The Value of Empires: Iraq

Ned is advised by his local public TV station that today marks the 5th anniversary of the discovery, outside Baghdad, of the bodies of 30 beheaded corpses, the victims of sectarian killings. Now, these and thousands more like them are taken by American apologists of the Iraq invasion as 'collateral damage' in the battle for Freedom. In other words, sometimes 'democracy is messy' in the infamous words of Bush's Krieg Reichs Kommander Rumsfeld. However, no doubt the sons and daughters, wives, mothers and fathers of these murder victims might disagree. Had we not invaded that country on specious pretexts, they and thousands like them would be alive today.
And here we see a value of despotism, in this case Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Iraq is not a real country at all: its boundaries were established by a commission of imperialists after WWI. It includes peoples who have for centuries, to put it mildly, had issues with each other, over such weighty points as who should have succeeded the Prophet Mohammed in the 7th century. [However, Ned would add parenthetically, we might sneer less at such unsophisticated goings on if we were to remind ourselves with humility that cults established in the 1st century AD govern much of U.S. government policy today. But let that pass.]
The point is this: the value of the Hussein regime was that it kept people who hated each other from killing each other. That is the essence of empire. Ditto the Ottomans, and the Austro-Hungarians. Same goes for Tito's Yugoslavia, and the British Raj in India. Churchill, that old anachronism, pleaded in Parliament for his colleagues not to 'abandon' India, predicting correctly that independence would bring terrible bloodshed at Hindu killed Muslim and vice versa. Hundreds of thousands were killed and millions displaced.
So Ned advises his jingoistc friends not to be so arrogant in their use of power--in our case, sending mercenaries to bomb and kill innocent people and 'suspected terrorists.' Over the past few weeks many children have been killed in air strikes against 'suspected terrorists.'
Ned for one hates the perpetrators of these deeds and hates them further for the evil done in his name.