Hussein Deemed Indisputably Evil

Author: Michael O'Brien

Even as the last cities begin to fall in Iraq, debate on the war continues all over the world - not surprising, given that the entire world will be, and already has been, forever changed by the conflict. Instead of a general move toward clarity of argument, however, almost all parties in this universal discussion have chosen to ignore or smokescreen any facts that don't support their position.
I would like to respond to what I believe is one of these widespread obviations of truth - Wellington Lyon's contention that Saddam Hussein really isn't that bad of a guy - which appeared in the "Liberal Voice" column by Lyons in the last issue of The Middlebury Campus ("War with Iraq: Is the United States Government Justified in Attacking Iraq?," The Middlebury Campus April 2, 2003.)
Were one to judge from the first couple of paragraphs, one would think the article would go on to cite facts to prove that the Pentagon's denouncement of Hussein's rule was "the most obviously grotesque falsehood recently vomited forth by our government's propaganda machine," a statement that ironically shares the extremism being criticized in these government releases. No proof is given; instead the article embarks on a critique of the "coalition of the willing" - pardon me - I believe "coalition of the killing."
Via a citation of Amnesty International, Afghanistan and Georgia both come under fire. According to the organization's Web site, however, the number of deaths resulting from human rights abuses in Georgia doesn't even come to a dozen. And every instance of torture or the abuse of women in Afghanistan comes from the heyday of the Taliban - though it's certainly true that Afghanistan had little choice but to join the coalition.
Even the horror and the chaos in Colombia, however, doesn't compare to that in the countries Lyons suggests that the U.S. should have gotten on our side: Russia and China. Russia's oppressive war on Chechnya has resulted in hundreds of deaths, most famously in the recent Moscow theater incident in which hundreds of civilians were hospitalized or killed by the Russian police's use of gas. China merely executed 2,468 of its citizens last year, often in unjust or hurried trials. But with enemies like these, who needs friends?
The main point of my article, however, is to highlight the abuses of Hussein's regime. Too often the most we hear are vague generalizations of torture and maybe a reference to the gassing of the Kurds, which fits well with the right's program of weapons-scare tactics. Around 100,000 Kurds were killed in that attack. In my research, I have found that Hussein is most likely responsible for the outright murder of 200,000 more of his own countrymen.
Certainly it is an exaggeration to call "Hussein's rule the worst in world history," as Stalin or Hitler, though both dead now, probably are more competitive in that category than Hussein. But then, I don't want the would-be mass-murdering dictators of the world to be convinced they're in the race for some elite prize.
One of the most horrid facets of Hussein's regime is not simply the number of the dead, but the torture most have had to endure before passing on. Amnesty International's extensive report on the "Systematic Torture of Political Prisoners" describes how prisoners were mutilated, electrically shocked, beaten and tortured in ways I will not print in a Campus piece. Despite being an ostensibly secularist state, common fundamentalist Islamic forms of punishment such as the severing of hands and feet were introduced in the last decade.
In fact, over the past few years Iraq has instituted a "return to faith" campaign to garner support from surrounding Islamic countries. This campaign has had a deadly effect on Iraqi women, who are often killed outside their own homes by Uday Hussein's Fedayeen Saddam. Execution is accomplished via the barbaric method of beheading with a sword. The crimes for which all of these tortures are applied are often contrived, of a political nature, or both.
The only grotesquerie I can see is in Hussein's regime and in those who attempt to ignore this evil so that a perfectly unblemished extremist view of the world can emerge.
For me it is not so easy to be "anti-war" or "pro-war," because the easy solutions never end up being the most accurate. As comforting as creative misspellings like "Faux News" may be to some, they're only preaching to the choir. Instead of always trying to prove ourselves right, let's try to find out what's right, and work from there.

Michael O'Brien is a literary studies major from Dallas, Texas.