People don't always agree with what I write, so I've decided to make all you detractors out there a very simple offer: I'm challenging you all to a debate. If you buy me a cup of coffee and a pastry, I will meet you in any well-lit public arena, and you can say to my face all the mean things you say in your emails.
As you can probably tell, I am far from original enough to have come up with this strategy myself. Instead, I have taken a cue from the master, Saddam Hussein. In his recent interview with Dan Rather, the Saddaminator actually challenged President Bush to a public debate.
While I might back such an event purely for entertainment purposes, you have to wonder how much Bush would have to lapse back into his old hard-drinking ways to take this offer seriously.
Still, you have to appreciate Saddam's chutzpah in the process of exterminating and otherwise oppressing his own people (I don't recall Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mugabe, or Qadafi making such an offer).
It's a bit like being asked to debate the merits of criminal punishment by the guy who just stole your car while beating you to a bloody pulp.
Maybe if Bush and Hussein met, Saddam could share his electoral strategies with Bush so that he might fare better in his next presidential race. Perhaps he could explain to Bush how he might justify holding an election in which the only two options are "Bush" and "not Bush," and choosing "not Bush" would have certain unpleasant consequences.
I wonder when Hussein had his last public debate. Maybe he's making a serious tactical error with this offer, because at least our president has a bit of recent debate experience. I would guess that Saddam has not entertained any public debate with the "not Saddam" voters in Iraq for quite awhile.
Hussein seems to have a gift for changing the subject. Somehow, he has gotten people to seize this debate offer and make it a story. Who knows, maybe some unfortunate liberals will try to use this offer, probably quite unsuccessfully, as ammunition for their opposition to the war.
While I share their general view about the war on Iraq, I think it would be a mistake to couch one's opposition to the war because of Saddam's moral rectitude and love for open public discourse. Had he made an offer to debate his own opponents and hold some free elections, then that would be another story. However, it's a story we're unlikely to hear anytime soon.
In doing this interview, Rather has given Saddam the only thing he has a use for anymore: a mouthpiece. Still, everything Saddam says needs to be assessed given the brutal nature of his reign in Iraq.
He has taken a potentially progressive, successful country and driven it into the ground, destroying so many lives in the process. He does not deserve our respect, and any legitimate anti-war effort needs to come to grips with the fact that Iraq would improve if Saddam were no longer in power.
A respect for the dignity of every human being is the basic principle that rejects the use of military force when it's unnecessary, and that same respect should help us oppose Hussein's brutal dictatorship. Rejecting the use of military force to affect regime change does not mean rejecting the need for new, democratic leadership in Iraq.
Then, the real debates - the ones that might actually mean something - could begin.
Benjamin Thelen is a philosophy and political science senior. Reach him at benjamin.thelen@asu.edu.
