Let Us Rejoice at Saddam's Capture
Darren Ell, Electronic Iraq
14 December 2003
Now that Saddam has been captured, it may be useful to refresh Western memory on a few things before the media wipes the historical slate clean.
Remember when we all started hating Saddam Hussein in 1990? Why didn't we hate him before? Probably because he was gassing Kurds, developing weapons of mass destruction and torturing his own people, but with Western, primarily US money and weaponry. He did the wrong thing in 1990 and threatened US-UK interests by invading Kuwait to solve legitimate longstanding historical grievances, including the ongoing Kuwaiti theft of Iraqi oil. All attempts to resolve the crisis through negotiations were rebuffed by the US, negotiations which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
Of course, Saddam had never been too popular with the West since nationalizing oil production years before -- the ultimate crime -- but that was secondary since he was needed in the 1980's to slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians because they had committed another major crime of overthrowing a different US client, the Shah of Iran who had instituted what Amnesty International described at the time as the most murderous regime in the world.
In 1991, it turned out that Saddam wasn't as powerful as we once believed. Somehow his indestructible war machine wasn't able to kill more than a few hundred coalition soldiers as opposed to the (we will never know for sure) 100,000-200,000 Iraqis killed during the 1991 invasion. In fact, it appeared he could have been captured easily at the end of the war, but that wasn't convenient at the time. The wrong people, largely hostile to the West, would have taken over.
Rather, instead of stopping him then, his forces were allowed, with military cover from the coalition forces, to move freely around Iraq, slaughtering tens of thousands of Iraqis who rose up against him, and burying them in mass graves. The mass graves are now being unearthed, but it is being conveniently forgotten why some of them are there.
After Saddam was left in power, it was deemed necessary to adopt UN sanctions in order to force an uprising, which never materialized. The contrary, widely predicted, happened: the health care and education system which was the most sophisticated in the region, was decimated, and the middle class, which ballooned to 50% of the population under Saddam, was driven into poverty. Even before the devastation of the sanctions, a UN inspection team had declared that Iraq had been transformed into a "pre-industrial age nation" which until the invasion had been a "rather highly urbanized and mechanized society."
During the sanctions regime, Saddam's grip on power was strengthened and anti-UK-US opposition that may have taken over in 1991 was taught a lesson. The sanctions left over 500,000 dead (the true number will never be known) and the head of the UN humanitarian coordinating team resigned in disgust over the "genocidal" nature of the sanctions. Fortunately, US Secretary of State at the time, Madeleine Albright, declared that the price paid by Iraqi mothers and children was "worth it," so we no longer had to question the morality of the project.
Unfortunately, Saddam couldn't be credibly criticized for not helping his people adequately throughout the sanction years because the head of the UN World Food Program had inconveniently declared that the Iraqi distribution of food, water and medicines was "the best distribution system that he had ever seen in his life," and this after conducting tens of thousands of inspections of the system and uncovering no evidence of fraud or favoritism. So a new pretext for another invasion had to be found: weapons of mass destruction. Long before the most recent US-UK invasion, this was also deemed fraudulent since UN inspection teams had shown clearly there was nothing to be found, something which recent history has shown to be true.
No matter. 9/11 could be used as an excuse to topple the regime. Despite US intelligence reports to this day which deny any Iraqi link to 9/11, half of the US population believes that Saddam was involved, a fact which should raise at least a few eyebrows as to the independence of the US media.
If anyone doubted the credibility of the 9/11 argument, the old "democracy and freedom" argument could always be hauled out. Who can argue with that? It's simply a political issue then. The US and the UK simply want democracy and freedom for Iraqis. That's why the governing council are appointed by them and not elected by Iraqis. It's also why vast new economic measures are being instituted without consultation of the Iraqi people: 200 state-run enterprises are now on the auction block for privatization.
There is, of course, much more to say. But hopefully this is food for thought as we embark upon a media circus which will haul out Saddam's hideous crimes, never in question to anyone who reads history, as yet another pretext for what has happened in Iraq. What may slip through the cracks is the fact that all the crimes happened with tacit support by the regimes of the main invading armies, who will be whitewashed of any involvement. As this occurs, we may want to inquire as to the real reasons for what has happened in Iraq.
We may also want to think about holding Western leaders up to the same scrutiny as we apply to hated enemies. To fail to do so will only lead to further disaster, perhaps not only for the "enemy" populations: officials throughout the security establishment in the US predicted prior to the invasion of Iraq that it would trigger renewed terrorist threats against the citizens of the US and their allies.
Darren Ell is an independent photographer based in Montreal
, Canada.
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