Reaction is mixed in the Iraqi city where Saddam Hussein's two eldest sons have been killed by U-S troops.
At least a thousand people gathered outside the house in Mosul where Odai and Qusai died in a raid today. Some were shouting in delight, some were cursing in anger. Others stood silently in mourning.
My reaction isn't mixed.
I think killing Saddam's sons was, well, not the smartest thing this administration has ever done.*
First, it's entirely possible that they were valuable sources of intelligence. Perhaps they knew which rosebushes the rest of the centrigures were under! Second, it would be more effective to display them as captives. Imperial Rome knew this when they paraded captives through the streets in triumph. The Peruvians knew this when they captured Shining Path leader Guzman and displayed him in a cage on national TV. Legends grow around martyrs, not captives.
But the stupidity goes even deeper. Let's look at 11 words in Bush's State of the Union speech that are a real scandal:
One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice.
Parsing this, what Bush means by "American Justice" is finding the "bad guys" and killing them. (Rather like Operation Phoenix in Viet Nam. And we all know how well that adventure went.)
Funny thing! I thought American justice was about The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, trial by jury, and the rule of law.
Suppose that was true, and the administration believed it.
Suppose we had captured Saddam's sons, and then turned them over to the Hague tribunal for trial. What happens? The national interest gets served in all kinds of ways. We get all the propaganda advantages that the Peruvians and Imperial Rome got (which is all the killing was about anyhow). We get the Europeans and the UN back on board, and maybe we get some help with reconstruction and even a graceful way out. Best of all, it's good for the Iraqi people. The Clinton administration followed just this policy in the Balkans when they got Milosevic tried at the Hague for war crimes, and the Balkans are doing reasonably well.
At best, killing Saddam's sons was a missed opportunity. At worst, it's the tip of the iceberg of a policy of targeted assassination that perverts the notion of American justice, and will lead to blowback just as certainly as funding Afghan jihaadists did.
But the killing gives an increasingly rattled administration real estate on the front pages for at least one news cycle. What are lives, the national interest, and justice compared to that?
UPDATE Images of the Mosul house.
UPDATE Additional material at Billmon and Kos.
UPDATE
"But what good came of it at last?"
Quoth little Peterkin.
"Why that I cannot tell,' said he
"But 'twas a famous victory." —Robert Southey
UPDATE: *At the suggestion of editor Bob, I removed "hog stupid," since it detracted from one of the main points of the post: that American justice is one of the most effective forms of soft power we have.