Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. Saddam Hussein is dead. In life, he made a convenient scapegoat for everything that went wrong in the world. 9/11? Let’s blame Saddam. Economy tanking 2000-2002? Let’s blame Saddam. Mysterious “Tuck Rule” in 2002 that cheated the Raiders out of a playoff victory? Let’s blame Saddam. (I do blame him for that one, actually.)
The McClatchy Newspaper Service – on average, a far more credible source than the Associated Press - recently published an article detailing how millions of Iraqis still do not have access to clean drinking water (“Baghdad’s Water Still Undrinkable Six Years After Invasion”, 18 March 2009 http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20090318/wl_mcclatchy/3191674).
In a bad month, they report that 90% of the water in Baghdad is undrinkable. Who gets the blame for this? Is it the country that destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure (including every waste water purification plant) in 1990, rendering it to “the Middle Ages”, as a U.N. official decried on a visit there in 1991? Is it the country that repeatedly denied Iraq the ability to refurbish its water purification system, punishing millions of children and other civilians (way to “disarm” Saddam of his weapons of mass destruction)?
Nope and nope. Saddam Hussein is responsible – not the country that inflicted crimes against humanity, the United States. As Matthew Schofield writes, “Baghdad’s water network was due to be upgraded in 1984, but Saddam Hussein went to war with Iran instead. Then he invaded Kuwait .”
I see. So Saddam Hussein is at fault for not upgrading the water network, is that right?
Not according to every expert on the subject, including Professor Joy Gordon of Fairfield University. As she brilliantly detailed in an expose for Harper’s in November 2002, the U.S. used “security concerns” as a facade for “legitimising mass slaughter” of Iraq’s civilian populace by denying them of the most basic humanitarian goods and tools, including clean drinking water.
This was a deliberate, carefully orchestrated campaign, as you can read here:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2002/11/0079384
As terrible a man as Hussein was, it cannot be denied, as Gordon writes, that under his regime, “the well-being of [Iraqi] society at large improved dramatically. The social programs and economic development continued, and expanded, even during Iraq’s grueling and costly war with Iran from 1980 to 1988, a war that Saddam Hussein might not have survived without substantial U.S. backing.”
Wait a minute, wait a minute. You’re telling me that Hussein, monster that he was, actually expanded social programmes and economic development during that “gruelling and costly war with Iran”? Wow. Then who, pray tell, destroyed those waste water treatment plants? Who for over a decade denied Iraq electricity, essential foodstuffs, and the spare parts needed to fix destroyed sewage treatment facilities?
It’s all there in Dr. Gordon’s article. Don’t take my word for it; do your own indepenent research and draw your own conclusions.
In the aftermath of George W. Bush we are all so quick to congratulate ourselves for finally “getting the Iraq thing right”. Everyone agrees now, it seems, that invading was wrong, not just tactically, but even morally. Well, Republicans don’t admit to the moral part. At least no Republican today pounds his chest and brags that “the world is better off without Saddam”; Chris Hitchens has fallen perplexingly silent on this issue, as well.
We all agree that invading was a catastrophic error, and we are all in agreement that each of us was against invading in 2003. Each of us was rational-minded and humane, each of us weighed the evidence carefully. Each of us, in retrospect, marched in demonstrations and held placards in rallies to convince our leaders not to invade. Each of us was – and is – innocent.
Who ever were those (few) misguided, benighted bad guys who wanted to invade Iraq? Where did they go? Those in the media and those among us, where are they now? They are not us, certainly, because we are all innocent, as we have just established. We did not vote for George Bush in 2004, a year after he/we invaded Eye-rack. Only a few crazy people did, and they are not representative of the American people.
(Only Eye-rackis are responsible for getting the leaders they deserve, remember. Only brown-skinned people are personally guilty for having bad leaders, as it reflects poorly on their moral composition and their society’s collective character. Winston Churchill told us as much, and we still carry that ethos with us today.)
I will explore this issue of American collective guilt and memory with regard to Iraq in further detail tomorrow, or very soon, at the latest. I have a good deal of personal experience with it, and possibly, a good memory to go with it. But we all remember things perfectly, right?