'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

How Saddam could have been confronted on human rights

So here's W's main line of defense now: "Oh, who really cares about Saddam's WMDs one way or the other, but the main thing is, we did good to get rid of the old SOB, right?"

H'mm. It's an interesting argument, and one that deserves to be taken seriously. (Though so too, of course, does the whole question of leading the world into this war under totally false pretenses... )

I think I have two responses to the argument.

The first is, yes, it's good that SH is no longer in power-- but we don't know yet whether the situation, say, two or five years down the pike will be even more rights-abusing than what Iraq was throughout the past Saddamist decade.

We certainly can't say that Iraq will be any kind of a settled, stable democracy. Or even, whether it will have stayed as one nation. Or whether, after two to five years, it may be sorta-kinda muddling along (with a lot of help from the neighbors in Iran.) Or whether its own internal tensions-- unleashed, post-Saddam as Yugoslavia's were, post-Tito-- may plunge the whole country and some of its neighbors into prolonged and really cruel fighting that would be even more damaging to human welfare than Saddamist rule.

We just cannot tell. So let's not make any kind of a judgment yet that, based on its consequences if not on the validity of the stated casus belli, the war against Saddam was a Good Thing.

(You think things couldn't possibly get worse for Iraqis than they were under Saddam? I'll tell you, I lived in Lebanon for six years of the ever-degenerating civil chaos there. Sometimes we'd wake up to news of some new atrocity and say, "Well! At least this thing can't possibly get any worse than this!" And sure enough, some weeks later, it always would.)

Okay, that's one line of argument. And by the way the consequences of the ill-planned Rumsfeldian war venture look worse and worse by the day.

The other line of argument takes seriously the proposition that Saddam's human rights violations were so unspeakable, so atrocious, that Something Had To Be Done. But then the question, were there serious alternatives for dealing with the rights-abuse issue other than the unleashing of this ill-advised war?

And I say Yes! If the members of the Security Council had gotten seriously exercized over the issue of Saddam's proven record of atrocious rights abuse-- as seriously as they did over, say the unproven allegations regarding his development of some of the very same weapons that all the Permanent Five members of the SC already have-- then they could have used many of the same kinds of mechanisms to deal with his rights violations as they tried to use regarding his weapons-regime proliferations.

I'm talking monitors. I'm talking intrusive inspections. I'm talking deadlines, and reports, and transparency, and verifiable compliance.

Why not?

OK, you may say, but the UN has never done anything like this regarding human rights before. Well you know what? They never did anything nearly as intrusive as UNMOVIC before, either. But Geore W Bush really, really wanted it, and he succeeded in ramming it through a dubious or even hostile Security Council.

If he had really, really cared about human rights-- or if the rest of us had cared enough about it to be able to persuade him to do it-- the Security Council could have created a Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission regarding Iraqi human rights practice, as well as or instead of the one for that was looking for those chimerical WMDs.

So here's a suggestion. Why don't we take some of the lessons and SOPs from the weapons UNMOVIC and think about trying to apply them to a truly atrocious human-rights situation instead? Like Burma, or North Korea. Non-violent, but firm.