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David Aaronovitch: Now we must try and free the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein

'Saddam is a sadist of the "I watch, you die" variety, but none of us quite know what to do with him'

23 November 2001

Right. who's next? The MP George Galloway says that "senior" people in the Iraqi government (and George knows a few) expect it to be them. This view seemed to be backed up by yesterday's editorial in the New York Times, which stated that "there continues to be an intense debate within the Bush administration about the next phase of the war, including whether to take it to Iraq and try to defeat Saddam Hussein."
Wait. Iraq is one of our greatest failures. 10 years after the Gulf War and the victory against Saddam Hussein, his people suffer more than ever from his tyranny and the efforts of others to contain it. They have the worst of all possible deals and their plight is an inevitable feature of savage criticism of the West, whether it comes from the troglodytic Mr bin Laden, the anti-war movement, ordinary Muslims or Third World leaders. As a symbol, the children of Iraq are almost more potent than the children of Palestine.
That hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children are supposed to have died "because of sanctions" manages simultaneously to be "a truth that is not allowed to enter public consciousness" (John Pilger in the New Statesman this - and almost every other - week) and also a claim which I encounter all the time. These trade sanctions were imposed under Resolution 661 of the UN Security Council shortly after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Medical supplies, food and humanitarian items were excluded from the embargo. Since 1996, there has also been an "oil for food" system, which allows the proceeds from Iraqi oil sales to go to civilian use.
What has happened since then is the subject of an intense propaganda war, one which America has comprehensively lost. The statistic most believed is that "half a million Iraqi children have died as a direct result of US sanctions". This figure derives from a Unicef report from 1999. It was arrived at by taking the trend line for the reduction in infant and child mortality in Iraq during the 1980s, calculating what the trend for the 1990s should have been, and then noting the difference. In fact Unicef's conclusion was: "Even if not all suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors, especially sanctions, the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivations in the absence of the prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of war."
It is not the same thing as "sanctions kill half a million", but isn't a squillion miles away either.
It's also rather contentious. One observer can argue in a report: "A dose of ordinary antibiotics would have saved the baby, but - since the end of the Persian Gulf War - there has been no such thing as ordinary medicine in Iraq. Or food. Or water."
Another observer concludes that, "The sanctions are not crippling the entire country, as some pundits would have us believe. While the sanctions and the oil-for-food monitoring committees regulate which goods can enter Iraq, the UN has little power to control distribution." In the autonomous northern region, under the same sanctions but not under Saddam, the rate of mortality of children under five years old fell from 90 to 72 deaths per 1,000 live births between 1994 and 1999.
Even so, and allowing for Saddam's exceptional insouciance concerning the deaths of his country's children, it is the West and not the Iraqi dictator that has taken the blame. In 1996, one American Middle Eastern think-tank wrote, "Whether the Iraqi regime is responsible for the continuation of sanctions or not is irrelevant. You do not shoot a plane down because it has been hijacked." Well OK, you do now.
Right there, in that moustachioed persona, is the problem. None of us quite know what to do with Saddam. This week, John Pilger seemed to be suggesting that not only was there a moral equivalence between Saddam Hussein and George Bush Senior, but that the latter (and, for that matter, his son) was probably worse.
This, I think, would be true had either of the Bushes: taken power in a coup; physically wiped out the Democratic Party; had Noam Chomsky murdered and his children tortured; attacked Russia without provocation and then fought her unsuccessfully for ten years and at the loss of a million casualties; and when that was over, invaded and held Canada until forced out; dropped mustard gas on the campus at Berkeley; or looked on indulgently one Thanksgiving Day as his twin daughters shot various other family members while they sat round the dinner table.
Saddam is a sadist of the "I watch, you die" variety, who destroyed the Marsh Arabs through damming (if only the anti-Iliusu dam protesters had been around then) whereas Dubya's worst vices may include a bit of light bondage and denying the occasional stay of execution.
I was reminded by the BBC the other night of what was found in the torture chambers of Suleimaniyeh when it was liberated by the Kurds in 1991 and what would still be found now if Baghdad were to become free.
So Saddam Hussein is bad. But is he a menace? No, says Hans Von Sponeck, the much-quoted former director of the oil for food programme. "Iraq today," he says, "is no longer a military threat to anyone. Intelligence agencies know this. All the different conjectures about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq lack evidence."
People who quote Sponeck - and who are therefore unfussed by the throwing out of the United Nations arms inspectors in 1998 - rarely go on to mention the testimony of people such as Khidhir Hamza, a scientist who defected in 1994 and who did give evidence of the existence of two atomic devices as well as loads of various unpleasant gases.
This, I suggest to Mr Pilger, is certainly something that has failed to reach public consciousness. As has the work of Dr Germ herself, Dr Rihab Taha, the scientific Eichmann of Saddam's biological weapons team.
Still, all the options not only look bad, but they are bad. Saddam cannot be toppled by proxy. We lost our chance to do that when we failed to help the anti-Saddam insurgents who rose against him in 1991. The opposition forces are weak and divided. Nor can we engineer a coup d'etat from the outside. Nor do we know, in the event of such a coup, who would take over.
The moment disappeared, too, for mounting a broad coalition, invading Iraq and installing an interim government to be replaced, eventually, by an elected one. Though I think that, if this were to happen, there would be such joy in the streets of Baghdad as we haven't seen anywhere since 1989. Recent scenes in Kabul remind us that people rather like freedom, even though some of us tend to forget it.
And I am now convinced that we must, as soon as we can, end almost all sanctions, allow Iraq to use its oil revenues, and kill the excuses that tie Saddam to his suffering countrymen and women. We can demand, as a quid pro quo, the return of arms inspectors in the form of the new United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, Unmovic (the replacement for the former UN Special Commission, Unscom, which was given the mandate to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.)
Then - least worst - vigilant, we wait for him to die (he's 64), or we wait for him to act. One will give the Iraqi people an opportunity, and the other, regrettably, will force the completion by us of a task that has taken too long.
 David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com