One can’t quite put Saddam Hussein in quite the same league as Hulegu and Tamurlane, which might disappoint him. Saddam didn’t destroy Baghdad so much as desecrate it with monuments to himself, monuments striking in their ugliness and grandiosity.
The cruelty and stupidity of these conquerors have faded into history, and now the cruelty and stupidity of another conqueror of Baghdad is fading into history as well. Juan Cole, in his excellent blog, fills out the implications of a recent announcement by the Obama Administration that all U.S. troops will be leaving Iraq by December 31, under the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) negotiated by President Bush with the Iraqi Parliament back in 2008.
The SOFA was needed, Cole explains, to give legal cover to U.S. troops in Iraq, who previously had been operating under resolutions by the UN Security Council. The Iraqi government set up by the U.S. preferred to operate under its own authority, rather than remaining subordinate to the UN.
The great dream of the Bush Administration, of course, was that Iraq would serve as America’s forward base in the Middle East, with massive military installations that would allow us to bestride that part of the world like a colossus. Bit by bit, that fantasy fell to pieces, but a monument remains—the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, an $800 million monstrosity that was largely completed. Intended as the Pentagon East and designed o be crammed with hundreds of millions of dollars of high-tech equipment, it is surely a great, hollow shell by now, a vast skull, staring out at the world with sightless eyes, the legacy of Geoge Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and a thousand other bright-eyed hegemons, who one can assume lacked the explicit cruelty of a Hulegu, a Tamerlane, or a Saddam Hussein, but who did almost as much damage.
