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I have read dozens of articles that explain to me why Saddam is manifest evil but it was not until these most recent developments in Operation Iraqi Freedom that his true character has struck my very soul. I have read about systematic “purging” of government and military personnel (including personally executing his best friend in 1979), his deplorable actions during the Iran-Iraq war, the Anfal campaign that immediately followed, his brutal efficiency of suppressing dissent, and selfishly starving his people by using all of Iraq’s wealth for his own personal ends. I knew these things were bad and that hundreds of thousands of people were tortured and slaughtered and it shouldn’t be tolerated. But I wasn’t made physically sick by it,.. it never really hit home. As the war is progressing I am watching how Saddam and his regime handle the invading Coalition. He has been planning just as carefully as we have for this expedition and he has proven to be brilliant in his defense. He is exploiting all our “weaknesses.” All along he and his government have dragged us into a diplomatic hornets nest. Never having any intention of disarming but showing just enough skin to keep the moderates intrigued and hopeful to see Iraq bare ass naked. He was stringing the world along for as long as he wanted (unless someone said its NOW or Never… and meant it.) Now he is in a war as the “aggrieved” party and can plead to the world for help. “Please pull this tyrannical bulldog off me,… I don’t deserve this,.. I have done nothing! The US wants to commit genocide on the Iraqi people!!” Saddam knows he cannot win a conventional war so he has his army draw the battles into urban areas with concentrated populations and dresses his most loyal forces in civilians’ clothes. He uses some innocent civilians as human shields and others as active military entities. He houses his major military weaponry in residential areas. He uses our respect for human life against us and then when he throws a child in front of himself to block our attack he screams to the world “Genocidal Americans! You only want to kill Iraqis.” The worst part of this, the part that makes me ill, is that it works! If we want to engage his army we have to go into urban areas where innocent people, smart people, peaceful, people, your buddy down the street is and wage a street war where all these people die! And when this happens the genuine Iraqi people, the proud and real people, they get pissed off (and rightly so). But they get pissed at the people who pulled the trigger, the US soldiers directly responsible. I gather they are a people that are not afraid to fight an aggressor and are willing to die defending what is theirs. Just my kind of people. Saddam knows this and so he draws the fight into the cities and sacrifices these people effortlessly in order to enrage them fight against us; he makes it so difficult to help these people. What kind of a man is it that uses his own population as human shields in order to cling to a country that doesn’t want him. Several I have spoken to take their freedom so much for granted that they ask me, “Well, if they hate him so much why don’t they just get rid of him?” I have not come face to face with the die hard anti-war activists that I see on TV but I fantasize about asking him why he is opposed to the war and how enraged he is by his perception of our country and our president, I want to ask him how it makes him feel and how pumped he is to be out trying to make a difference and then tell him that it is a capital crime to do that in Iraq. That people are executed systematically for doing the very thing that he cares about most. That people just like him or her have done and tried the same thing and were met with a torture chamber, or a bullet in the head, or even the subject of chemical weapons tests. I am 23 years old and am an idealist at heart and as I see it there are two ways to see the present world situation: 1: George W. Bush is a the tyrannical head of a country that he unjustly stole by a conspiracy headed by the former director of the CIA, the former president of the USA, dear old Daddy. And that reckless cowboy is going to use his new superpower to destroy the world, settle old scores and piss everybody off. Or 2: George W. Bush is a provocative, proactive president that leads the most advanced and smartest think tank in the world that excels above all other things at collecting information and identifying problems. After careful analysis they have identified Saddam Hussein as a keystone that when broken opens the doors to positive world change and order in the Middle East (the most far off and fantastic ramification being conciliation of Israel and Palestine). And after 9/11 G.W. refuses to play the bullshit political who’s pocket are you in game that EVERYONE complains about. Bush didn’t want to go to the UN because it is a diplomatic jungle where world reform goes to die. And that is just what started to happen but our President refused to bow to a Body that wanted to wait it out and was happy accepting half-ass compliance, and lip service to every one of their “Final Notices.” The UN has failed to back forcible action against even blatant genocide in Somalia and Kosovo. I have never cared about politics enough to feel betrayed by my government and so I can lay my balls out there and believe what the government has to say. I used to believe that the true American spirit was something that I had to read about in books because it had died a long time ago and still only truly surges through a minority of our veins but I have recently gotten very excited that that is not true. I have seen recent trends in American pop culture and have figured that the modern day superpower was going the way of Rome, into hedonist decay. But what if that same spirit that pushed us to revolt in 1792 was still pumping strong and actually compromises the majority of Americans and what if it still has the resolve to fight for what it holds to be self evident and true. What would that spirit look like? Perhaps the distinctly American icon of the Cowboy?