"Hatefulness" - Commentary by Tony Seton

Hatefulness

When I was a nineteen-year-old copyboy working on the network television news assignment desk at ABC in New York in 1970, my main functions were answering the phones and ripping the copy from the 13 wire machines and delivering them to the editors. One Saturday morning, the AP started ringing its bell -- the signal that a major news story was breaking -- and I hustled to the wire room to check it. The machine printed out the word "hatefulness" three times. That was the code from NORAD of the nation being on war footing. Of course it was an error, and very few editors around the country thought it was anything else. It turned out that some grizzled-face yahoo in a dirty t-shirt had pushed the wrong button.

The word "hatefulness" came to mind regarding the latest atrocities in Iraq. It reminds me of the hell that was Yugoslavia after Tito died. Tito kept the country together. With his demise, the country came apart at the seams and the different factions went about killing and raping with a ferocity that would have leashed a rabid dog.

Saddam kept the Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites from warring. He wasn’t very nice about it, but the country had electricity, running water and a secular government. Saddam had been put into power by the United States, and we had maintained him. For the most part, despite such nitpicks as gassing thousands of his own people, Saddam played a useful role as far as American foreign policy was concerned. As a counterpoint to the psychotics who gravitated to power in Iran, Saddam actually stabilized the region.

Removing Saddam from power, while it might have looked noble on the surface, was a disastrous mistake. Obviously. For the several years since the U.S. invaded their country, the Sunnis and the Shiites have been content to kill each other in smallish numbers. A car bomb here, a suicide bomber there. A family of eleven got their throats slit for living in the wrong neighborhood. A handful of teachers were shot to death in their school. Hundreds of police and military recruits have been executed.

When you think about the apparently limitless supply of people willing to blow themselves up with others, and compare it to any of the more civilized conflicts the U.S. has engaged in over the centuries, you get a sense of how truly volatile is the situation in Iraq. When you see that these psycho-killers will detonate themselves at funerals and weddings, at markets and where children are getting candy, you begin to get a flavor for just how much hatred and how little sanity is extant in this country.

Saddam’s Sunni minority once controlled Iraq. They oppressed the Shiite majority and slaughtered many Kurds. Now the Shiites are running the country; they are the majority, after all. The Kurds are colluding with the Shiites but mostly making sure they keep their part of the country for themselves. The three factions are now gearing up for a civil war. There doesn’t seem a reason in the world why they won’t start killing each other wholesale. There is lots of hatred and many weapons.

It’s not our fault that these people are such zealots, so mad with hatefulness that they will destroy innocents simply because they profess support for a different imaginary being. Or is it the same god but with a different slant? It’s hard to understand, not just the differences, but that the fury behind them that could provoke such violence.

We have some true loons in our country. For instance, there’s a group of so-called Christians who go to the funerals of war dead and scream at the survivors that the deaths are god’s way of punishing the U.S. for supporting homosexuality. Yes, Dorothy, this is happening in Kansas. Counter groups have formed to insulate the family from the crazies. At least they aren’t blowing themselves up to prove their position, but the anger and the psychosis are still there.

What’s happening in the Midwest is nothing compared to the Mideast, of course, where violent behavior is de rigeur. Last week, a particularly sacred Shiite mosque in Samara was destroyed. The response by Shiites, allegedly, was to take dozens of factory workers off their buses and riddle them with bullets. A curfew offered a day of respite but the violence resumed. Despite heightened security and pleas from Iraqi leaders of all stripes, more than 60 people were killed on Saturday.

Is this our fault? You bet it is. We invaded Iraq. We toppled Saddam. The inmates escaped from the asylum that had restrained them and now they are still crazy but they are also heavily armed. The various religious factions have formed their own militias with huge caches of weapons and explosives that the invading U.S. forces failed to secure, and they are committing incremental genocide, in the name of god, against their opponents.

Anyone with even scant knowledge of Iraq, its history and its people, would have predicted that the Sunnis, Kurds and Shiites wouldn’t get along. Democracy isn’t viable under such circumstances. Democracy requires a degree of civilization. Democracy can’t function in countries where the people are primitive. So it is in Iraq, where they have installed a theocracy closely aligned with neo-nuclear Iran, and women are considered property.

Building democracy is the explanation du jour after the other excuses fell by the wayside. There were no WMDs, no ties with Al Qaeda, and Saddam had no role in Nine-Eleven. The story is that we invaded Iraq to replace the evil dictator with democracy. But you can’t create a modern democracy when the people with whom you would propose such a system are still living in the eleventh century.

Thinking anew about that Saturday morning in 1970 when the "hatefulness" message flashed across America, it’s curious that someone decided to use that word for that purpose. It reflects the worst of a human being. Of course, starting a nuclear war isn’t very loving. Two hundred Iraqis have been killed in the past couple of days because of the hatefulness enfranchised by our invasion of their country. Does anyone hear the alarm?

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.