Some things end while others begin. . .
Not to sound too cliche but. . . well I guess with a title like that I’ve already resigned myself to that. Today, just days after his appeal was denied, Saddam was executed by hanging in Baghdad. There seems to be three different points of view on the effect it will have on the country. One is that the insurgency will start to die down as people realize he truly will never be coming back to power. The second is that his death really won’t change anything because he has been out of power long enough that people have effectively forgotten about him as a political player. That is there is/was no place for him in the new reality of Iraq. Finally there are those who say his death will lead to a new round of violence by Sunni loyalists against the mostly Shiite government and the American forces in the country. So far it has been about 5 hours since his death and not much has happened. Personally I don’t think it will change a whole lot, though I hope if it does have any effect it will be to move things in a positive direction. I agree with Fareed Zakaria, however, when he says that the insurgency is really not really fueled by Saddam loyalists nor Al-Queda fighters. Maybe in the beginning, but the sustaining force at this point is the division along religious lines.
I head park of the Michael Savage show tonight where he was talking with a listener about how “those people” only understand savagery and violence. While I agree that on some level some of these guys need to be dispatched by an assassin’s bullet, that is not the solution to the larger problem of ethnic or religious strife. Sure brutal dictator’s like Saddam (or Tito in Yugoslavia for a historical example) are able to suppress outward expression of strife but that is because they are brutal dictators who murder tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the process. It is rather hypocritical to say that we are fighting for democracy if we settle for the establishment of a pro-US dictatorship. Really it would be no different than what we did in Latin America during the Cold War and we can all see how well that turned out (Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Augusto Pinochet, et al). I do, however, fear on some level that an overly strong authoritarian government will be needed. It may even need to be at least outwardly cold toward America. I don’t know if a strong pro-US democratically elected government is capable of existing in Iraq or anywhere in the Middle East. Even Israel, the one true US ally in the region, often thumbs it’s nose at America. Anyway, enough being serious. . .
Well I didn’t plan on really reviewing or even talking about music much with this blog but I’ve started finding many very exciting artists since I bought my Zune. The most recent is Carla Bruni, an Italian supermodel who sings French pop music. Think of her as a French Beth Orton or Ani DiFranco. You can find her music at http://www.carlabruni.com where you can listen to full tracks from both of her albums. Cheers!
