The Illuminated Donkey

I'm not sure why it took me two weeks to remember this, but anyway. On October 20, following the "unanimous" presidential referendum, Saddam Hussein issued a near-complete prisoner amnesty, emptying Iraq's prisons (those accused of spying for Israel or the U.S. were exempt from the amnesty). Numerous questions were asked regarding motive, but the news did remind me of a Nancy deWolf Smith Opinion Journal report from Afghanistan, writing about Afghans' dreams of the country "the way it once was and they would make it again."

A country where the fruit hung so heavy on the trees, an old man once told me, that when it fell to the ground nobody bothered to pick it up, but people simply walked through carpets of mulberry slush, like the rest of us wade through mud or snow at certain times of year. A country where there was crime, to be sure, but where a kind-hearted king pardoned every convicted murderer except one, a case where the family of the victim refused to grant permission for a death sentence to be lifted. These memories, gilded with nostalgia, sustained Afghans for so long.

I can't find out if the story is real or apocryphal, but it did make me wonder if the idea of a general amnesty might have some popular precedent in the region, more than it certainly would in the west.