Iraq

^{Editor’s Note: This article was reprinted with permission from Dan Miller’s book Spiritual Reflections. It appears here verbatim.}

(Adapted from the author’s article published in the Savage Pacer, June 21, 2003)

Whether you supported the U.S. war effort to topple Saddam Hussein and his henchmen or decried that offensive as unjust, foolhardy or both, we should all agree on at least two points. First, the allied armies removed a really bad chap. Let the record show, Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party gestapo gassed, shot, tortured, dismembered, maimed, raped, fleeced and generally bullied an awful number of Iraqis for a very long period of time. An evil dictator has fallen.

Second, removing Saddam from power has created an ominous vacuum in Iraq. Terminating Saddam’s regime was the easy part. Managing the vacuum his removal created and seeing that vacuum filled with something better will prove the greater challenge.

This challenge is obviously much more complicated than simply replacing dictatorship with democracy in Iraq—as if one were merely removing a faulty engine from an old car and replacing it with a better one. The task at hand is more analogous to a heart transplant—a complicated, risky undertaking that will require the consent of the patient, the success of the surgeon, and this particular body’s mysterious capacity to receive, rather than to reject, the donated organ. Anxious pacing and a case of the jitters are justified at this point.

What is the new heart that must be successfully transplanted into the chest of Iraqi culture in order for genuine freedom to fill the present vacuum? Iraq (and the rest of the Muslim world for that matter) will continue to generate repressive governments until she is retrofitted with the conviction that human beings must be granted freedom of conscience.