Wednesday, 23 July 2003

Confession. My father once told me never to celebrate the death of other people—that no matter how bad someone may be, rejoicing at their demise can only reflect poorly on my upbringing. Celebrating a death is bloodthirsty and barbaric, and it's not something that good people should do.

Nonetheless, and in spite of my father's words of wisdom, I have to admit I feel a certain… satisfaction in learning that Uday and Qusay Hussein are dead, and in how they died: Not in a blaze of glorious jihad, or leading a guerilla attack against our armed forces, but hunted down and cornered like rats in a hole by some highly motivated troops from the 101st Airborne. I also have to admit that I preferred Uday's death to his capture: I didn't want to see him coming out with his hands up, imposing on us to accept his surrender, and then requiring us to find a suitable punishment for a man whose hobbies included abducting and raping women, torturing Iraqi Olympic athletes, and murdering people by the thousand. I confess to some uncharitable and unChristian thoughts about whether his death was slow and painful enough, and I take solace in imagining the fate that awaits him in the afterlife.

It's not very civilized of me, but there it is.

On the other hand, I do rejoice that our forces have done their duty well, that they moved quickly and effectively on a valid intelligence tip, that they suffered minimal casualties, and I hope that Uday and Qusay's deaths will demoralize the partisans and reduce the attacks on our troops. (I have some doubts as to whether the latter will happen, but I can hope.) Better yet, I hope other Iraqis are inspired by these events to collect the $25 million tag on Saddam's head, or that someone in northwest Pakistan realizes Osama will eventually be captured or killed regardless—so he might as well do the world a favor and pocket $37 million for his troubles.

As grisly as it sounds, I also hope we get our propaganda act together and publish identifiable photos of the bodies. Announcing that we've killed Uday and Qusay is good; showing that we've killed them is immeasurably better. We're still not using "soft power" as effectively as we should, in part because the party of Newt Gingrich abandoned the idea of soft power in 1994: If a problem can't be solved with brute force, our leaders have forgotten how to solve it. Attacking the BBC for biased journalism is well and good (and, from the look of the David Kelly incident, well-deserved), but we need to do more than just refute the negative stories; we need to keep showing the world why American soliders are still dying in Iraq, and the reasons why they aren't dying in vain.

A nod in passing to Steven Den Beste, who posted his article on this subject as I was composing mine. Steven and I are on the same page for once.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 6:31 am. comments.