Charles Krauthammer
Iraq: A moral reckoning
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | There is a large and overlooked truth about the American occupation of Iraq: Whereas in postwar Germany and Japan we were rebuilding countries that had been largely destroyed by us, in Iraq today we are rebuilding a country destroyed by its own regime.
In World War II we leveled entire cities (Tokyo, Dresden, Hiroshima, many more), targeted and razed the enemy's industrial infrastructure, killed and displaced countless civilians. We turned the countries to rubble; then we rebuilt them.
In Iraq, it was Saddam Hussein who turned the place to rubble. By any historical standard, the amount of destruction caused by the coalition was small. Most of the damage was inflicted on the symbols, barracks, ministries and communication organs of the Baathist regime. The infrastructure -- roads, bridges, dams, sewage systems, schools, mosques and hospitals -- was barely touched.
And as for the people, one of the more unnoticed facts of this war was the absence of refugees -- the Iraqi people's silent homage to their trust in the stated allied purpose of coming to liberate and not destroy.
Iraq today is a social, economic, ecological and political ruin not because of allied bombing but because of Baath Party rule. Since 1979 Hussein had managed the economic miracle of reducing by 75 percent the gross domestic product of the second-richest oil patch on the planet. That takes work. Hussein's capacity for destruction was up to the task. He reduced the Shiite south to abject poverty. He turned a once well-endowed infrastructure to rot by lavishing Iraq's vast oil resources on two things: weaponry and his own luxuries. And in classic Stalinist fashion, he destroyed civil society, systematically extirpating any hint of free association and civic participation.
And don't talk to me about sanctions being the cause of this misery. First of all, Hussein willfully brought on the sanctions by violating the disarmament conditions that he signed to end the Persian Gulf War. Moreover, the billions he skimmed and scammed from the U.N. oil-for-food program and from even shadier oil deals went into schools filled to the rafters with machine guns, into cold cash stashed behind walls and into shagadelic palaces -- about 50 built after the Gulf War and thus under sanctions.
Upon the detritus of 30 years of indigenous misrule, we come to rebuild. This is not to say that we lack self-interest here. We are embarking on this reconstruction out of the same enlightened altruism that inspired the rebuilding of Germany and Japan -- trusting that economic and political success in Iraq will have a stabilizing and modernizing effect on the entire region.
But our self-interest does not detract from the truth that what we are doing in Iraq is morally different from what we did after World War II. In Iraq, we are engaged in rescue rather than the undoing of our own destruction. We've undertaken the maddening task of cleaning up someone else's mess.
As the extent of the horror inflicted by the Baathist regime is documented day by day, opponents of the war are increasingly shamed. With every mass grave discovered, those who marched with such moral assurance just two months ago under the banner of human rights and social justice must make an accounting. In the name of peace, they supported the legitimacy and defended the inviolability of a regime that made relentless war on every value the left pretends to uphold:
- Human rights: Outside of North Korea, Hussein was the greatest violator of human rights in the world. The list of his crimes, the murders and the tortures, will take a generation to catalogue.
- Economic equity and social justice: Hussein was not just a murderer, he was the king of robber barons. Since 1983, Iraq has not even had a national budget. Every penny of its wealth was plundered by Hussein and his fellow Mafiosi and spent on the most grotesque extravagances, while his people were made to starve.
- The environment: Hussein was unquestionably the greatest eco-terrorist in history. During the Gulf War he produced the worst deliberate oil spill ever. He followed that with the worst oil-well fires ever. Then came perhaps the most astonishing ecological crime in history: deliberately draining the marshes of southern Iraq in order to depopulate and starve out the Marsh Arabs, who were hostile to his regime, creating a wasteland that will take years for the world -- meaning Iraq's American rescuers -- to undo.
Torturer, murderer, plunderer, despoiler. "We've gotten rid of him," said presidential candidate Howard Dean, prewar darling of the Democratic left. "I suppose that's a good thing."
It was a very good thing. A noble thing. And rebuilding the place that Saddam
Hussein destroyed is an even nobler thing. It is fine to carp about our initial
failures at reconstruction; it is well to remember, however, the nobility of the
entire enterprise.
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