Noted political satirist P.J. O'Rourke offered a humorous but nuanced defense of the war in Iraq to a standing-room-only crowd in Filene Auditorium Thursday.
O'Rourke, who has covered both the recent conflicts in the Persian Gulf, said that he supported the war in Iraq despite the lack of evidence that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Rather, he suggested that the dictator's long record of brutality was reason enough for the United States to attack.
"Saddam is a guy who has been murdering everyone he could get his hands on for 25 years," said O'Rourke.
He described Hussein's Ba'ath party as essentially fascist and thus an especially pernicious type of totalitarian government."Communists do bad things, but for a reason. Religious fundamentalists, again, do bad things, but for a reason," he said.
Fascist regimes, on the other hand, lack any formal ideology and merely seek power for power's sake.
"The purpose of fascism is to turn people into a mob," O'Rourke said.
O'Rourke witnessed this mob mentality when observing Iraqi reactions to the arrival of the second convoy of humanitarian aid.
When the convoy arrived in the small Iraqi town of Satwan, "suddenly about 100 Iraqi men and boys emerged out of nowhere, and then all hell broke loose."
A Kuwaiti doctor administering the distribution of aid shut the doors of the convoy's trailers and exhorted the mob to calm down and stand in line patiently. O'Rourke termed the ensuing melee the "World Wrestling Federation version of humanitarian relief."
The Kuwaiti doctor began bellowing, "Wait! Wait! In line!" to the assembled mob, but to no avail. O'Rourke found it especially interesting that an Arabic speaker would tell a horde of other Arabic speakers to wait in line in English, as though no phrase for "Wait in line" existed in Arabic.
Starvation could not explain this crowd's eager looting of the trucks, O'Rourke said, as these men looked healthy and well-fed, and he could see flourishing irrigated fields and herds of goats grazing nearby.
Rather, only the mob mentality created by living under Fascist dictatorship could explain their reactions and also the kind of glee with which the citizens of Satwan approached looting.
O'Rourke also voiced skepticism about several of the major Democratic presidential candidates' plans for the reconstruction of Iraq.
"Kerry voted to threaten Iraq with force, but he thought that actually using force is wrong," O'Rourke said. "The technical political term for this is, of course, 'bullshit.'"
Of Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich's plan to create a "Secretary of Peace" cabinet position if elected, O'Rourke said that this official "would do for international understanding what the Postmaster General currently does for the mail."
Former Vermont governor Howard Dean, on the other hand, has spoken about leading "a Cold War against terrorism," which he hopes to win by inspiring terrorists to follow the American way.
Noting the long history of religious influence over American politics, O'Rourke said, "Our president's a born-again, America was founded by religious lunatics ... religious loonies can even get their own state, like Utah." He said he was skeptical that America was likely to combat terrorists by example alone.
While Howard Dean's campaign platform boils down to "it worked in Vermont," according to O'Rourke, Gen. Wesley Clark's campaign platform is essentially "it worked in Kosovo."
O'Rourke also addressed a range of questions about domestic, foreign and international politics, during the question and answer period, at a dinner with students sponsored by PoliTalk, and at an editorial roundtable earlier that afternoon.
Though he has been classified as a conservative, he said he prefersthe label "libertarian with a little 'l'" and readily criticized the Bush administration several times.
He called Bush's No Child Left Behind act "idiotic," and when talking about Bush's faith-based initiatives, needed the audience to remind him, "What's that thing called where they drag the charities into the government?"
O'Rourke nonetheless expects Bush to be re-elected in November "all things being equal."
"None of the major Democratic candidates has any Kennedy charisma, or even any Carter moral paradigm," he said. "There's something the matter with each of them."
He cited Friedrich Hayek's 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, as one of the most important influences on his political thinking. O'Rourke values the book because it describes well "what happens when politics expands excessively."
