Bulletin boards around Saint Louis University are currently adorned with flyers advertising a rally that will protest, according to the flyer, “war on Iraq.” First off, that is poor political science: The United States, if it determines that war is necessary, would not be going to war “on” or “with” the country of Iraq. The United States would be going to war with Saddam Hussein and anyone else in Saddam’s inner circle whose occupation is the dispersal of misery and the multiplication of death.
Anyway, the flyer depicts an array of shadowed figures throwing up their arms; under which flailing comes the statement, “Not In Our Names.” That is, the sponsors of the rally want to make sure that President George W. Bush does not wage war under the false consciousness that such action has the sanction of B.T. Rice, Joan Suarez, Emery Washington, Harriett Woods–and, presumably, all the others who desire “justice not war.”
Well, fine. Perhaps, however, the “Not In Our Names” martyrs will consent to war in the name of someone else; actually, in the name of two other people–an Iraqi husband and wife.
Arrested in late 2001, and accused of conspiring with Saddam oppositionists, the couple refused to sign a confession. In response, the interrogators separated the husband and wife, and the latter “was stripped naked and cigarettes stubbed out on all parts of her body whenever she refused to implicate her husband. She was beaten and thrown around the interrogation room. Her children were forced to watch the torture.”
As for the husband, his arms “were tied behind his back and he was then suspended in the air using a hook hung from the ceiling.”
Then, from “close range, he was . . . shot at with a pistol whenever he refused to agree to sign his confession. Sometimes shots were fired which missed his body, at other times the pistol muzzle was placed against his fingers, toes or arms and fired so as to mutilate these areas.”
The story of this couple (who somehow survived and later fled the country) is told in a dossier just released by the British government. The dossier, titled “Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses,” is a comprehensive summation of Saddam’s evil. In his brutality, in his complete disregard for the value of human life, he is as monstrous as any figure from the Third Reich. (A BBC correspondent spoke with an Iraqi official, now in a Kurdish prison, who boasted, “We could make a kebab out of a child if we wanted to.”)
The British report amplifies what hitherto has been a mere whisper: That the case for regime change may be justified not merely in geo-political terms (i.e., preventing Saddam’s use of nuclear weapons), but in terms of human rights.
The question is not incidental. Anyone with any sense of history who reflects upon the genocide of the holocaust understands the ramifications of delay.
If only we had acted sooner, people say. Furthermore, military intervention in the name of humanitarianism is nothing new for the United States. In the 1990s, President Clinton sent troops to Somalia and the Balkans, even though American interests were not at stake. Massive starvation and Slobodan Milosevic’s forced exile of ethnic Albanians were considered too terrible to ignore.
Now, there is no evidence that Saddam is attempting to wipe out an entire race, nor is it evident that he is gassing people by the thousands.
But there is no doubt that his cruelty rivals that of the Nazis. The question is: Is the West, particularly the United States, morally obliged to do something about the torture, the killing and the maiming, about the incidents of evil brought to light in the British report?
The answer is obvious: absolutely. But the recognition that something must be done does not, of course, mean the United States knows exactly what to do, how much to do it, or when.
However, war must remain an option. To take war off the table, to argue that no provocation calls for the use of armed force, is to engage in self-serving moral exhibitionism: college students can say they are “anti-war” and tout their peace-loving credentials; meanwhile, children continue to be tortured, people continue to have their limbs cut off . . . and the only thing that could stop that–war to overthrow Saddam–is not an option.
In the next few weeks and months, note the response of Democrats and others on the left as they begin to ponder the hell in which Iraqi citizens live.
Liberals, as Christopher Hitchens has recently pointed out, are notoriously incapable of believing that Hitler-level evil remains a reality. The British dossier is a sally against this incapacity, and it further weakens the left’s already feeble case against pre-emptive war.
Matt Emerson is a junior studying philosophy and political science.
