The Man Who Might Have Made A Difference

I don't subscribe to the "Great Man" theory of history. Without Columbus, some other European would have established the principle of "massacre the natives and steal their land" in the Americas. Without Washington, the colonists would still have beaten the redcoats.  Without Lincoln, the Union would have ended slavery. Without Churchill and Roosevelt, Hitler would still have lost.

But.

Ten years ago, one man might have stopped the Iraq clusterfuck before it got out of control. He was killed before he got the chance.

On August 19, 2003, Sergio Veira de Mello died - slowly and painfully - in the rubble of bomb in Bagdad.

A lot of powerful groups wanted to stop de Mello: al Qaeda, for cooperating with the U.S.;  Dick Cheney's neocon cabal, for trying to cut short their Excellent Iraq Adventure; Big Oil, for interfering with their Iraq oil fields takeover; Blackwater, for almost denying them hundreds of billions in security contracts.

al-Qaeda got the blame, justly or not. But of all the ironies and tragedies inherent in de Mello's death, the one that cut deepest and got me screaming in rage at the television was part of the heroic attempt to rescue him.

Hank Stuever in the Washington Post in 2010, on the HBO documentary "Sergio.":

As Sergio Vieira de Mello lay dying under the bombed rubble of the United Nations compound in Baghdad almost seven years ago, two U.S. soldiers worked to dig him out.

One admired the selfless way Vieira de Mello kept asking if everyone else was okay -- several U.N. staffers had been killed; dozens injured. The other soldier was disturbed by Vieira de Mello's steadfast refusal to accept his offer to pray with him. "I don't want to pray," Vieira de Mello reportedly told the reservist, Andre Valentine. "[Expletive] God. Please, just get me out."

"He really failed me," Valentine says in the new documentary "Sergio." "God sent two angels . . . and [Vieira de Mello] didn't believe in me. He didn't believe in the miracle."

Listening to the two soldiers talk about their attempt to save Vieira de Mello, the U.N. special representative in Iraq, is what helps lift "Sergio" from straightforward hagiography into a more gauzy and artful rumination on the miscommunications and opposite worldviews that culminated in the American war in Iraq. "Sergio," former war correspondent Greg Barker's film based on Samantha Power's biography ("Chasing the Flame"), airs Thursday night on HBO.

The soldiers who squeezed themselves into that hole did not (could not) know the complexity of the man they spent hours trying to rescue. Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian, was worldly in a style the movie celebrates -- son of a diplomat, Marxist in college, participant in the 1968 Paris riots; a multilingual, lifelong U.N. employee with a brilliant resume; a dashing philanderer; a man distrustful of religions, dictators and foreign policies that give off a whiff of imperialism.

"Sergio" takes care of all that, embroidering upon the now legendary narrative of Vieira de Mello as a serious and heroic man; a handsome and coolly charismatic peacekeeper (there are several references to Vieira de Mello as a cross between RFK and 007) who, if he'd not been tragically killed, might have made a real difference in rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq.

Motherfucking freakazoid wasted precious, irretrievable minutes trying to force mythology down de Mello's throat instead of saving his life. And the motherfucker brags about it. Blames and attacks de Mello, a man who, if he had lived, might have prevented the deaths in combat of thousands of Valentine's fellow soldiers.

Why are we atheists so angry?  Because of shit like this.