Is there anyone out there who will cry on the day when Saddam Hussein dances a jig six feet above the ground? I thought not. There may be some who will regret that he will be dancing alone -- certain other world leaders who shall remain nameless (I don't want the Secret Service paying a call on me) really ought to be up there with him (their body count from bombed wedding parties and the like is at least not negligible compared to his) (1)-- but take heart; the joint dance probably wouldn't have been all that well choreographed anyway.
Back when millions, here and elsewhere, were demonstrating against the war with Iraq, the regular accusation against the demonstrators was, "They're supporting Saddam Hussein!" Hmm. I suspect you would have had to look hard through any random collection of demonstrators to find anyone who didn't consider Saddam at best a mean-spirited thug. For myself -- and though I didn't demonstrate, being too lazy to get off my fundament and march for hours in the cold, I considered myself one of them, albeit a lazy one -- my own opinion of Saddam has always been best described using the expression "unhanged brigand", one that I was not hesitant about using back in the eighties when the father of the current president of the United States treated him as though he were a Middle Eastern Sir Galahad.
Of course, before we give Saddam his fair trial and then hang him, (2) perhaps it would be wise to look at what sins he has committed.
(1) Saddam was enthusiastically building up stocks of Weapons of Mass Destruction. (This widely bandied-about term seems to refer specifically to nukes, poison gas and anthrax.)
No question that once upon a time Iraq, like lots of other countries, had a nuclear program, probably with ambitions of developing something that would go BA-BOOM. Saddam once had lots of poison gas; we know, we used to tell him the best places for his conscripted grunts to use it (on the conscripted grunts of the Iranian army). At one time or another, the United States sold him stocks of anthrax germs to play with, so he pretty obviously had those.
Where are they now -- or, more correctly, where were they early in 2003? Well, his nuclear program came a cropper when the Israeli Air Force took it out in a single well-executed raid, back in the 1980s. There's no evidence that he has used poison gas since the mid-to-late 1980s, and no evidence that he's even had any to speak of since the Gulf War. And nobody knows where that anthrax is -- he never gave any indication that it was ever used for anything other than research purposes. (By contrast, about 1000 people in Sverdlovsk, nowadays known as Ekaterinburg, in Russia, died of anthrax infection back in the eighties when a secret military plant in the town suffered an "accident". Of course, the USSR was "Empire of Evil" of that era, a term now replaced by "Axis of Evil", in which Saddam seems to have been the chief ball bearing.)
It's been suggested (by Seymour Hersch, I believe) that, in fact, when Saddam realized that he was no longer playing just with his petty-brigand neighbors but with the Big Boys such as the United States, he lost his taste for the sort of weapons that could draw down their like-minded wrath on tiny Iraq. Unhanged brigands, after all, may be brigands, but they are not necessarily also idiots.
Whatever, no evidence of any recent WMDs in Iraq has been found. The British found two trailers which, as recently as a couple of weeks ago, US vice-president Dick Cheney insisted were bioweapons labs, even though the British who found them and other engineers who investigated them concluded that they were, in fact, used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons. The Danes found some rusting shells with evidence of blistering agents in them -- that made the front page -- but analysis showed that, while the rust was rust, the blistering agent ... wasn't -- which, of course, didn't make the front page.
(2) Saddam did not hesitate to use his WMDs on his own people.
Yes, back in the eighties Saddam did use poison gas on one or more Kurdish villages, emulating the actions (some years earlier) of one of his predecessors on the throne of Iraq -- Winston Churchill, who was later punished for this act by being made an honorary citizen of the United States. One doubts, however, that Saddam will be offered a similar option. More recently, Saddam (post-Gulf-War-I) used WMDs on nobody. Of course, this may be because he had no good way of getting at Kurdish villages in Iraq to do so.
(3) Saddam threatened the United States.
Really? How? The only time Iraq has ever attacked the United States was in the mid-to-late eighties, when one or two Iraqi warplanes fired missiles at a US destroyer, the Fletcher, killing some 35 crewmen. At the time, our then-president, ideological grandfather of the current president, publicly deplored Iran for having caused this horrible attack by not rolling over and playing dead for Saddam, our most noble buddy. Saddam, of course, was suitably contrite, and quite willing to help us investigate the matter.
Even if, in 2003, Saddam had had nukes, gas or bugs, he had no delivery systems to get them to the United States; those who read the papers or scanned the internet were treated to pictures of UN inspectors breaking up his longest-range missiles (around 200 miles) a week before our attack on Iraq occurred.
(4) Saddam was hand-in-glove with Osama bin Laden.
Even before the war, it was pretty obvious -- as was pointed out on Face the Nation (I think) by no less a personage than General Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Adviser for the current president's daddy -- that there was no relationship between Saddam and bin Laden, except perhaps an adversarial one. Bin Laden is an Islamic fanatic; Saddam ran what was arguably the most religiously moderate government in the Middle East, bar none (I don't exclude Israel). (3) In Iraq, you didn't have to be a Moslem to be high in the government -- Saddam's right-hand man, that urbane-looking Tariq Aziz whom we regularly saw on television, was a Christian. In Iraq women didn't have to wear the burqa, and could learn to be engineers or drive trucks. Whether this latter situation will endure in the new, "democratic" Iraq remains to be seen.
What this means, of course, is that to bin Laden, Saddam was an apostate who had led his country in the wrong direction. It may be argued, and has been argued, that Saddam was even more intensely disliked by bin Laden than is the United States.
(Are there now al-Qaeda activists in Iraq battling against the U.S. occupying forces? Very likely. This does not automagically make them good buddies of Saddam -- with Saddam out of the picture, Iraq is a whole new playing field.)
Of course, Osama -- via his family -- may have been hand-in-glove with other important radical ruling families who provided him with at least tacit support, but probably not in Iraq. I don't want to name any names, but if you take the word "bullshit" and remove the "llit", you may get an idea of what American family has long had financial ties with the Saudi bin Ladens. (Note: were there any Iraqis or Afghans among the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center? I didn't think so. On the other hand, more than half were Saudis ... but, of course, nobody has yet accused the Saudi government of participating in that horrendous attack, and nobody has suggested that we launch an attack against Saudi Arabia to punish them for it.)
(5) Saddam had thousands of people murdered and buried in mass graves.
Probably quite true. I'm not sure how this makes Saddam much different from similar sinners whom we have supported in the past and will continue to support in future. (Chances are very good, in fact, that most of the mass graves found so far date from a period when we were giving Saddam the support necessary to fill those graves.) We might want to remember that our sometime noble ally and business partner General Suharto in Indonesia came to power, with the help of our CIA, over the corpses of three quarters of a million individuals whom he labelled Communist -- and perhaps they were; not one of those corpses ever arose from the grave to protest the label, and I guess that proves something. Then there was the Pol Pot-Angkar regime in Cambodia, which we once excoriated for mordering a million people or more -- but which, after the Vietnamese army marched in, ousted it, and replaced it with an ally of their own (the only time in history, I'm told, when the Cambodians cheered to see the Vietnamese invading their country), we supported for years in the UN as the only legitimate government of Cambodia.
Saddam remains a sinner, and, again, I at least will not be sad to see him hang. But perhaps it would be wise to hang him for the right reasons, and not keep harping on ones that don't hold water and make us look like shameless hypocrites, which, perhaps, we are.
(2) I've seen a number of articles and letters assuring the public that we, or our proxies in Iraq, will give Saddam a fair and impartial trial before hanging him. Perhaps this is the appropriate time to quote Lewis Carroll's famous poem from Alice in Wonderland (I will not try to reproduce the typographical idiosyncrasies of the original edition):
Fury said to a mouse
that he met in the house,
"Come, let's go to law,
I will prosecute you.
Come, I'll take no denial;
we must have a trial,
for really this morning
I've nothing to do."
Said the mouse to the cur:
"Such a trial, dear sir,
with no jury or judge,
would be wasting our breath."
"I'll be judge, I'll be jury,"
said cunning old Fury,
"I'll try the whole cause
and condemn you to death."
(3) I'm not sure whether Syria, also under the socialist, and therefore areligious, Ba'ath Party, was comparable, at least under Hafez Assad. Hafez, known affectionately as the "Butcher of Hama" for the ten thousand devout and rebellious Moslems whom he had murdered during an insurrection in the area of that city, was probably also disliked by bin Laden. If you ever want to see a picture of Hafez, go back to records of the Gulf War era, and you'll find the nifty photo-op that the Butcher of Hama and our current president's daddy shared. (Party affiliations notwithstanding, Hafez allowed himself to be coopted to the purposes of the Coalition of that era.)
Posted by Don Harlow at January 31, 2004 09:39 AM