Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

The Crimes of Saddam Hussein

In this month’s issue of The Atlantic there is an article by William Langewiesche, who back in the summer of 2002 had a series on 9/11 that was absolutely incredible. Anyway, this month’s piece, "The Accuser" (sorry, access is by subscription only) deals with Hania Mufti, the Jordanian human rights activist who since the early 1980s tracked the atrocities carried out by Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. It is not for the faint of heart, and I imagine makes particularly uncomfortable reading for those who argued that the Iraq War was unjust.

When I asked her [i.e., Mufti] what she had felt in Kurdistan during the lead-up to the invasion, she did not answer for herself but described the concern of the people around her. They were worried that international opposition to the war might cause Britain and the United States to hesitate, or back down. She said, "The question about whether there were weapons of mass destruction or not, I think for many Iraqis that was just a red herring. It didn’t matter whether they were found. And there were all these antiwar demonstrations being shown on television, in Europe and the States, and elsewhere in the Middle East. And I remember sitting with various groups of Kurds watching the news, and they’d look at the TV screen and gesture in this way"—she waved her hand dismissively—"and they’d say, ’These people don’t know what they’re talking about. They should come here and try Saddam for a while, and see whether or not they like it for themselves.’"

Discussions - 2 Comments

Very interesting - but disturbing - stuff. Makes me wonder if/when Bush will add Uzbekistan
to the Axis of Evil list, and consider liberating that country. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

I have always believed that the WMD argument was a convenient reason, and not THE reason we took action there. It seemed an easy excuse, that in the end turned out not so easy to prove. Still, it’s not out of a sense of supporting Bush at all costs that I beieve there is more to the story. It just seems to me that an entire military organization, the Pentagon and all it’s advisors, the administration’s second and third level assistants, were all (mostly) willing to go along with this plan, and one would have to believe that thousands of people are not only keeping a secret (a dumb idea to be sure) but all those poeple are also quite evil...starting a war for political reasons. No, there’s more to this, and I believe the iraqi people’s perspective before I’ll believe the Micheal Moores of America.

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