Gutman, After the tyrant from Tikrit is forgotten

The face of evil is not always hideous to behold. Sometimes it assumes a wretched countenance, a visage so cleaved by discomfiture and incredulity that it conceals the malevolence in its deep, gloomy furrows and, for an instant, against all odds, it manages to inspire pity. So it was when I first glimpsed that bizarre feral creature that filled my television screen the other day.

But when arrogance and deceit resurfaced on his craggy features, when cunning reanimated his restless eyes with flashes of egocentricity and malice, pity turned to disdain for I recognized a man who knows no compassion, a heartless tyrant who drenched his nation in blood and martyred his people into submission.

As I watched, transfixed, I remembered the corpses, hundreds of them --- Iranian villagers --- men women, infants twisted like disembodied marionettes, frozen in place by death's grotesque choreography. I was there. The spectacle still haunts me. VX (nerve) gas is mercifully swift. Mustard gas is slow and agonizing. It first blisters the skin, then blinds, then scorches the trachea, bronchia and lungs. Most died as their organs turned to liquid.

I then remembered the Scuds raining on Tel Aviv where my son was living at the time. He was nearly killed when an adjacent building collapsed as he was running for shelter.

I revisited battlefields and torture chambers where thousands of Kuwaitis, Jordanians, Kurds and Shiite Iraqis lost their lives. And my eyes filled with bitter, angry tears as I learned of the death, senseless and devastating, of yet another young American in a hostile, alien land.

There is a feature of evil that escapes scrutiny in times of tragedy, or in moments of mindless national jubilation. Sometimes evil gestates in the alchemist's crucible. Created --- not the random product of spontaneous generation --- it awaits its maker's pleasure. So it was with the hirsute beast that emerged from his lair. For many years the Butcher of Baghdad was our man in the Middle East. So long as it served our interests, we let him loose against his people and his neighbors. The geopolitics of hegemonic interest has since shifted. He will be tried for war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. Should his overseers and handlers be indicted for failing to abort this horrific miscreation? Will they ever? The answer, like the question, is the stuff of allegory. There is no justice in metaphor.

Absolute evil is unconquerable. It sired and survived the Crusades, the "Holy Inquisition," the Thirty Years' War. It spawned the likes of Attila and Hitler, Stalin and the Shah, Pol Pot and Ceaucescu, Milosevic and Osama Bin Laden, to name a few. It continues to breed US-backed despots in Africa, Asia and Latin America, all of whom, given the right political imperatives, are apt to engage --- as they often do --- in acts of monstrous sadism.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, evil is "human, all too human." Like the phoenix, it will be reborn of its own ashes and endure long after the man from Tikrit is forgotten.

Willy Gutman is a veteran journalist who lives in Tehachapi, California.

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opinion

Long after the man from Tikrit is forgotten