A Tigris Chronicle

We owe to Hannah Arendt one of the central insights of our time: the banality of evil. Arendt returned with that verdict after covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. There were the monstrous deeds of Eichmann and the Nazi regime whose work he had done. But there was also the man in the glass booth whom Arendt saw and described: "Medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes, who throughout the trial keeps craning his scraggy neck toward the bench... ." There is a swindle, a disappointment to great evil. It never quite lives up to expectations. The image of Saddam Hussein in captivity was but the latest variation on Arendt's theme. The dazed and scruffy man in the "spider hole" was the very same tyrant who had inflicted unspeakable sorrow on his people, and on the peoples of two neighboring lands.

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It adds nothing to say that the insurgency in that Sunni triangle of rage will go on with or without Saddam. Nor is it particularly insightful to assert that the jihadists who made their way to Iraq -- across the Saudi or Jordanian or Syrian borders -- are of a religious bent and had no use for the secular despot. In a highly personalistic culture susceptible to myth, the former dictator on the run had become a rebuke to American power, proof of our inability to penetrate an alien, seemingly inaccessible place. We had awed the region with our high-tech wizardry; so our enemies fell back on the consolation that we were strangers destined to lose our way in their cities and towns. Save for a minority of Arabs who cast their fate with us (I think of Kuwait and Qatar) we were in truth alone in an Arab world that wished us ill in this campaign. We had gotten our comeuppance, our enemies and false friends alike were happy to proclaim. The insurgents had bought time, and additional yarn, for Arab delusions; and the disappearance of the dictator fed the idea that we'd blundered into a place destined to thwart our power.

November had been the cruelest of months: our Chinooks and Black Hawks were being shot out of the skies over Tikrit and Fallujah and Mosul. There were rumors that we had begun to scramble for a way out. The capture of the dictator came in the nick of time. Our troubles are not over, not by a long shot. But the message has been received in Araby. The man who'd strutted around the region, who for all practical purposes dominated inter-Arab politics for nearly a generation, was found at the bottom of an eight-foot hole. Legends die hard. The crowd is, of course, what it is, and its capacity for self-delusion is bottomless. In the hours that followed the dictator's capture, and in the shadow of that image of him meekly undergoing a medical examination, the legend spread, in Ramallah and Cairo, and as far away as the Muslim suburbs of France, that it was all a trick, that the man had been drugged, that it had all been an American hoax.

The very same Arabs who had averted their gaze from the despot's mass graves were now quick to take offense that he had been exposed to public humiliation. This is the quintessential "shame culture," and we had snatched from that crowd a cherished legend. But we should not give up on the project we have staked out for ourselves: The quest for a decent political order that would take Iraq beyond its cruel history, and would demonstrate that despotism is not something "written" -- maktoob -- or fated, for the Arabs. For every Cairene and Palestinian, and for every "intellectual" in Amman, who was second-guessing the way we "processed" the dictator and displayed his surrender, the hope must be entertained that there are Arabs who saw into the tyrant's legend and his legacy. The celebratory gunfire in the streets of Iraq is proof that many of the dictator's compatriots, at least, are eager to be done with a legacy of radicalism and terror.

To the extent that a vast and varied Arab world can be read with reasonable clarity, a decent minority of Arabs has stepped forward to bury the dictator's legacy, to brand him a false savior who had promised the Arabs an age of chivalry and power only to hand them a steady flow of calamities. A noted Kuwaiti liberal, Ahmad Rabie, writing in the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat, gave the legacy of Saddam an apt summation. "Countless mothers will light candles and celebrate the tyrant's capture -- mothers in all the cities of Iraq, in all the villages of Iran, in all the streets and quarters of Kuwait, everywhere the tyrant's cruelty was felt, and where his power translated into mass graves and mass terror."

It should not be lost on the potential foot-soldiers of religious terror pondering a passage to Tikrit across Iraq's borders that the man who had exalted "martyrdom" would not have it for himself. And it is not that hopeless a bet that after the crowds in Fallujah and Ramadi shout themselves hoarse in support of Saddam, they might come to a recognition that the cause is lost, and that the age of Sunni dominion has come to a close. In the same vein, the young Syrian ruler, Bashar Al-Assad, may insist that what happened in Iraq is no concern of his; but he knows better. The fate of Saddam is a crystal ball in which the rulers and the rogues in the region might glimpse the danger that attends them.

The capture of Saddam, like the war itself, is a foreigner's gift. This is a truth that stalks our effort in Iraq, and our determination to fight a wider Arab battle on Iraqi soil. Saddam was an upstart, it is true. The squalor he was found amidst was not unlike his own wretched beginnings. His path to power was paved with the Arab world's sins of omission and commission. He plucked potent weapons from within his culture's deadly dreams: anti-Westernism, a virulent hatred of Persia and Persians, the scorching of Israel with chemical weapons, the promise of nuclear weapons that would avenge humiliations inflicted on the Arabs. All those had been Saddam's arsenal. No one in the region had drawn limits for him. No "velvet revolution" within Iraq itself blew him out of power, no Arab cavalry had ridden to the rescue of Iraq's population. An American war disposed of this man.

Saddam, it is true, was alone in that "spider-hole" amid the litter of a run-down farm house. But he had been a creature of the Arab order; as late as March 2002, his principal lieutenant, the barbarous Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri (still on the run, an illiterate former street-vendor of ice who came into great power in the rise of the Tikritis) had come to an Arab summit in Beirut. He had been embraced by the rulers assembled there, and reconciliation was in the air. The crimes of the Baathist regime were papered over. It is not so difficult to see that a different destiny could have been had by that stupefied man flushed out of his "rathole" by soldiers of Task Force 121. He had once been the "knight of Arabism" marked by destiny to crush the "fire-worshipping Persians," and to lay to waste the Jewish state. The "knight" has stumbled, but those deadly dreams are not abandoned.

We are not yet readying to leave Iraq. But the dictator's capture lends the process of "Iraqification" greater legitimacy. With Saddam on the loose, our options were limited. We had full possession of Iraq, and we were responsible for everything under the sun. We now have room for maneuver, and the Bush administration has the warrant to grant Iraqis more power over their own destiny. We have given the best of ourselves in Iraq. We are not miracle workers, though. We can't wish for Iraqis more national unity than they wish for themselves, nor can we impose it on them. It is their country that is in the balance. It is they who must put behind them the age-old tyranny of the Sunni Arabs, and their pan-Arabism which was but a cover for sectarian hegemony, while keeping in check those who would want to replace it with a Shiite dominion.

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Iraq, we must admit, has tested our resolve. We have not found weapons of mass destruction, and we may never do so. We found a measure of gratitude, but not quite enough. What we found was a country envenomed by a dictatorship perhaps unique in its brutality in the post-World War II world. We can't be sure that our labor in that land will be vindicated. There is sectarianism, and there are undemocratic habits, and a good measure of impatience. But the abject surrender of a tyrant who had mocked our will and our staying power, and whose very political survival stood as proof of our irresolution a dozen years earlier, can only strengthen our position in the Arab-Islamic world. In those unsettled lands, preachers and plotters tell about America all sorts of unflattering tales. The tales snake their way through Beirut and Mogadishu, and other place-names of our heartbreak and our abdication. It is different this time. The spectacle has played out under Arab and Muslim (to say nothing of French and German) eyes. We saw the matter of Saddam Hussein to its rightful end. We leave it to the storytellers to make their way through this American chronicle by the Tigris.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins, is a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report.

Updated December 18, 2003