Saddam and Gerry

Saddam Hussein and Gerald Ford faded into the ether last week, presaging the passage of two pivotal actors in the last 30 years of American history. Both men in some sense represented the flaws of American power, both as practiced in the republic and as projected overseas.
The dominant paradigm of Gerald Ford, endlessly invoked following his death, is that of an honorable, apolitical man who steadied the republic in one of its most turbulent hours and who proved that “we are a nation of laws, not of men”. We were buffeted with video clips of Ford asserting “the Constitution works” after assuming office.

Gerald Ford was the last of five men who have served as president without having been elected to the office, the others being John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, and Chester A. Arthur. These men are to be distinguished from the several accidental presidents who finished their predecessors’ terms and were subsequently elected in their own right. Two disturbing facts divorce Ford from these men, however. Firstly, the first four un-elected presidents finished the terms of elected presidents who had fallen to illness or assassins. Secondly, all of these men had the legitimacy of having been elected vice-president. Thirdly, these men served at a time before the imperial presidency; these accidental presidents were not even the most powerful people in the nation (that honor belonged to the Speaker of the House), never mind the world.

Gerald Ford’s predecessor had not died in office; Richard Nixon had resigned to avoid impeachment and conviction by the Senate for high crimes. Gerald Ford had not been elected to serve as the second in line for the presidency. He was appointed by the soon to be discredited Nixon after the elected vice-president, Spiro Agnew, had resigned, hounded by scandals of his own. And in the hour of the imperial presidency, Gerald Ford became the most powerful man alive, having been elected to no national office. Never before had the people of Michigan been kingmakers. This is surely far from reassuring evidence that “the Constitution works”. While there was nothing unconstitutional about Ford’s accession, the fact that his appointer was so loose with the constitution in other matters cast a deeper shadow over Ford’s already dubious legitimacy.

Aside from the fact that he became president at all, we must look at Ford’s pardon of Nixon and see if that serves as further evidence, as we were endlessly told after Ford’s death, that “the Constitution works”. Gerald Ford pardoned a man who had been convicted of no crime. The pardon thus served not to give mercy to the condemned, but to avoid the very process of assessing what crimes Richard Nixon had committed in office. Again, there is nothing unconstitutional about this pardon, but the effect was that Richard Nixon was able to serially violate the constitution, resign to avoid impeachment as spelled out in the constitution, and receive a full pre-emptive pardon from his appointed successor. Is this evidence that “the constitution works”? Or is it evidence that, in an hour of unparalleled peril, the constitution was not allowed to work?

Amid all the folksy yarns about how Air Force One never took off without Gerald Ford’s favorite flavor of ice cream (butter pecan), I noticed an even more intriguing anecdote about the man that may have more relevance to us than his endearing love affair with butter pecan ice cream. In an interview given by Ford released after his death, he informed us that he had pardoned Nixon because they were longtime friends and he wanted to save his friend from humiliation. Does the constitution tell us that presidents shall only be punished for high crimes if such punishment would not be humiliating to the fallen chief? This staggering, casual statement by Ford serves as quite the counter to his assertion that “We are a nation of laws, not of men”. If the law had taken its course, Richard Nixon would have gone to prison. In 1974, the United States was indeed a nation of men, and the man among men was Gerald Ford, who subverted constitutional accountability and disinterested justice to concern for a friend’s sensitivities.

How to connect Gerald Ford to Saddam Hussein? Well, in 1975, the Ford administration cut off all support for the Kurdish insurgency in Iraq. Since the Iraqi government had decided to settle a simmering border dispute with Iran, America’s preeminent ally in the Middle East, Washington no longer had reason to pay for attacks by Kurds on the Iraqi government. Any concern over Ford’s abandonment of America’s allies can be dissipated by the unparalleled amorality of his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. The United States has no friends, only interests. The Kurds were subsequently slaughtered, of course, and the young Saddam Hussein was temporarily rid of one of the perennial threats to the Ba’athist regime.

Iraq under Saddam Hussein was obviously a nation of men, not of laws. Actually, it was a nation of man, not of laws. Actually, it wasn’t a nation at all, but that’s another story. A story we’re told every day lately. If Gerald Ford’s accession to office and pardon of Nixon said some troubling things about America’s commitment to the law, what did Saddam Hussein’s execution say of the Iraqi government’s commitment to the law when it comes to punishing its own fallen presidents?

While the trial of Saddam Hussein suffered severe flaws, it would be overly dismissive to tag it as a show trial. And it was infinitely fairer than the trial given to Richard Nixon. That is to say, it was better than nothing. It appeared that the trial could serve as evidence of Iraq’s monumental transition from rule by men to rule by law. In large part, it did. Until the execution, that is. One should not be surprised that Shi’a witnesses to Saddam’s hanging could not contain their emotions. The Americans did not hand over Saddam until the eleventh hour because they did not want him tortured. They took custody of his corpse so that it would not be desecrated. We should harbor no illusions about how Saddam would have fared in Iraqi custody. The real surprise is that Saddam was subjected only to a few taunts, not even a slap or a loogie in the face for the sadistic destroyer of a whole society.

The problem lies not in the understandable emotions involved, but in the staggering incompetence of the Iraqi government and what it means for the war there. The Iraqi government is so incompetent that it could not prevent one of its representatives from filming the execution on a cell-phone camera and releasing it to the world. There were twenty people in the room. How hard is it to spot one man among twenty holding a cell phone aloft? And how could the government allow the voyeur to leave the chamber and release the video, which is unflattering, to say the least, to the Iraqi government, and somehow manages to make Saddam look like an unbowed victim of victor’s justice?

In that chamber, Iraq was a nation of men. And one man, Saddam, had to die. More significantly, another man, Moqtada al-Sadr, was invoked as the new man. The one chanted word, “Moqtada”, shifted the procedure from justice to vengeance in the eyes of the viewer. Was this the same Saddam who had been so humiliated in his spider hole? Who had gone out like a bitch, not to put too fine a point on it, by failing to fire his weapon at his Zionist-Crusader captors? Now, his neck in the noose, head held high, he sneered at his executioners. “Is this how you show your bravery as men? Is this the courage of Arabs?” And then the coup de grace, “I bear witness that there is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet”. And then he died, this great butcher of Arabs and Muslims, having been allowed to cast himself as the true Arab and the true Muslim, martyred by godless imperialists and their spineless collaborators.

We should not be surprised that Iraq is still more a nation of men than of laws. We should, however, be ashamed that, three decades after Watergate, we can’t bear the thought that we may be as well.