. It will be months before interrogators have finished grilling Saddam and maybe months more before there is a government in Baghdad with sufficient legitimacy to try him. And who truly knows if Saddam?s capture will lead to a reduction of hostilities? But on one thing, everyone seemed agreed. The images, the symbolism, the semiotics of Saddam?s capture were freighted with significance...
...with Saddam. The images of his detention and examination were designed to show that he was at the mercy of his captors. They signified Saddam?s weakness and the strength of the U.S. in the hope, presumably, that his supporters would conclude he was finished and end their armed opposition to coalition forces. But it took only hours for Arab and European newspapers and websites to claim that the opposite would happen: that a deliberate humiliation of Saddam would engender a renewed loyalty to him and refuel the violence...
...Saddam himself knew all about the power of symbols. For decades his propagandists compared him to Saladin, the great Muslim general of the 1100s. Saladin, like Saddam, was born in Tikrit (though Saladin was a Kurd), and at the Battle of Hattin in Galilee in 1187, he won the bloodiest and most comprehensive victory that Muslim armies ever achieved against Christian Crusaders. The murals in Baghdad of Saddam on a white horse, with a drawn sword - laughably kitsch to Western tastes - were a deliberate attempt to link him to Saladin?s blessed memory...
...just as Saddam used symbols to engender loyalty and fear among Iraqis, so we used Saddam - his cruelty, his megalomania - as a symbol to justify war in Iraq. Of course Saddam was evil. But the real, nonsymbolic Saddam was just as evil in the 1980s - when the U.S. was tilting toward Baghdad in the Iran-Iraq war - as he was later. It was only recently that we chose to use Saddam as the chief exhibit for the proposition (with which I agree) that the failure and violence of the Muslim world were so dangerous to others that they could...
...from Constantinople, Cavafy was born in 1863, in Alexandria, Egypt. He wrote in both his native Greek and English, but he was an Alexandrian and proud of it. He was, in other words, a symbol himself - of a time when the Middle East was not shaped by thugs like Saddam, but could enfold many religions and languages, and breed from their interplay sublime moments of art and humanity. If the capture of Saddam marks the moment that such a world starts to be reborn, it will be the best symbol...