Be sure to read Steven Vincent's very interesting piece at ReasonOnline about his time in Baghdad and the paradoxical opinions he heard there. But here's an especially interesting analogy from a local poet Vincent met there:
I asked Hasan, the poet, why, if the freeing of his country from Saddam Hussein was such a great event, so many people, both in Iraq and throughout the world, view it so negatively. "Think of Hamlet," he told me. "In the play, the young prince is haunted by his murdered father. At the same time, his mother, Gertrude, wants to forget the murder in order to get along with her life and encourages her son to do the same. But Hamlet can't forget; he won't forget. We see the same in the world: Hamlets who refuse to forget the crimes of Saddam, and Gertrudes who refuse to remember them.