by Richard Stern

Saddam and Gerry
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd feel their hands were clean...

On this third planet of the sun
Among the signs of bestiality
A clear conscience is Number One.

Wislawa Szymborska, "In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself"

In the Anteroom of the Eternal sit two former heads of state. One had died in his sleep a couple of nights earlier; the other had just been hanged by a rope of yellow hemp after cursing one of the masked Shiite guards (ashawi) who had cursed him for ruining his life and country, then, with the thick rope on his bescarfed neck, cursed Americans, Persians, spies and traitors. Both men seemed to have died with their consciences clear as a newborn's or, to pick one of Szymborska's examples, as a piranha's. Their careers, so different in some ways, had interesting similarities. Both were raised in the sticks; both had been deserted by their biological fathers, the Iraqi's six months before he was born, the American's at the age of two; both early found supportive males, the American his mother's second husband, whose name he took, the Iraqi his uncle who initiated him into political militancy. Both studied law, the American at Yale, the Iraqi at Cairo University; both had military training and were successful, the Iraqi as soldier, the American as naval officer. In politics, each made his initial reputation as party reconciler and peacemaker, the Iraqi in the Ba'ath party, the American in the Republican. Both attained ultimate power in irregular ways, the American by presidential appointment, the Iraqi by coup d'etat. Both were large, good looking, physically and mentally strong, both were considered charming, both had roots in small towns which they adopted as their home towns and where they will be buried. Many of the many differences between them can be traced to the cultures which formed them. In combative and dangerous Iraq, the Iraqi became increasingly isolated, fearful, aggressive, paranoid, and megalomaniacal; in the much less stressful American political scene, the American stayed famously down to earth, eschewing the paraphernalia, let alone the monuments of grandeur, for which the Iraqi increasingly hungered. The American died in his nineties, admired even by those who'd opposed him politically from left or right; the Iraqi died on the edge of three score and ten after being hunted down, discovered and pulled out of a bolt hole like a filthy rodent, then imprisoned and finally tried in a public trial during which he seemed to reforge the defiance and arrogance of his dictatorial years, traits which saw him through to his final conscious seconds. Awaiting their Ultimate Assessment and Assignment, they exchange a few words.

Saddam Hussein: I envy the serenity and ease of your career, and wonder if, born and raised where you were, if I'd have had one like it. Gerald Ford: I've never been much at counterfactuals. Maybe it was my football training which made me face only what was facing me. SH: But you say you had training, and that means preparation. GF: Right, but when it came down to what counted, there wasn't time for what-might-have-beens. SH: I understand that well. Much of my life consisted in making life and death decisions, some on the spur of the moment. GF: But as a dictator, you created the situations. And until the last couple, you were doing all right. SH: You have no idea. When Americans quarrel, it's like children; a parent says a few words, maybe slaps someone, and that's it. Iraqis have nothing better to do than quarrel and quarrel to the death. You're not a parent, you're a policeman, a dog keeper, the head of an asylum. Words don't work. A slap isn't enough. You have to be tough and act tougher. You don't come out smelling like a rose. Gerry Ford would look more like Mussolini than FDR