The Racist Mind

" 'I only wish it was not the Americans who got him,' said a Syrian student, Abdule-Nasser, according to Reuters. 'I don't like Saddam but as an Arab I wouldn't like to see them dragging him around Baghdad.' "

(New York Times)

Could someone please explain to me how a mind like that works? I am never going to understand that, and I conclude that I am reading the words of a rank, pre-modern, savage. Let me try to put this in perspective:

He was only a chiseling liar who didn't have one-tenth the nerve of a Saddamn Hussein in order to commit even a single murder with his own hand in his lifetime, but if nobody in this country had had what it took to chase Richard Nixon out of the White House, I might have prayed for a sensible Arab to rid my country of that rotten old shitbag. "As an American," it would not have mattered to me one whit where such a person came from, only so long as he possessed the righteous outrage requisite to attacking something so evil.

And he was no Saddam Hussein, not by a damn sight.

What sort of a primitive does it take to regret that anyone caged that monster?... especially in a culture that did nothing on its own for so long, except to follow him into about fifty-six kinds of hell between Iran, Kuwait, and Baghdad? (Yes, yes, I know: the bug quoted above is from Syria.)

You know what? Mark my words:

This "nation-building" angle is utter crap. It's never going to work.

I say: put an ice-pick in Saddam's eye until he stops wiggling, leave his head on a pike at the city gates as a solemn warning to all other pre-moderns, pack up the whole kit and come home, right now. This party's over.