>Saddam Hussein, a bad man by any account, was feared more than loved,
>even by his closest associates. What good can you say of an autocrat
>who comes to power under dubious circumstances, invades foreign
>countries without provocation, sets up secret prisons for those who
>threaten his government, engages in torture and killing of those who
>dare to take up arms against him, and who allows his country's
>infrastructure to deteriorate, while he and his friends enrich
>themselves at public expense? Those are things that cry out for
>justice.
Hmmm.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
At 2:43 PM -0500 4/1/07, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>Actually, he makes a lot of sense.
>Wojtek
>
>----Original Message Follows----
>
>Subject: FW: Enterprise Ethics -- January 1, 2007 -- That doesn't make any
>sense
>Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2007 17:13:56 -0500
>
>***********************************************************************
> Carlton Vogt's
>
> ENTERPRISE ETHICS
>
> Vol. 5 Number 1 January 1, 2007
>
>***********************************************************************
>
>That doesn't make any sense
>
>A lifelong habit of saying "What the ...?" continues
>
>My academic career got off to a rather rocky start. It was first grade,
>and Sister Dolorosa Excruciata (not her real name) had just finished
>explaining for us five-year-olds some convoluted piece of diluted
>dogma. I must have semed perplexed, because she looked at me and asked
>"Do you have a problem, Master Vogt." (They really talked that way in
>those days.)
>
>I replied, with all the earnestness that only a five-year-old can
>muster, "Sister, that doesn't make any sense." While that kind of talk
>may fly in a graduate philosophy seminar, it was a flop in the bunker
>mentality of Catholic education in the late 1940s. Sister was not
>amused. There was a furious rattle from the giant rosary beads hanging
>from sister's belt, and the crinkle of starched linen, just
>milliseconds before sister's open hand landed across the back of my
>head. I was immediately tagged as a troublemaker, a tag I wore more or
>less proudly for the rest of my long career there.
>
>I've always had a low tolerance for things that don't seem to make any
>sense, and this low threshold has served me well in a career in
>journalism, where it leads to interesting questions on my part and even
>more interesting answers on someone else's part -- again, not always
>appreciated by the person being questioned.
>
>It's probably what also led me into a secondary career excursion into
>the philosophy -- more specifically ethics -- racket where you are
>allowed or even encouraged to ask questions like that. One graduate
>adviser, however, did warn me that success in academia stems from
>giving back to your professors their own thoughts and ideas in new and
>interesting ways.
>
>That low tolerance was tested again these past few days by two
>occurrences that seem to have dominated the news, at least locally, and
>I imagine nationally.
>
>Gerald Ford, a decent man by all accounts, died this week, and as I
>write this, his body is lying in state just a few miles down the road
>from my house. I have managed to avoid the traffic snarl this has
>created in the area of the church, but I am constantly reminded of the
>event by the chop-chop-chop of the helicopters as they practically
>brush their landing gear against my rooftop, while they ferry military
>personnel and politicians to the scene. They start around 5 a.m.
>
>The other event, as we all know by now, was the state-sponsored ritual
>killing (let's call it what it is) of Saddam Hussein, a really bad man
>by any account. I have managed to avoid most of the coverage of the
>killing, although, somewhat curiously, a great deal of my information
>comes from staunchly pro-life acquaintances, who are inexplicably giddy
>about the killing. They try to explain away their giddiness with
>convoluted reasoning that makes just about as much sense as Sister
>Dolorosa Excruciata's dogma.
>
>The two events may seem to be unrelated, but I saw a connection. Ford
>was lauded, at least in what passes for the mainstream media, for his
>pardon of Richard Nixon. The explanation, which has now become part of
>our growing national mythology, was that it was designed to put the
>matter behind us and "allow the country to heal," or, some say, "to
>move forward."
>
>At the same time, many of the people who dutifully recite the mantras
>of that mythology assured us that the killing of Saddam Hussein,
>sloppily pigeon-holed under the catalogue entry of "justice," would
>help Iraq move forward.
>
>The part of my brain that recognizes such inconsistencies immediately
>snapped to attention. How is that in, one case, pardoning the
>individual -- in other words not holding him accountable for his crimes
>-- leads to greater justice, healing, and moving forward; while in the
>other case, a swift pre-dawn killing -- ostensibly holding him
>accountable for his crimes -- will lead to healing and moving forward.
>It brought back echoes of my fateful encounter in first grade. "That
>doesn_t make any sense."
>
>So, I was perplexed, at least until I thought about it more. My
>conclusion is that in neither case was justice done. I've also
>concluded that in the Nixon-Ford case, the country "healed" only if you
>define healing as ignoring and glossing over the root causes of the
>problem. When you do that, you tend to bury the history. When history
>is buried, people cannot learn from it, and, as the saying goes, those
>who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
>
>In the case of Saddam and Iraq, it remains to be seen if there is real
>"healing" or whether the country indeed "moves forward," although in
>the sandstorm of sectarian and tribal strife that is Iraq, it's
>difficult to tell which way "forward" really is.
>
>Some will argue that Saddam deserved to die and therefore his killing
>satisfied the demands of justice. The success of that argument depends
>on whether you see state-sponsored ritual killing as a tool of justice
>or merely a vestigial remnant of bloodlust revenge. My view tends
>toward the latter.
>
>That argument also appeals to those who prefer sloganeering and bumper-
>sticker logic to a real examination of the situation. Both "deserve"
>and "justice" are highly packed terms that require a great deal of
>examination, especially when you try to put them together. Merely to
>say it doesn't make it true.
>
>I've found that whenever you encounter something puzzling, if you just
>look hard enough, you will find a key to unlock it. In the Nixon-Ford
>case, the key was provided by Gerald Ford himself, who either didn't
>get the memo on the "healing the country" explanation or let it slip in
>an unguarded moment. He told an interviewer that his reason for the
>pardon was that Richard Nixon was his friend and he didn't want to see
>his friend's name tarnished with a criminal trial. That, while it
>doesn't really serve the ends of justice either, makes a lot more
>sense. That one I can buy.
>
>However, in both cases, justice, which is ultimately about restoring a
>balance, would have been served by a full explanation and a deeper
>investigation into where and how things went wrong. In both cases, the
>main actor, while doing reprehensible things, didn't act in a vacuum.
>There were others involved, and there were systemic failures.
>
>In both cases, justice would have been better served by finding out
>what went wrong, so we could prevent it in the future. In Nixon's case,
>there was a deliberate attempt, on the part of Nixon and others in his
>camp, to polarize the country in a divide-and-conquer strategy. As one
>adviser told Nixon, "Find some way to tear the country into pieces, and
>we'll pick up the biggest piece."
>
>The problem is that while Nixon went into his semi-retirement, the
>failure to look too deeply into the systemic failures meant that many
>of the other proponents of that strategy remained in place, plying
>their trade. Today, in a highly polarized political and social
>environment, we are seeing the fruits of their labor, all because that
>strategy and those behind it were shielded by an ill-considered
>truncation of justice.
>
>In Saddam's case, he was killed for what may have been the least of his
>crimes. He was arguably guilty of many more heinous acts involving many
>more victims. Justice would have been served by exposing those acts and
>hearing the voices of the victims, or their family members whose lives
>were torn apart.
>
>Justice doesn't come from simply killing the perpetrator. It comes from
>hearing the story and validating the suffering of the victims. I
>recently read one study showing that families of crime victims do not,
>in fact, find the ballyhooed "closure" that is supposed to come from
>the death of the offender. What people really want is for the world to
>know that they have suffered, what has happened to them, and how much
>they hurt. They want the offender, if not to answer for, at least to be
>confronted with his crimes.
>
>What society should want is not merely to punish the offender, but to
>prevent whatever happened from happening again. If that isn't done,
>then the ritual killing just is bloodlust revenge.
>
>Just as in Nixon's case, Saddam didn't act alone. There were
>individuals, corporations, and governments -- including our own -- who
>were complicit in his actions. None of them were apparently willing to
>see his sordid history laid bare for the world, and the Iraqi people to
>see.
>
>As one commentator said, "Saddam Hussein was a former American puppet
>killed by current American puppets." And that should be a warning to
>American puppets everywhere.
>
>So, at the end of the day, neither case was about justice, healing, or
>moving forward. Both were about getting things over with as quickly as
>possible, so that no one looked too deeply or shined too bright a light
>into what went wrong. And justice be damned. And that, while
>unsatisfying and frightening, unfortunately makes all the sense in the
>world.
>
>And there, the similarity ends. Gerald Ford, a decent man by all
>accounts, was loved and will be missed by many.
>
>Saddam Hussein, a bad man by any account, was feared more than loved,
>even by his closest associates. What good can you say of an autocrat
>who comes to power under dubious circumstances, invades foreign
>countries without provocation, sets up secret prisons for those who
>threaten his government, engages in torture and killing of those who
>dare to take up arms against him, and who allows his country's
>infrastructure to deteriorate, while he and his friends enrich
>themselves at public expense? Those are things that cry out for
>justice.
>
>*************************************