Bring back Saddam Hussein?

The Army's move to expand their thinking and actions to include development of order, not just the removal of the old order, seems to be a good thing.

We need to learn how to transition from one order to a better order without chaos breaking out in the middle. This is getting way too expensive and risky.

Lack of it has led to more than the removal of Donald Rumsfield. Now, we have people in the LA Times actively suggesting the return of Saddam Hussein to power.

Only dealing with part of the problem is increasingly looking like thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, depending on how you count, have sacrificed in vain. We really owe it to them to learn the lessons this is trying to teach us and give meaning to their sacrifice.

See one of the most viewed opinion pieces in the LA Times:

Johnathan Chait: Bring back Saddam Hussein

LA Times

Nov 26, 2006

Excerpt:

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At the outset of the war, I had no high hopes for Iraqi democracy, but I paid no attention to the possibility that the Iraqis would end up with a worse government than the one they had. It turns out, however, that there is something more awful than totalitarianism, and that is endless chaos and civil war.

know why restoring a brutal tyrant to power is a bad idea. Somebody explain to me why it's worse than all the others.

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Actually, while it dominates the headlines today, Iraq is just one example of a larger class of problems that we face as a planet. Charles Perrow, in his book Normal Accidents- Living with High-Risk Technologies, make several key points.

• We keep making the world riskier by our efforts to make it safer, on many fronts. When we master building 100 story buildings, someone says great, let's build a 200 story one. When we get cars that are safe at 60 MPH, people go, great, let's go 85 mph now.
• This problem is everywhere, and it will just keep on getting worse.
• In most cases, the best thing we can do is learn how "safety cultures" work and how "high reliability organizations" function.
• In some cases, the only thing to do is to back away from that technology and say, "No, we're not organized enough as a species to manage that safely."
• That last thing is a really unfamiliar and hard thing to do.

technorati tags:saddam, iraq, chaos, civilwar, nationbuilding