And you thought the Lieberman-Bush kiss was bad...

A picture says a thousand words, this is from www.Wonkette.com a worthy blog in its own right. It has to be the single most disturbing image I've seen all day.

At right, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad demonstrate why America hates the latter and has given up on the former.

The Case for an Iraqi Strongman

Here are two articles from two very different sources (National Review & The New Republic) both discussing the same point - Saddam's power to control Iraq and the Shiites.

First James Robbins of the National Review Online:

November 28, 2006, 8:28 a.m.

Bring Back Saddam
Bygones?

By James S. Robbins

When Saddam Hussein first went on trial in October 2005, I wrote a satirical memo from Saddam to his (still living) chief lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi. In it, he explained why he did not want to embarrass the United States during the trial:

We had good times back in the day, we can again. I think in time the Americans will shake the influence of their Zionist masters and come to their senses. They still need someone to hold the line against Iran, more than ever these days. Will the Shiites do it? Not likely! And there was never this level of disorder when I was in power. Order is what they want. I can take care of it. They know this, and they will come to me eventually. If we can draw it out they’ll understand the futility of this exercise. They don’t have to admit failure, I can stand for election or something, however they want to dress it up. We just need some time.

I was only partly kidding in that passage. I knew this really was part of Saddam’s defense strategy. It seemed funny at the time. But now who’s laughing? As Saddam’s probable execution nears and violence in Iraq escalates, the idea of bringing him back to power is starting to simmer.

The rumor that the U.S. has been backing Saddam all along has been out there in one form or another since 2003. It was originally intended to delegitimize the presence of Coalition forces, particularly among the Shiites. We overthrew him, but are keeping him around in case we need him, in case the Shiites grow too powerful. The notion has been hawked by the Iranian press for years, most recently this week in the Tehran Times. The story line is familiar — the U.S. fears a Shiite majority in Iraq that will pursue friendly relations with Iran. The answer is to overthrow the democracy and place the Baathists back in power. “The secret visit to Baghdad by US Vice President Dick Cheney and former secretary of state James A. Baker, who is currently the chairman of the Iraq Study Group, is part of the conspiracy,” the Times speculates. Jomhuri-ye Eslami says a coup against the current government “would be one of Bush's major achievements to implement American-style democracy in Iraq at the hand of the Ba'thists, and to present a new style of democracy to all the bewildered observers.” Bewildered is right. Hard to see how it constitutes a major achievement to go to all this trouble to wind up where we started.

Meanwhile back home The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, in a piece I am still not sure is serious, makes his case for bringing back Saddam. Everyone agrees that radical de-Baathification was a blunder, so why not try radical re-Baathification? You want order? Saddam invented it. A bulwark against Iran? He’s your guy. Plus, this time around he’ll be grateful and cooperative. If not, we hang him. The people? They will be so shocked and awed by the turn of events they’ll meekly reassume their traditional roles. No more random killings in the streets, but focused, systematic and orderly massacres in freshly dug pits. No foreign terrorists coming and going as they please, but only doing so on Saddam’s orders. Oil exports up, American troops out. It really would be an ideal solution, if it weren’t for all those lives we sacrificed on our journey back to square one.

Even if we declare the democratic experiment dead and seek regime re-change, I do not understand the fascination with Saddam per se. There have to be many dictators in waiting out there, why bring back one who most likely will be very angry at us for all the trouble we put him through? Saddam does not do gratitude. If you want a strongman, wouldn’t it be much easier just to hand the reigns over to someone else? Sure, Saddam has a proven record of accomplishment, he knows how to use a political party ruthlessly to dominate a government apparatus and establish totalitarian rule buttressed by secret police and an effective cult of personality, but these days who doesn’t?

The “bring back Saddam” plan is a geostrategic way of saying “Oops, my bad.” It seeks to erase the last three and a half years of conflict and start fresh, as though one could do so without consequences. Resurrecting the Baathist regime, even if it were possible, would stand as a repudiation of the entire war effort, its means, its ends, and its ideals. It would be a slap in the face to all the members of the armed forces who have done or continue to do their duty in Iraq, not to mention those who have been wounded, and the families of the fallen. It would signal the emergent impotence of the United States in world affairs, and the death-spiral of the Bush presidency. It would be an admission of strategic failure on a level seldom seen in history.

Other than that — great idea.

— James S. Robbins is senior fellow in national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, a trustee for the Leaders for Liberty Foundation , and author of Last in Their Class: Custer, Picket and the Goats of West Point. Robbins is also an NRO contributor.

And now, Jonathan Chait of the New Republic:

Jonathan Chait: Bring back Saddam Hussein

Restoring the dictator to power may give Iraqis the jolt of authority they need. Have a better solution?

Jonathan Chait

November 26, 2006

THE DEBATE about Iraq has moved past the question of whether it was a mistake (everybody knows it was) to the more depressing question of whether it is possible to avert total disaster. Every self-respecting foreign policy analyst has his own plan for Iraq. The trouble is that these tracts are inevitably unconvincing, except when they argue why all the other plans would fail. It's all terribly grim.

So allow me to propose the unthinkable: Maybe, just maybe, our best option is to restore Saddam Hussein to power.

Yes, I know. Hussein is a psychotic mass murderer. Under his rule, Iraqis were shot, tortured and lived in constant fear. Bringing the dictator back would sound cruel if it weren't for the fact that all those things are also happening now, probably on a wider scale.

At the outset of the war, I had no high hopes for Iraqi democracy, but I paid no attention to the possibility that the Iraqis would end up with a worse government than the one they had. It turns out, however, that there is something more awful than totalitarianism, and that is endless chaos and civil war.

Nobody seems to foresee the possibility of restoring order to Iraq. Here is the basic dilemma: The government is run by Shiites, and the security agencies have been overrun by militias and death squads. The government is strong enough to terrorize the Sunnis into rebellion but not strong enough to crush this rebellion.

Meanwhile, we have admirably directed our efforts into training a professional and nonsectarian Iraqi police force and encouraging reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites. But we haven't succeeded. We may be strong enough to stop large-scale warfare or genocide, but we're not strong enough to stop pervasive chaos.

Hussein, however, has a proven record in that department. It may well be possible to reconstitute the Iraqi army and state bureaucracy we disbanded, and if so, that may be the only force capable of imposing order in Iraq.

Chaos and order each have a powerful self-sustaining logic. When people perceive a lack of order, they act in ways that further the disorder. If a Sunni believes that he is in danger of being killed by Shiites, he will throw his support to Sunni insurgents who he sees as the only force that can protect him. The Sunni insurgents, in turn, will scare Shiites into supporting their own anti-Sunni militias.



And it's not just Iraqis who act this way. You could find a smaller-scale version of this dynamic in an urban riot here in the United States. But when there's an expectation of social order, people will act in a civilized fashion.

Restoring the expectation of order in Iraq will take some kind of large-scale psychological shock. The Iraqi elections were expected to offer that shock, but they didn't. The return of Saddam Hussein — a man every Iraqi knows, and whom many of them fear — would do the trick.

The disadvantages of reinstalling Hussein are obvious, but consider some of the upside. He would not allow the country to be dominated by Iran, which is the United States' major regional enemy, a sponsor of terrorism and an instigator of warfare between Lebanon and Israel. Hussein was extremely difficult to deal with before the war, in large part because he apparently believed that he could defeat any U.S. invasion if it came to that. Now he knows he can't. And he'd probably be amenable because his alternative is death by hanging.

I know why restoring a brutal tyrant to power is a bad idea. Somebody explain to me why it's worse than all the others.

What's really at stake is the future of democratic pluralism in the Middle East, if not the entire Muslim World from Morocco to Mindinao. What kind of political structure do we want to see in these areas dominated by America-hating populations and regimes both religious and secular dedicated to proposition of a defeated America. After years of cultural indoctrination into this culture of hate, is democracy really a good idea? Is pluralism even possible? Is it even worth trying to facilitate their growth in the face of such open and unabashed hostility? This may be one of those instances when fighting for freedom and democracy may endanger you and your ideals more than simply tolerating repressive and totalitarian regimes - as long as those regimes do not pose a direct and imminent threat.