I promised myself I would not comment on the Saddam trial. There is so much that is obvious, I will leave it to Al-Jazeerah’s talking heads to debunk what they want. I will want to rise above it and hope others will do so too: If not for the love of Bush, then certainly for the love of Iraq.
Let us step back for a while and look at matters as they really are in situ. There is a foreign army there. There are people either resisting or terrorizing the country, depending on where you stand on the issue.
The government of the new “sovereign” Iraq was born mutilated and started its term in a lame-duck mode. Security is nonexistent. Bombs around Iraq make Israel look like Switzerland in comparison.
On the home front, the US that is, Bush supporters cannot see him doing anything wrong. He is almost like a god. On the other hand, those who hate him will never concede a decent act to his administration. So, trying to argue anything with any of the two parties is a nonstarter.
On the Middle East front, rulers are watching with trepidation and quiet consent while the mob’s prejudices are being fed by those with an agenda. To the most oblivious observer, this is nothing but a boiling pot waiting to spill its scalding contents all over the world.
As I said last week, philosophy is there to make us understand if not to comfort us. So let us seek some understanding in that realm and see what happens. Heraclitus (c 400 BC) said that “all things are in a state of flux. Everything happens through strife. Reality is a condition of unrest.”
If applied to Iraq, this statement might shed some positive light on events. There certainly is motion and flux in post-Saddam Iraq compared to the stunned and pained silence of the years under the dictator. I doubted Bush’s intentions in Iraq and still don’t believe him when he says he wants freedom for the people of the Middle East as an a priori justification for his actions.
But the reality of the situation now has taken on a life of its own and we should help heal the rift regardless of prior intentions.
Iraq, according to Heraclitus’ definition, is now alive and in a solid state of “reality”, if only through its painful unrest.
To take this argument further, the basic idea behind this philosophy was advanced to make Creation, Activity, and Movement, rather than law and order or any “wholeness”, the essential qualities of the Real. Basically, this means chaos is good, order is not — at least philosophically.
To the layperson, this might sound farfetched and ethereal.
Yet the blood on the streets is real enough and Saddam is alive and kicking hard at the shins of his captors.
We in the Arab world have never had the luxury of ticking a name and slipping it in a ballot box to change matters.
It seems we are destined for the time being to either hold a sword and chop off people’s heads or hold a book and try to understand.
I prefer the latter, for in the end the book invariably carries the day.
