Saddam Hussein and Jack Bauer
One of the reasons for invading Iraq that the Americans tried on for size, ex post facto and after the collapse of the previous WMD excuse, was that Saddam was in the habit of torturing people. And so indeed he was, but, as Jack Bauer has so exhaustively explained to us, it is perfectly OK to torture people if you are facing a terrorist threat. You need to find out who dunnit, and where the next one will be. In Saddam’s case, the terrorist threat was a resistance movement letting off car-bombs in downtown Baghdad. I have heard the proposed American puppet Ahmed Chalabi fingered for this. Of course, car bombs only make the international news when they are aimed against American interests, rather than being organised by same. The moral of the story is that it is OK for Americans to torture terrorist suspects, but when someone else tortures people in order to prevent American-sponsored terrorism, this is a casus belli.
Adam Michnik has thrown us a challenge: do we oppose totalitarianism because it is wrong in itself, or merely because it is being done by the wrong people? He aimed the challenge at the Left, whom he thought measured the Nazis by one standard and the Communists by another; but his principle is a two-edged sword. Conservatives wanted freedom in the Soviet bloc but not in Central America, Zionists think that ethnic cleansing is just fine as long as it is they who are dishing it out, and Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers only became a problem after he annoyed us by invading Kuwait.
2 Responses to “Saddam Hussein and Jack Bauer”
…and “24″ with Jack Bauer is, of course, a Fox Network production.
It would have been interesting to be a fly-on-the-wall during the inception of that series. Likewise, I would like to see some comparative opinion polls on approval/disapproval of torture before and after the series…
I think it’s been done, Ghost, though I don’t have the reference. The results are what one might fear,
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