Tuesday - December 16, 2003
The Losing Team Can Have Good Players, Too.
There's a dentist named Zeyad who lives in Baghdad. A
month or two ago he started a blog about what his experiences were like from the
point of view of an Iraqi. He has close relatives that were colonels in the
Iraqi army, and he admits that his family was among those who benefitted from
being Sunni and somewhat favored by the Ba'athists. He himself was a member of
the party, but only so that he could get into dental school. Despite all this,
and despite some disagreement with others in his family, he has been consistent
in denouncing Saddam Hussein and welcoming the US to help the Iraqis institute a
democratic regime. He's a very interesting man, but what I most admire about
him is his frankness in expressing what he thinks and feels. Upon hearing of
Saddam's capture and seeing him on the television, he felt sadness and shame.
He claims that he doesn't know why he has this
reaction, but I would like to hazard a speculative guess. The monster that
murdered so many of them, that had teams of torturers. a network of informers,
and a reign of fear, turned out to be nothing more than an old man lacking the
vigor to even struggle with ordinary US soldiers. I'm sure Zeyad felt shame
because it is now clear that it only took a few soldiers to arrest
him.
That is the whole key to how
tyrants retain power. The good people always outnumber the psychopaths who
would kill and torture others, and if the good people could just act even mildly
in concert, there is no way that the goons can retain their reign. The truth is
that the people deserve the government that they have, no matter how despotic or
murderous.
A good analogy is the
plane that was hijacked and crashed in Pennsylvania. For decades Americans have
been taught that they should behave like mice in the face of terrorists and
hijackers. Failing to resist caused three planes to be taken over by hijackers,
and while their passengers passively waited for some hostage negotiation to take
place, they flew into buildings and became the instruments of death and
destruction. The fourth plane, through good chance, contained passengers that
learned of the others' fate and the passengers assaulted the hijackers, ending
their lives, but saving others on the ground, perhaps some important
building.
If the people of Iraq had
lifted their heads up out of their situation, there was never a time that they
couldn't have taken control of their own government again and saved themselves
from 35 years of torture, or better yet they could have prevented it from ever
starting.
Why didn't they? Just like
the passengers of the first three 9/11 airplanes, they had been taught to not
resist, they had been taught to accept bad treatment, they had been taught that
resisting would be impossible. It could happen anywhere, to any people, but it
requires a culture that accepts that others can have power over the individual,
that the individual is expected to submit to the will of the
leader.
But, while Zeyad should rightly
feel shame for his country and its culture and its failure to act on its own
behalf, this is a crime of a culture, not of individuals. The people of his
country are no different than those in any other country because people are
people. They have the same potential for life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness as any other people. It's not the individual team members that win
the game, it's the ability of the people on the team to work together in their
common interest.
The individuals of
Iraq should feel no shame as individuals. They have great potential to improve
their plight if only they jettison the culture that led them to such
self-destructive, suicidal misery.
The team that comes in last place is a
bad team, but even a bad team usually has some good players. The people of Iraq
have those good players. They need to rally around the good ones and work to
make their country a place that encourages the success of the good.
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