By Terry Lane December 21, 2003
Well, whacko! They have caught Saddam. What a relief. Now the Iraqi people can live in peace, prosperity and perpetual happiness. Except the several thousand collaterally damaged ones, but you can't make omelettes without cracking Arabs.
One happy chappie writes to me: "And was (sic) a sorry day it is for weak, sniviling (sic) and gutless people like you. Terry- you are a sad and pathetic excuse for a man. You are a disgrace to all Australians. You should go and burry (sic) yourself in a rat hole along with Saddam. You should also appologise (sic) to all the Iraqi people for your shameful articles. It is spineless whimps (sic) like you who kept Sadam (sic) in power and caused extended suffering for the Iraqi people."
I know that it is rude to mock the illiteracy of the people you disagree with, but it is hard to resist.
The war-lovers hold the anti-war dissenters responsible for decades of Saddam tyranny. But how is this so? We are not the ones who armed Saddam to kill Iranians - that was the American government. It was not us who made Saddam a present of golden spurs - that was the grateful Donald Rumsfeld. It was Rumsfeld, as an emissary from Ronald Reagan, who went to Baghdad in 1983, knowing that Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians, and said nothing.
But let's concede that the US and its lickspittle allies are not bad people, merely slow learners. After all, Saddam had systematically exterminated communists in Iraq and you can see how this would confuse the Americans. Even if they suspected Saddam was a crook he was their sort of crook. But eventually the penny dropped and they figured out that Saddam Hussein was a bad man.
Which is the nub of the problem. It is all very well to cheer the downfall of a tyrant, but since when do Americans have an aversion to tyrants? Most of their best friends are tyrants.
Let's see if I've got this right. Saddam Hussein was a bad man and it was worth killing thousands of Iraqis, destroying the country's infrastructure and wasting billions of dollars to catch him down a hole.
But the white supremacist tyranny that brought murder and misery to South Africa for generations was, according to American governments, best dealt with by patience. Did you notice that it was left to the South Africans themselves to sort things out?
What about Pol Pot? The most infamous mass murderer since Hitler was recognised as the legitimate ruler of Cambodia by the US because it was better than conceding that the wily Vietnamese had stepped in just in time to save the last innocent Cambodian from being killed. Best not mention Vietnam.
What about Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the military junta that terrorised Argentina? And the colonels who ruled Greece with an iron fist, to American applause? Or the thugs of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras where dictators are welcome if they protect the investments of American fruit companies? What shall we say about Saudi Arabia?
It is true that if I had my way Saddam Hussein would still be dictator. But that is not the whole story. The US usually deals with tyrants by supporting them or leaving it to their own people to bring them down. What was different about Saddam? Oil? War is neither the only nor the best way to topple tyrants. Every nation in the world, except for four, saw it that way. I'm happy to stand with the 97 per cent majority opinion.