Bring back Ba'athism!

The loathsome Rod Liddle - writing in The Spectator, which I thought had higher standards than this - says dem Iraqi Ay-rabs don't really want democracy, and that things were better under the genocidal madman removed from power last year:

Today, in response to continued criticism about the war and the occupation, the government responds by yelling ‘Appeaser!’ every time it can and asking the fatuous question: ‘Isn’t Iraq better off without Saddam?’

Well, no, actually it isn’t, in the coarsest terms. Some 12,000 Iraqis were killed during the war and another 2,000 since the ‘end’ of the hostilities. I don’t know how many people Saddam routinely dispatched every year with his acid baths and spurts of homicidal spite, but my guess is that 14,000 would have been pushing it, even for him. What I mean is that as a result of our actions many more people have lost their lives (or, for that matter, been maimed or made homeless) than would have been occasioned by another ten years of Saddam’s rule.

The number of people killed by Saddam Hussein is anywhere between 300,000 to a million. One survey says 61,000 were killed in Baghdad alone. No one knows the exact figure yet, but I'm pretty sure it's more than 14,000 - and that Saddam killed considerably more than 1,400 people per year.

What part of his ass is Rod Liddle pulling these numbers from?

Similarly, we might take issue with both Blair’s and Bush’s belief that a Western-friendly, secular, Islamic democracy could be introduced to Arab states through the conduit of Western intervention. That little notion is looking a bit ragged at the moment, no? There was a form of pragmatic, secular Islam in the region — it was called Baathism, and horribly brutal it was too, but at least not ideologically antithetical to Western interests (which was, of course, why we supported Baathist Saddam, rather than the mad mullahs of Iran, in the first Gulf war).

Right now, there is not the faintest glimmer that the Iraqis are clamouring for more secular democracy. They do not want greater female representation within government or local government, nor a more rigorous application of EU health and safety regulations, nor the introduction of positive discrimination in the workplace. What they want, it would seem, is Christian infidels out of their benighted country immediately.
[...]
It is true that you cannot build democracy in a day, but you cannot build it at all if nobody very much wants it. And there is no evidence that many people want it in Iraq, outside the more affluent salons of Baghdad. We — and the Iraqi people — will be left with an administration which loathes us and what we stand for far more than Saddam ever did. Saddam was a gangster, but he was a pragmatic gangster. We could have bought or cowed Saddam. We won’t be able to buy or cow al-Sistani, or anyone like him. They have their God on their side, sadly.

In other words, he may have been a son-of-a-bitch, but he could have been our son-of-a-bitch. So now the "anti-war" movement encompasses a full spectrum, from those who chide the U.S. for once supporting Saddam, to those who chide the U.S. for not continuing to support Saddam.

Time will tell whether democracy will take root in Iraq. But I thought it was hard-hearted right-wingers like me who were supposed to believe dark-skinned furriners didn't really want to live in a free society.

Things have really changed these past few years, haven't they?

Posted by damian at April 16, 2004 06:03 AM