Irak, Medio Oriente y Asia

La Moraleja de Saddam Hussein

Autor: Editorial

Fecha: 18/12/2003

Traductor: Analí T.B., especial para P.I.

Fuente: The Economist

The moral of Saddam Hussein


Nobody emerges with much credit from the saga of Iraq. The future may be more hopeful

IT WAS a heartening way to end a bloody year. The sight of a murderous dictator being plucked like a rat from a hole in the ground offered a rare and pleasing spectacle of virtue armed and evil vanquished. But if the tyrant's capture is a cause for celebration, it should also prompt a moment's sober reflection. As will probably become clear when he is eventually put on trial (see article), few people or governments, in the West, the Arab world or beyond, emerge with credit from Saddam Hussein's long and sorry saga of misrule.

Saddam was no creature of the West. It was the Soviet Union that armed him to the hilt. But the bloody coup that brought the Baathists to power in 1963 may (the historians are still in the dark) have had some help from the CIA. When he invaded Iran, starting a war that lasted for most of the 1980s and may have consumed as many as a million lives, many outsiders found it convenient to use him. The West came to see him as a bulwark against the threat Ayatollah Khomeini posed to the Arab states and their oil. The French sold him aircraft and missiles, and the Americans fed him battlefield intelligence.

Arabs today castigate America for having aided the man it nowadays calls a monster. This proves American hypocrisy, they say. But Arab regimes bankrolled his war against Iran, and Arab masses cheered him on. In 1988, when the American State Department called his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds “abhorrent and unjustifiable”, the Arab League leapt to his defence. Before he invaded Kuwait in 1990, millions of Arabs—not just the regimes but the people too—were thrilled by his promise to destroy “half of Israel” with chemical fire. Some Arabs, including Yasser Arafat, continued to applaud even after he grabbed Kuwait. In 1991, Palestinians climbed on to their rooftops to cheer the Scud missiles falling on Tel Aviv.

One dynasty's defective victories

The Bush family became Saddam's nemesis. But the record of the Bushes, senior and junior, is mixed. In 1990, the first President Bush handled Iraq's invasion of Kuwait with exemplary skill. He spent five months assembling a grand alliance, then commanded a swift war with the authority of a united Security Council. It is fashionable now to criticise him for not going on to Baghdad to finish Saddam off, but this is the wisdom of hindsight. At the time, many voices (including The Economist's) urged Mr Bush not to exceed his UN mandate, which was only to rescue Kuwait. He (and we) reckoned there was a good chance that a humbled Saddam would fall anyway. Sending an American army to conquer a great Arab capital did not look like a splendid idea. But that honest mistake was tainted by what happened next. Mr Bush called on Iraqis to rise up, only to turn away when those who did were slaughtered in a bloodbath America could have halted.

History will record that Bush the younger, basking at present in the dictator's capture, has collected his own store of failure to set against the triumphs. He too conducted a swift war. But his pre-war diplomacy was less deft than his father's and his planning for the post-war occupation rudimentary. America went to war on what appears now to have been weak or false intelligence, which the Bush team exaggerated, about Saddam's forbidden weapons. In fact, the case for war did not have to be stretched this way. Saddam was a serial aggressor who had refused for more than a decade to prove beyond doubt that he had disarmed in accordance with the ceasefire that followed his expulsion from Kuwait.

Mr Bush has made matters worse by continuing to portray Iraq as part and parcel of the war against al-Qaeda. Although this simplification may play in Peoria (not to mention in the presidential election), it is wrong. Yes, Saddam terrorised his people and his neighbours. But to lump all America's enemies together as “terrorists” is to play with words and, worse, to risk making a muddle of policy. Osama bin Laden is a religious fanatic with an apocalyptic vision of permanent Islamic war against the infidel. Saddam is a secular Arab nationalist who had a rational if reckless dream of acquiring super-weapons and dominating the world's oil reserves. Saddam had to be stopped, but his defeat has not necessarily hastened the defeat of al-Qaeda, and might even make victory harder if it continues to stoke up Muslim rage against the West.

Another's utter defeat

Will America's occupation of Iraq continue to inflame Muslims? Perhaps it will, but it is needlessly despairing to say that it must. At the least, Saddam's capture, coming after the killing of his sons, Uday and Qusay, ought to convince Iraqis that the old regime will never return and that they must prepare for a different future. Mr Bush hopes that this will “change the equation” on the ground, and so it may. A spike of violence following the arrest shows that plenty of Iraqis remain willing, in the name of Islam, Arabism or something else, to fight the occupier. Even so, many more seem content in the absence of any plausible alternative to give a chance to the interim administration the Americans are putting into place.

What happens next will not be shaped by the Americans alone. Much also depends on what Iraq itself is capable of. Thanks to the long reign of Mr Hussein, nobody really knows what that may be. It is far from certain that it can even remain one country, let alone grow into the sort of liberal democracy the Americans hope to make of it.

Iraq is one of the awkwarder creations of colonialism. Its sense of nationhood, never strong, has been bent out of shape by the way Saddam fostered it. He tortured and killed in order to rule, giving privileges to the Sunni minority, gassing the Kurds and persecuting the Shia majority. At the same time, he stripped the country of political institutions. The ruling party existed in order to shore up the ruler's cult of personality. The parliament became a cipher; the army was divided against itself in order to ward off coups. It is no accident that no prominent Iraqi soldier or politician has been able since the war to mobilise the support of Iraqis as a whole: Saddam made a point of murdering anyone with the potential to do so. And this is the wreckage upon which America now proposes to erect a beacon of hope for the other Arabs. Why expect the first Arab democracy to arise in Iraq, of all places?

The answer is simple. Accident. Democracy has a chance in Iraq because the repeated miscalculations of its dictator resulted in his forcible removal by a superpower which, unlike the departing imperialists of the 20th century, dares not impose any other system. The Americans may not succeed, but now that they are there they are duty-bound to try.

The task is not hopeless. Throughout the Arab world, it has suited unelected leaders to blame the absence of democracy on the deep structure of their societies, or on the interference of outsiders, or on the complications of Islam. But it might be simpler than that. When given the chance, Arabs have had little difficulty working out what elections are about. What has held democracy at bay is the refusal of their rulers to risk losing power. Such rulers say now that democracy cannot work in Iraq because they do not want it in their own countries.

In Iraq itself, the foreign occupiers, being foreign occupiers, are not popular. And yet few voices, even among the Shia clerics, are raised against the idea of democracy. It will take time, no doubt, to create one. But after the horrors of Saddam, why should Iraq's people put up with anything less?