The best way to prevent our becoming trapped in a Saddam-like

The best way to prevent our becoming trapped in a Saddam-like situation again is to become consistently Wilsonian and to equip only solid democrats with weapons of defence.The final lesson, I think, is that America can act for good as well as bad. Some of the generation of left-wingers formed intellectually during the Vietnam War have never reconsidered their then justified belief that the US is simply evil. America has not had a Damascene revelation since then: it is still doing obscene things in, for example, Colombia. But there are other American instincts and foreign-policy traditions, and some of them are good; the good US acted in Kosovo to prevent ethnic cleansing on the European continent, and it acted in Iraq this month.Our job on the left is not to try to stop America from ever acting; one of the great tragedies of the 1990s, the Rwandan genocide, wasn’t caused by too much America but by its failure to act. No, our job is to try to steer this colossus towards spreading the values of its own American revolution: the overthrow of tyranny and the birth of democracy.j.hari independent.co.uk
More from Johann Hari.

Bringing down the statue of Saddam in Fardous Square was symbolic. But its symbolism is slightly more complicated than it might appear Saddam was, indeed, brought down decisively. But while the initial impetus to destroy the statue came from jubilant Iraqis, they were not given long to attempt to dismantle it themselves. That might have been a long, drawn-out and dangerous task, as dull and frustrating to watch as, say, the unphotogenic progress of weapons inspectors. Why not opt instead for a quick fix, or in the case of both country and statue, a quick destruction? For the Iraqi people, the challenge was tough For the US military, it was a cakewalk. For the US military, it was a cakewalk.
American troops led this operation, just as they led the operation to dismantle the regime of the man himself.

They may have had second thoughts about including the Stars and Stripes in the picture, but even this was fabulous propaganda for a Western world brought up on witnessing the triumphant fall of such icons of repression. Once America’s military had been brought to bear, the removal of Saddam was easy. Commentators have remarked on the cheap brick behind the marble facing of the plinth, and the hollow inside of the body of the would-be Saladin: a nice metaphor for a barren leadership.But it is also a deeply chilling metaphor. Pleasing emptiness may have filled the space previously dominated by Saddam’s monument to himself, but the vacuum that has been left behind by the removal of the real man and his regime is far more frightening. As fear of Saddam drains out of Iraq, fine as this may be in itself, it quickly becomes apparent that fear alone is a powerful glue.