Pacific News Service > News > After Saddam, the Deluge: U.S. Misjudges What Dictator's Downfall Will Bring

Pacific News Service > News > After Saddam, the Deluge: U.S. Misjudges What Dictator's Downfall Will Bring: "After Saddam, the Deluge: U.S. Misjudges What Dictator's Downfall Will Bring
Commentary, William O. Beeman,
Pacific News Service, Jul 24, 2003
Editor's Note: The drama of the hunt for Saddam Hussein and the recent killing of his two sons can't hide the fact that taking out an evil dictator may paradoxically bring more ruin to Iraq.

Finding Saddam Hussein is 'definitely the most important thing we have to do right now,' declared Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the wake of the killing of Saddam's sons on July 22.

But what should be worrying Wolfowitz is not how to find Saddam, but how to contain the disintegration of Iraq that looms even as U.S. forces try to track Hussein down and put a definitive end to his rule.

From the outset, the neoconservative theory of the Iraqi war promoted by Wolfowitz, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Advisor Richard Pearl, among others, was simplistic. It asserted that Saddam and his sons held the nation in a reign of terror and the removal of these terrible tyrants would be greeted with gratitude and cooperation among the Iraqi people and lead to an instant national solidarity and the rise of a democratic state.

This theory is not dead, as seen in the White House's stated belief that eliminating Saddam once and for all is the key to peace and order in Iraq. However, as evil as he was, Saddam paradoxically unified rather than divided Iraq and provided order, albeit repressive.

Iraq was a misbegotten nation, cobbled together from three provinces of the Ottoman Empire with spit, bailing wire and the British Army after World War I. The Britons crown"