Iraq

Former US Attorney General (and current anti-American publicity-hound) Ramsey Clark has joined Saddam Hussein’s legal defense team.

It’s that season and I’m grading final essays where my students try to struggle with Melville’s Vere and the choices he made. Melville’s ambivalence leads close readers to doubt he approves of Vere’s choice, but his “The Housetop” (about the race riots of 1863) shows the chaos when the rule of law breaks down. Vere is no straw man. An intelligent reader can make his case, too.

And so, taking a break, I turn to Citizen Smash. There I find a description of the consolation he feels that his friend’s death has met not with revenge but with justice: indeed, the rule of law, the rule of Iraqi law. And we look at his muted and sad pleasure and are struck by the hope that order may arise from the Mesopotamian chaos.

The factor of Juan Cole, on the other hand, leads us to the chaos in minds closer to home – minds that apologize, apparently, for not only murders of those who “look Jewish” but find in the persecuted Baha’i faithful the evils of fundamentalism. (Thanks to Belmont Club, in a rather strange post that mixes identity fraud with its complaints about Cole.)

But let’s concentrate for the time on the glass that is certainly half empty with the loss of Smash’s friend, but is half full with those steps toward civil society. And we can be thankful that, even with all the hoopla about the Peterson trial, we live in a society that is, by and large, governed by laws.

Joe Katzman graciously invited us to join his Spirit of America Blogger Challenge team. I wasn’t sure our doing so would be fair to people who have already donated via the ChicagoBoyz team. However, Joe & Co. are raising money, within the context of the Spirit of America Challenge, for a highly specific — and promising — purpose: creation of Arabic-language blogging software. So I put a link to Joe’s donation page next to our own donation link in the blog heading.

Chicago Boyz has signed up with the Spirit of America, a worthy cause if there ever was one. Spirit of America provides resources to Americans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan who have organized a number of helpful projects. Read more at the Spirit of America website, or click here or on the “FRIENDS OF IRAQ” graphic to donate through this blog.

So say the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan (via Drudge). Sounds like wishful thinking on their part.

Given who the messengers are, the message I am taking from all this is that the sooner Iraq holds elections, the better. The worst thing we could do would be to reward terrorists and non-democratic Arab regimes by postponing the election. It would be nice if Iraq could even advance the scheduled date, just to make its enemies squirm. For dictatorships, violence is just another business tool but elections are terrifying.

Bring on the elections in Iraq and elsewhere.