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from -
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp12192003.html
The Neocons' Dream Memo
Featuring: the Latter-Day Hitler, Saddam Hussein; His Intelligence Chief, Habbush al-Takriti; Palestinian Terrorist, Abu Nidal; 9-11 Mastermind, Mohammed Atta; and a Mysterious Shipment to Iraq from Niger
By GARY LEUPP
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(1) The Capture of Saddam, in Perspective
So the big news Sunday morning was that they got Saddam. This is not terribly surprising. They've been searching for eight months and they do, of course, occupy the country. I'm neither happy nor sad about it; Saddam was a middling-quality fascist with a certain social base, as well as many opponents, in a complicated society. Millions of Iraqis cheer, in genuine exultation, the capture of the Butcher of Baghdad; others, familiar with the history of U.S.-Iraqi relations from the early 1980s, wonder what gives the foreign occupiers the right to arrest and publicly humiliate a man they once coddled, even as he was gassing Kurds. They have mixed feelings. Still others, comprising a significant pro-Saddam social base, rage and mourn.
Here in the imperialist Homeland pundits opine that this is bad news for the Democrats, and for war opponents and critics. They reason as follows: even if the (continuing) war was and is illegal, and its stated pretexts lies; even if it has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths; even if resistance to the occupation continues; even if U.S. actions generate understandable resentment and hatred among the "liberated" people---well, at least we've got Saddam. "We" have really scored. "We," who are led by Bush, whose courageous troops have tracked down, arrested and humiliated a dictator. That's gonna make him shoot way up in the polls. The Democratic pols, for their part, hasten to gentlemanly congratulate the President for his achievement. Those who in varying degrees questioned the war are at least with him on this one: it's a great day when you capture a dictator. Never mind that your troops shouldn't be there and have no legal right nor moral authority to apprehend anyone.
Now these pundits who see this as a big boost for Dubya may be right. The human mind is a complex thing, and many are capable of consigning their mounting realization that the war was based on lies to one section of their gray matter, while storing the image of the captured Saddam (hauled from his "rat's nest," his "snake pit," his "lair" in mainstream journalese) in whatever section produces seratonin. The primitive inclination to rejoice, along with the entire Volk, at a victory over the Enemy, can easily defeat reason. The Bush team, especially the neocons, knows that. It also knows, as we all should, that dictators are all over the place, and many of them are supported by the U.S. A lot of decent folks are thinking "Great. We've captured Hitler." The Bushites know better. They're thinking, "Great! We've get people thinking this former buddy of ours---who they don't even know is a former buddy of ours---is a cross between bin Laden and Hitler, Evil Incarnate! And since we've bagged him, we're gonna look so FINE as the election approaches. On to Syria!"
The fact is, Saddam is not a Hitler; and all those analogies between Iraq and Nazi Germany deployed by the first Bush administration as it prepared to "liberate" Kuwait (handing it back to its Emir, who from his harem of chattel-slaves still presides over a society nowhere near so progressive as Saddam's Iraq) were preposterous rhetorical flourishes. Germany by the 1930s had won and lost a colonial empire stretching from Tanganyika to Micronesia; it had led the world in medicine and in chemical production; it had competed with the other Big Powers for world dominion. It was an imperialist country, even if it had seen some hard times. Iraq in 1990 was a sophisticated "modernizing" nation with a well-educated citizenry, committed to secularism under the heavy hand of the Baath Party. But it was dependent upon global capital (as Germany had not been), hence on the receiving end of imperialism. Germany, under Hitler, developed a fascist command economy, and was able to recover from its post-World War I depression. Saddam's Iraq, saddled with crippling debts by the end of the (U.S.-abetted) Iran-Iraq War, could not revive without generous debt forgiveness from Kuwait and other nations wedded to western capital. It remained, after all, a Third World country, and Saddam Hussein was merely one, not atypically brutal, Third World ruler.
The better parallel with Saddam's Iraq is Suharto's Indonesia.
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full at -
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp12192003.html