WASHINGTON, April 9 (UPI) -- "The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
"Make instruments to plague us."
Edgar's exclamation to his wicked step-brother Edmund in the final act of William Shakespeare's masterpiece "King Lear" also serves as a pithily prophetic explanation of why Saddam Hussein failed in his ambition to turn the city of Baghdad into a gigantic Stalingrad to confound, trap and slaughter thousands of American soldiers.
Had Saddam been content with the city he inherited as formal Number Two and real strong man of the second Baathist regime in Iraq 35 years ago, he could have done it.
For, as prominent Iraqi democratic dissident Kanaan Makiya, writing under the nom de plume Samir al-Khalil noted in his 1991 classic study of Iraqi totalitarian architecture, "The Monument," Baghdad in 1968, with a quarter its current population of five million people was a "much maligned, anarchic and crumbling cosmopolitan city."
It still retained large areas of 'old' Baghdad "with its sectarian and ethnically divided neighborhoods, its colorful souls, its horizontal skyline punctuated with pretty vertical minarets, its inward -looking houses and shaded narrow alleyways."
In other words, the perfect kind of environment in which to fight a bloody, last-ditch guerrilla war.
But Saddam did not leave it that way.
As Makiya wrote, "Baghdad first began to metamorphose into its present form in the late 1970s ... Overnight Baghdad became a giant construction site: new and wider roads, redevelopment zones ... and many new monuments -- all were put in hand."
"New and wider roads" ... "Many new monuments" ... And all the new monuments had wide, magnificent arterial roads leading to them.
They all proved perfect for the armed forces of the U.S. 3rd Mechanized Infantry Division to punch into the heart of the city, demoralize its defenders and fragment their forces in matter of only four days.
There are many other reasons, many of them predicted by UPI military analyst Thomas Houlahan, as to why Saddam failed to turn his capital into an urban stronghold to inflict significant, let alone massive losses on the invading U.S. forces. But this one should rate highly too. The Architecture of Fear which he imposed upon his own city led directly to his downfall.
There is a consistent pattern to this kind of irony. For dictators have always loved monumental architecture and long, immensely broad, endless boulevards that crush the individual human being's sense of significance and worth with their overwhelming scale. But more often than not, their boundless ,megalomaniac arrogance backfires on them and they fall plagued by their own pride and vices, just as Shakespeare predicted.
The Emperor Napoleon III of France transformed Paris into a magnificent city of glorious boulevards in the mid-19th century, giving it a splendor it retains to this day. But his real purpose was to fragment the city and allow loyal military forces recruited from the provinces to move about it easily without being stymied by urban barricades in its ancient narrow streets.
Napoleon III's visionary scheme was meant to end the succession of urban revolutions and riots that had plagued the city for three quarters of a century since the French Revolution, as shown in the hit musical "Les Miserables." But it failed to prevent the bloodiest insurrection of all, the rising of the Paris Commune that succeeded his own failed Second Empire in 1870. And after that was crushed, it was the democratic Third, Fourth and Fifth Republics that enjoyed the urban tranquility and magnificent architecture Louis Napoleon had wrongly imagined would perpetuate his own glory.
Adolf Hitler discovered the hard way how amazing road systems designed to facilitate the easy conquest of his neighbors instead ended up facilitating the destruction of his own Third Reich. Germany's national autobahn system, built in the 1930s, was a full 20 years ahead of even America's fabled Interstate Highway System. It greatly aided the massing of the German army for its early victorious campaigns against Poland, France and Russia from 1939 to 1941.
But in 1945, the forces of the U.S. 12th Army Group driving across the Rhine to encircle Field Marshal Walter Model's armies in the Rhur instead found it a fast track into the heart of Germany, annihilating Hitler's last fading hopes of survival.
In 1989, the grandiloquent scale of communist urban architecture and street planning backfired on brutal dictatorships at opposite ends of the Eurasian land mass. First, more than a million students and their supporters demanding Western-style democracy flooded into Tiananmen Square, the colossal central staging area of Beijing in front of the ancient Forbidden City of the old Emperors.
Mao Zedong, founding father of the Chinese communist state had razed the heart of Beijing to make Tiananmen Square a worthy city for the monumental mass spectacles that totalitarian regimes are so obsessed with holding. Instead, it became the natural focus for anti communist revolution. And although the demonstrations were brutally crushed with the slaughter of thousands of students, Tiananmen Square's most lasting association was no longer with the supposed glory of Mao and his successors, but with the ever-reviving, un-crushable immortal human impulse to be free.
That same year, down in the Balkans one of the endless popular demonstrations that Rumania's communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had summoned in central Bucharest to celebrate his own genius and endless rhetorical powers finally turned on the murderous, grandiloquent old blowhard. Popular revolution spread like wildfire and Ceausescu -- popularly known among his adoring subjects as "Draculescu" and "the Antichrist" -- faced a firing squad on Christmas Day.
Now Saddam has joined the long and no doubt ever-growing list of monstrous tyrants who raised supposedly magnificent super-highways and monuments to their own glory, only to see them become symbols and instruments of their own ruin.
The 40-foot high statue he raised to himself in the heart of Baghdad will instead be indelibly remembered by future generations of Iraqis -- and the whole world -- for being torn down with a noose around its neck, and its severed head then joyously passed in a spontaneous frenzied freedom ritual among a rejoicing crowd.
Perhaps Percy Shelley said it best nearly 200 years ago, inspired by the crumbling remains of ancient Egyptian tyrant Ramses II at Abu Simbel:
"'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings
"'Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
"Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
"The lone and level sands stretch far away."
