Arrested Development and Philosophy_ They've Made a Huge Mistake - Kristopher G. Phillips [81]
A Company Whose Founder May Be on Trial for Treason: The Case Against George Sr.
Saddam Hussein was our enemy. Regardless of the nuances of who counts as an enemy (perhaps the Sitwells? Lucille 2?), Saddam fits the bill. We waged war with Saddam twice, placed sanctions on his government for over a decade, and he long had ambitions of creating weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). If Saddam wasn’t our enemy from the first Gulf War to the end of the second, no one would be. So, if an American supported Saddam during that time, he or she supported an enemy. Strike one.
George Sr. and the Bluth Company certainly had some sort of relationship with Saddam. He had his picture taken with Saddam in 1998, during the sanctions imposed between the first and second Gulf Wars. In the picture, Saddam’s apron is embroidered with a message that betrays his character: “You’ll take it the way I make it.” When the Bluth boys arrive at one of the model homes in Iraq, the Saddam look-alikes recognize the Bluth name and expect them to fix the air conditioner. All of this displays a level of familiarity that implies at least some degree of repeated interaction with Saddam’s regime. While it’s unclear whether George Sr. in fact supports the causes of the regime, he clearly stood by them economically. Because Saddam still owed George Sr. money, George Sr. kept documentation of his interactions with Saddam H. (in the H. Maddas cooler). This demonstrates George Sr.’s vested interest in the survival of Saddam’s regime. While such an interest might not constitute outright support, George Sr., given his demonstrated greed, probably wouldn’t want the United States to succeed in toppling Saddam’s regime. In this sense, George Sr. stood by Saddam’s regime. That’s strike two.
Now, the Bluth homes in Iraq certainly weren’t “solid as a rock,” but, even if the air conditioning didn’t work, they surely provided some comfort. The model homes housed the Saddam look-alikes, and maybe even Saddam himself (as suggested by the epilogue in the penultimate episode ‘Exit Strategy’). The home also hid a WMD, albeit a fake one (Homefill brand, like all other model home accoutrements) planted by one wing of the CIA. But what if Saddam had succeeded in making a real weapon of mass destruction and we had actual evidence of it, rather than a picture of Tobias’s balls (see Chapter: 14, “Bunkers and Balls”)? The secret room would have been a good hiding place. The CIA agent on the ground certainly didn’t know about it, and Michael Bluth lived in a similar house for three years before discovering his own secret room that served as the hiding place for Tobias’s bodybuilding magazines. That’s strike three. The facts add up, and since George Sr. isn’t the umpire of this company softball game, he probably committed passive-aggressive treason.
“He’s Guilty, Michael, of Medium to Heavy Treason”: The Degrees of Treason
Some cases of passive-aggressive treason are worse than others. Helping North Korea maintain an active nuclear weapons program seems worse than building mini-palaces in Iraq that barely stay together. So you probably can commit treason to varying degrees. Fortunately, by distinguishing the three elements of treason, we already have the tools to make sense of the severity of treason in George Sr.’s case.
We suggest that the degree of treason corresponds to how bad the act is along each of the elements in the constitutional definition: (1) the threat posed by the enemy, (2) the extent to which the traitor adopts the enemy’s cause, and (3) the amount of aid and comfort provided to the enemy. We’ve already said that Saddam counts as an enemy of the United States, but, without grinding any political axes here, if Saddam only had Homefill WMDs then he may not have posed much of a credible threat to U.S.