Hussein Apologist

Reactionary Snob cannot be arsed to fisk this guy. Well, having read the article, I can’t resist. This Daniel Cox is so clearly wrong about so many things I cannot help but have a pop at his crass drivel.

“Three months ago, Tony Blair warned the world that an "arc of extremism" now stretches across the Middle East from Iran to Lebanon. This phenomenon, he suggested, threatens the survival of the very values on which western society is based. Yet, when Blair came to power, no such claim could have been made. Slap-bang in the middle of his currently awesome arc, lay a fortress of stability in the shape of Saddam's Iraq.”

Oh, I think you could argue such an arc existed prior to Blair’s arrival in power. What with the US Embassy siege. And the Barracks bombing in Lebanon. And the Six Day War. And the Yom Kippur War. And the multitude of assassinations and other terrorist attacks. And… well, I could go on, but you get the point.

However, if there has been a change since Blair came to power then it is the result of 9/11. You know, when Islamic extremists crashed civilian planes into buildings in the US. I am not saying the war on Iraq was justified or right, but 9/11 gave Bush Junior the circumstances he could use to invade Iraq. And, whilst the US made mistakes in the run up to 9/11, I am going to lay the blame for 9/11 squarely at the door of those who hijacked those planes and committed mass murder.

“Saddam had tied down revolutionary Iran, the most potentially destructive force in the region, in an eight-year war, at the expense of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties.”

Seems ironic that someone who is moaning about the Iraq war would advocate a war that leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

“Any Islamic terrorists found on Iraqi territory were summarily executed.”

Summary execution is generally frowned upon in polite society. I would love to see the outcry if Blair proposed summary execution in this country. Christ, even the thug like shaved ape who operates as our Home Secretary wouldn’t dare propose this.

“The Middle Eastern oil that underpins our society, and therefore the values that our Prime Minister holds so dear, flowed freely into our refineries.”

Except when good ol’ Saddam set fire to the oil wells.

“Within Iraq itself, a secular state offered women opportunities unimaginable in nearby countries, and provided a standard of living far from unreasonable by the standards of the developing world.”

Hussein’s main claim to operating a secular society was his Catholic Deputy Prime Minister. He used religion to appease the fundamentalists in his country. I would also argue that the comparison with the opportunities for women in nearby states is meaningless – Israel is far better than the former Iraq, whilst the likes of Iran are amongst the worst in the world. To be somewhere in the middle when one of your neighbours is the worst in the world is no great achievement. And the standard of living in the former Iraqi state is not great when you consider the vast fortunes that the oil should have brought the Iraqi people.

“Three objections were made to this state of affairs.”

I would imagine most right-minded people could raise more than three objections to the brutally oppressive regime in Iraq…

“The first was that Saddam had expansionist ambitions. His annexation of Kuwait in 1990 was, however, rooted in a long-standing territorial claim based on the fact that Kuwait had been part of Basra province under the Ottomans and was only hived off under British colonial rule. Somewhat disconcertingly for Iraq's current liberators, this claim was revived in 2004 by none other than the US-appointed President of Iraq's Interim Governing Council.”

Right, so he was expansionist, then? The fact that he had a territorial claim does not mean he was allowed to act on that claim through an invasion (not annexation). Britain could argue that it has a claim to the United States. That doesn’t make that claim right, or justify an invasion against the weight of world opinion. And the fact is the Interim Governing Council’s claim could equally be rejected. Hell, I could make a claim for Kuwait…

“The second objection was that Saddam was developing weapons of mass destruction. Why he stopped doing so, we shall perhaps never know, but when he had such weapons, he chose to use them against Iranian armed forces and Iraq's own dissident Kurds, rather than for any purpose that threatened the wider world.”

Fine to kill Iranians, fine to gas the Kurds. Just don’t touch the rest of the world. Clearly an Iranian or Kurdish life is worth less than a Western life… I detect an unpleasant undertone of racism.

“Had he acquired nuclear weapons, this might have proved a useful check on Iran's regional ambitions.”

That seems unlikely really, doesn’t it? The main check to Iran’s regional ambitions would be the eradication of the Israeli state. And I hope Cox isn’t advocating that. And had Hussein acquired nuclear weapons, he might equally have used then against his neighbours (Kuwait, Israel) or sold them to terrorist groups. See, the danger with these unpredictable tyrants like Hussein is they are, well, unpredictable. And I like to be able to predict what nuclear powers are going to do.

“Today, Iran appears to pose far more danger to the outside world than Saddam ever did, yet we seem to have no plans to deal with this country as we did with Iraq.”

Iran has been a problem for decades. And I take come comfort from the fact that we are not planning to invade Iran as we did Iraq, because the Iraq invasion, well, it didn’t go great, did it?

“The final objection to Saddam's rule, on which more and more weight has necessarily had to be placed by those responsible for his downfall, is that he abused the human rights of Iraqi citizens. Quite clearly he did. Yet, why should it be assumed that this consideration trumps all others?”

Ask an Iraqi citizen who had their rights abused. Then you will probably get your answer.

“Iraq was created by the victors of World War I. Its Shia, Sunni and Kurdish peoples did not choose to be flung together, and their antagonisms made the country a powder-keg. Saddam believed that such a nation could be held together only by brutally effective repression. Current events suggest that he may have had a point.”

Always easier to embrace “brutally effective repression” when you are pontificating in a liberal Western democracy, isn’t it? Much easier to advocate repression when you’re not the one who is going to end up swinging from the gallows.

“Living under tyranny may not be ideal, but it is not impossible. In the Soviet Union, life took on a character of its own, in which the human spirit managed to flourish in spite of the political constraints. The literature generated in those conditions can still inspire us. Today, many former Soviet citizens feel no more free under the yoke of global capitalism than they did before, and some would like to see the return of Stalinism.”

Those who would advocate the return of Stalinism are fucking brain-dead, frankly. Stalin was a brutal, psychopathic dictator whose atrocities against his own people exceed the likes of Hitler. Collectivization wiped out millions of peasants, and the purges saw further millions being murdered by the state. It is no exaggeration to say that Stalin waged a war against his own people. If any human spirit flowered under Stalin, then it was quickly rewarded with a bullet in the back of the head and a shallow grave. And whilst it is *possible* to live under a tyranny, it is very difficult to do so when you are starving to death. There was no liberty and no freedom under Stalin, just the ever present spectres of starvation and death.

“The people of China seem in no rush to jettison a regime that holds out the prospect of prosperity at the expense only of liberty.”

Given dissension is not allowed on pain of imprisonment and perhaps even death, it is difficult to gauge the levels of opposition in China, isn’t it?

“Even in Britain, our supposed attachment to our supposed freedom turns out to be tenuous. We seem content to toss aside ancient liberties in the face of a dubious war on terror, and we live, cheerily enough, under a regime of surveillance that the KGB might have envied.”

I’m not that cheery about it. There is some sterling opposition to Blair’s attempts to curtail our civil liberties. And the comparison with the KGB is just fucking stupid. The KGB had the right to disappear people and to use torture as a means of extracting confessions from the innocent. There is nothing proposed by Blair that compares to the hideous reality of life with the KGB.

“Saddam offered his people a harsh deal. Yet, their lives were at risk only if they chose to challenge his authority. Now, they die because of the sect to which they happen to belong. Soon, their country may fall prey to a savage civil war. If that happens, the Iranians will doubtless intervene, along, perhaps, with Turkey and Israel. No one can predict where that might lead, but the outcome is unlikely to be positive for peace, prosperity, justice or, indeed, human rights.”

So people died under Saddam, and people might die today? That’s the argument for Saddam? Frig me rigid, it is hardly a ringing endorsement of good ol’ Hussein, is it?

“If Saddam were still in power, he would have stopped this happening. Iraq's dissidents would have paid a price, but the rest of us would be a lot better off. As he goes to meet the hangman, the world has cause to rue his demise.”

Audacious stuff. Basically, it was alright for the Iraqi’s to suffer under Saddam as long as it didn’t impact on the rest of the world. In short, “fuck you, Johnny Foreigner, I’m alright so as far as I am concerned, you can go rot.”

I hope there is such a thing as re-incarnation, so David Cox can be reborn as an Iraqi dissident (or just someone who Saddam didn’t like, for whatever the reason) – and end his next life as a tortured wreck in an Iraqi prison, awaiting a brutal execution for the crime of not agreeing with Saddam Hussein.