'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Marching for Saddam?

In his "Informed Comment" blog, Juan Cole recently wrote:

I wasn't exactly for the war, I was just unable to bring myself to march to keep Saddam in power.

I don't think that implication is at all a fair one to make. As someone who marched and undertook a lot of other activities to try to prevent Bombs-Away Don and his cronies from launching that disastrous war, I never for one moment thought I was "marching to keep Saddam in power".

I think Juan should know my work and my writings well enough to know that. And he probably knows enough other people in the anti-war movement that, on a moment's reflection, he would recognize that his blanket charge against all the anti-war marchers/protesters/activists is unfounded and unfair.

Juan has been so wise on so many issues in the Middle East that his slur hurts. I know he shares with me an strong commitment to the wellbeing of the peoples of the Middle East. In that same post he gives as the reason for his support for the war (which he admitted was "tepid"), Saddam's record of iterated genocides against Iraq's Kurds and Shi-ites. Unlike the whole elaborate constructs of fabricated nonsense about Iraq's alleged WMDs, or its alleged links with Al-Qaeda, the argument about Saddam's appalling and incontestable record of human-rights abuses is a serious one to which opponents of the war need to give intense consideration.

I have started to do this. Back at the end of June (and again at the end of July), I argued here on JWN that yes, we should all--governments, NGOs, and the global citizenry--have dealt far more effectively with the Iraqi human rights situation all along, but that, crucially, there were certainly ways of doing this other than, and probably much more effectively than, the launching of a war.

The one I have proposed is the creation-- for Saddam's Iraq, or perhaps for North Korea, Burma, or other grossly rights-abusing totalitarian regimes today-- of a human-rights UNMOVIC.

I would love for Juan to retract his slur and (as a way, perhaps, of enacting his remorse over expressing it) to join with me in brainstorming ways that the rights situation of people living under totalitarian dictatorships can be improved in ways other than the unleashing of that unfailingly destructive and harmful instrument, war.

What d'you think, Juan? All that and a new semester of teaching, as well?