Monday, November 08, 2010

Justice was slow in coming

"It was said in the Sunni strongholds of Iraq, and in the Arab capitals, that
it had been bad form that the dictator had been dispatched at dawn, on the first day of
Id al-Adha, the feast of sacrifice that marks the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
But those protests came from people who had never shed a tear for Saddam's victims.
Their loyalties are atavistic: They are motivated by a dread of the Shiites, and by a
reflexive, unthinking anti-Americanism.

A big thing happened, it has to be conceded, when Maliki affixed his signature to that
death sentence. Sunni rulers had been hounding Shiite rebels for centuries in Arab
lands; Saddam himself had put to death some great men of standing in the Shiite
religious establishment. In April 1980, in a deed that is still recalled with terror by the
vast majority of Shiites, a great figure of the Shiite seminaries, Ayatollah Muhammad
Baqir al-Sadr, was put to death by the Hussein regime-along with his immensely
talented sister, Bint al-Huda, a poet and a writer of exquisite sensibility. Sadr had
become the great martyr of Iraqi Shiites; he is said to have been the intellectual
inspiration behind the Dawa Party to which Maliki belongs. Saddam's execution was an
act of fealty to that beloved man. For the Shiite faithful, justice had been slow in coming.

It had taken a foreign war to decapitate that tyrannical regime in Baghdad, it is true. But
the judgment that mattered was an affair of the Iraqis. We have been asking them to
claim responsibility for their country, bemoaning their political abdication. On that
morning in Baghdad, three years after he had been flushed out of his spider hole,
Saddam Hussein came face to face with the wrath and hurt he had bequeathed Iraqis.
Those vengeful men taunting him as he fell through the gallows' trapdoor were in the
most direct way the children of his cruel reign of terror."

--Fouad Ajami

I remember a post by As'ad Abu Khalil (Angry Arab), who seemed to be a fan of the "legitimate" resistance in Iraq, in which he said of Maliki: "here is a man who has just signed two death sentences: one for Saddam, and the other for himself."

But all the Arab "resistance" has done is murder Iraqi police and ordinary Iraqi civilians.

7 comments :

Dolly said...

We have already clarified that 'Ajami is insane.
You can kind of tell just by looking at him.

Dolly said...

Well I thought about assassinating him personally myself. But I thought it was impossible to get access.
Later on I was surprised to hear that my cousin's friend met up with Maliki on a few occasions.
http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/1216/63956551.jpg

Iraqi Mojo said...

"There should be no illusions about the sort of Arab landscape that America is destined to find if, or when, it embarks on a war against the Iraqi regime. There would be no "hearts and minds" to be won in the Arab world, no public diplomacy that would convince the overwhelming majority of Arabs that this war would be a just war. An American expedition in the wake of thwarted UN inspections would be seen by the vast majority of Arabs as an imperial reach into their world, a favor to Israel, or a way for the United States to secure control over Iraq's oil. No hearing would be given to the great foreign power.

...America ought to be able to live with this distrust and discount a good deal of this anti-Americanism as the "road rage" of a thwarted Arab world – the congenital condition of a culture yet to take full responsibility for its self-inflicted wounds. There is no need to pay excessive deference to the political pieties and givens of the region. Indeed, this is one of those settings where a reforming foreign power's simpler guidelines offer a better way than the region's age-old prohibitions and defects."

Iraqi Mojo said...

'I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are “nowhere men,” children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.

More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.'

Anonymous said...

fouad ajami has an inferiority complex. He needs help.

God Bless The Martyred President's Memory. He will forever be loved by the Arab Nation, a real modern day Salah alDin.

Iraqi Mojo said...

The "Arab Nation" is retarded.

Salah al Din conquered Jerusalem and allowed the Christians & Jews to stay. What did Saddam do, besides mass murdering Iraqis?

Anonymous said...

He didnt mass murder iraqis no matter how many times you repeat.

when iraqi is liberated i plan on visiting so i can piss on the grave of mouhamed sadiq al sadr