THE LOW POST: Hussein in the Membrane

Now we've pissed off both the Shiites and the Sunnis and gotten both sides markedly more pissed off with each other (not just in Iraq but around the world), and we've done so by accelerating the execution of a prominent Sunni politician whose fate was the one card the United States was really holding with a Sunni minority already deeply upset at being made the subjects -- at the end of an American bayonet -- to a Shiite-led government.

Not only that, but the execution put the finishing touches on the "democracy lesson" we've supposedly been giving the Iraqi people, who, thanks to this move, still have yet to experience a government where a leader can leave power without losing his life. That is some interesting-tasting lemonade, I must say.

Rhetorical question: if you're going to offend the earth's entire Sunni population by letting a Shiite mob hang a prominent Sunni politician on a Muslim holiday -- on television on a Muslim holiday -- why bother interfering in the burial question? Seriously, why? To curry favor with the Sunnis? Because it's "the right thing" to do? What kind of deranged lunatic hangs "the Sunni sword" at the end of Ramadan and then tries to make up for it with the world's Sunnis by allowing a "civilized" burial? "We will all become a bomb," is how one Palestinian responded to this latest act of decency and goodwill on the part of the United States.

I'm not saying Saddam Hussein deserved to live. Fuck Saddam Hussein. The point is that his execution is a symbol of America's cultural blindness. America has one gear in its head: Saddam was a monster and a mass-murderer, so he should be executed and everyone should love us for doing it. Right? I mean, who doesn't like a tuna casserole?

Friedman, it must be said, predicted that we might have such troubles. Nearly four years ago, he came up with a clever way of phrasing what he meant, saying that the Bush team needed an "attitude lobotomy," that it needed to "get off its high horse" and "start engaging people on the World Street, listening to what's bothering them, and also telling them what's bothering us." He also said that we needed something like the Marshall Plan, something that was "both a handout and a hand up." This was "D-Day for our generation," he said.

That was our attitude on the eve of war -- we sounded like we were preparing for a sales conference in Memphis, not a Middle Eastern bloodbath. It was like nobody in America noticed that all this catchy talk about high horses and handouts and hand ups was completely meaningless to anyone except the sloe-eyed residents of the American suburbs, people raised on this language of corporate memos and canned efficiency slogans and pep talks. If George Bush had gone on al-Jazeera after the invasion and promised to "get off his high horse," the Arab world would have stared back in amazement. What horse? What the fuck is he talking about? Why does this man invade us and then start talking about a horse? Are these people crazy?

That didn't happen, but it might as well have, because we're still doing basically the same thing. This isn't a pile of lemons we're dealing with, and there's no way to make it into lemonade. This is the Middle East, a place populated with Muslim people, and we know absolutely nothing about them and have no business being there. There's no horse to get off and no one there is looking for a handout or a hand up. They just want us to get the fuck out of there. How long is it going to take for people to figure this out?

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