I watched the video. I watched the men in hoods put the noose over his head and adjust the torque of the fat, indisputably lethal knot around his neck. His expression was distant, eyes glassy. Like someone waiting on a checkout line at a supermarket. And he was checking out. And then the video froze.
And I felt oddly sorry for him.
The sick, murdering thug. The vile, genocidal dictator. Executioner of thousands. Poisoner of fathers, mothers, children. Sociopathic, profoundly corrupt despot.
It was his face. A face we've become so familiar with we could draw a recognizable version of it without lifting our pen off the paper. A face we've needed to recognize who and what it was we've been fighting the last 5 years. And his was the perfect face. Unmistakably foreign but not so much so that it would induce feelings of guilt, causing one to hesitate before pulling the trigger. Heavily moustached like a villain in a Charlie Chaplin film. Bellicose, boastful, rattling scimitars and leveling omnipotent stares at the terrified throng. Strutting out in the open, daring and audacious. An evil so easily digestible. The Neo-Con's perfect villain. Now pathetic and slack, having voided the last of its diabolical essence long ago.
A face accomplishes two things. It provides something to grasp until our knuckles are white. It focuses our attention, elicits our unswerving devotion to a cause, foments our unquenchable rage.
Or, it bestows a soul to even the least deserving of creatures. It immediately adds elements missing from a simplistic two-dimensional presentation: the elements of history, of sight, sound, smell and touch. It foreshortens the so-necessary distance and brings us nose to nose with the complete and utter truth, for better or ill.
One of these motivations describes the all out effort to avoid putting a face on the young American men and women who have died in Iraq. If we knew the dreams, the histories, the breath, the sounds, the smells, the touch, the faces of every life lost for this Sisyphusian cause, if we could have seen those faces as close as we have seen the face of Saddam Hussein---would we have stayed the course?