Apologists for Ba'athists and Slave Masters

If we are going to be on the record historically as opposing this Iraq War, then at least let us not also be recorded as Ba’athist apologists. We are slipping toward re-casting Saddam Hussein as some misunderstood moderate and imagining that the effort to democratize Iraq is "subjecting the Iraqi people to suffering far greater than anything Saddam could dish out." But lost among the daily news of Baghdad car bombings was a recent report by the free Iraqi government that to date, 300,000 of Saddam Hussein’s victims have been uncovered in 290 Iraqi mass graves.

WMD stockpiles or no, Saddam Hussein had invaded two neighbouring countries and attacked two others with ballistic missiles, was attacking U.S. and British warplanes patrolling the no-fly zone he had accepted, had expelled UN weapons inspectors he had agreed to allow, had violated 17 Resolutions of the UN Security Council, had used chemical weapons repeatedly over five years killing 30,000, had produced biological weapons and developed nuclear weapons, had jailed, tortured, amputated, and executed untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, had created four million refugees, had expelled 100,000 minorities from oil-rich areas and replaced them with Arabs, had destroyed 2,000 Kurdish villages and the wetlands of Iraq’s Marsh Arabs, had imposed religious restrictions on Iraq’s majority Shiites, had abused the UN Oil-For-Food program causing mass malnutrition, had ordered the assassination of a former U.S. President and a Kuwaiti Emir, was openly sponsoring Palestinian suicide bombers, and so on. How much more would Saddam Hussein have had to do before we all agreed he had to go?

And if Saddam Hussein had to go, then how if not by force from outside Iraq? It was thought that a domestic revolt against Hussein in his weakened position immediately following the Gulf War would effect a positive regime change from within Iraq, but even then, Hussein crushed the revolt utterly and brutally. UN Security Council Resolutions demanding better behaviour from Hussein's regime were no more than words on papers. Economic sanctions were further depriving the Iraqi people while doing nothing to weaken Hussein's regime, as the UN Oil-For-Food program was grossly abused for the benefit of Hussein and his Western supporters. Intermittent aerial bombings through the 1990s were half-measures which left Hussein untouched in his bunkers. And Hussein was unusually skilled at disposing of any conceivable political challengers, and his heir-apparent sons were generally considered to be more psychopathic than even their father. It took the Iraq War to finally end 35 years of malevolent Ba’athist rule in Iraq.

We have been here before. A century and a half ago, it took the U.S. Civil War to finally free America’s slaves, but we Maritimers opposed that war, damned the abolitionists, and excused the slavery.

In his 1998 book In Armageddon’s Shadow, Greg Marquis writes, "By 1861, Maritimers were not unfamiliar with pro-slavery opinions, and as the Civil War progressed many who opposed the institution in theory began to make excuses for it in practice." "…a New Brunswicker who had lived in the South went so far as to argue that the slaves were comfortable, happy, and loyal…."

When President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in late 1862, "the Novascotian reminded readers that Washington had not gone to war to liberate the slaves."

"Maritime critics of the North delighted in listing…the inadequacies of ‘coloured’ troops in Union service." And "the Novascotian described the New Orleans area in 1864, where thousands of [liberated slaves] had perished from disease and starvation since [Union] occupation. This supposedly proved that the African was unfit for self-government."

Opposition to the Civil War was not without compelling points. By the war’s end the combined death toll was a cataclysmic 558,000. The Lincoln Administration had enacted undemocratic emergency measures such as the suspension of habeas corpus. And the international consensus led by the great powers such as Britain and France was unofficially but decidedly anti-Union. But all this could not undo the earth-shaking achievements of the U.S. Civil War, that it freed the slaves, reunified a nation that would go on to lead the world, and served as a model for future liberation.

Likewise, whatever else may be said of this Iraq War, it has rescued Iraq and the world from Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athism and sparked the most Middle East reform in generations. America, Britain, Australia, Poland, and the other Allies truly have made the world a better place by dismantling Hussein’s regime and establishing a democracy in its wake, and if we will not be counted among the Allies then let us at least be counted among the grateful.

Andrew W. Smith, Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia and Tulsa, Oklahoma