An eclipse in the season of light

Posted by Philip Barron at 12:10 PM on December 30, 2006.

Last night found my wife and me at the house of a friend, a minister, along with another couple who were long-time friends of the hostess. It was a warm and congenial evening in a comfortable room with a wood fire, a brightly decorated Christmas tree, a sleepy cat, good company.

At one point, the husband in the other couple paused to answer his cell phone. He listened for a bit, then spoke briefly before hanging up. He looked up at us.

"They hung Saddam," he said.

We were silent for a moment, but only for a moment. We remarked on how the timing of the execution was at once both a surprise and completely expected; we agreed that Saddam's death would change nothing substantially in Iraq and would likely provoke a short-term spike in violence; we argued over the degree of culpability that individual American citizens, folks like ourselves and perhaps yourselves, might feel regarding the execution in particular or the Iraq debacle in general. It was the kind of conversation that was doubtless repeated million of times elsewhere, and so was not terribly unique. I don't think any minds among us were changed last night regarding America in Iraq, and that probably was likely not so remarkable either.

The discontinuity between the news of Saddam's hanging and the warmth and humanity of the holidays - the season of light, as they say - did strike me last night, however, and resonates with me now. This dichotomy between justice and vengeance, between our ideals and our expediencies, stands as a perfect exemplar of what George Bush has done - of his own choice and for his own ends, but in your name and in mine.

It seems to me that if the president had tried consciously and with all his effort to get it precisely wrong in Iraq, in both essence and in form, he could not do better (or is it worse?) than he has done to this point.

Mission accomplished, I suppose.

Tagged as: iraq, saddam hussein

Philip Barron is a St. Louis writer and author of the blog Waveflux.