Obituaries reveal our pecking-order of hatred

Published on Sunday 7 January 2007 00:54

WELL-WRITTEN obituaries represent a rare form of pure journalism. Unvarnished by spin or opinion, they set out in sober detail and chronological order the notable features of a life that has ended. And in so doing, they recall episodes and characteristics that are otherwise submerged by more recent events, not to mention the re-writing of history.

The significant obituaries on Saddam Hussein fulfilled that purpose admirably. "Stalin," wrote David Hirst in the Guardian, "was his exemplar... He was unique less in kind than in degree, in the extraordinary extent to which, if the more squalid forms of human villainy are the sine qua non of the successful tyrant, he embodied them". This was a fair summary of the man who ruled for 30 years and caused at least a million people to die.

Even the most self-certain opponent of Saddam's removal might, one would think, be given pause for thought by these death notices. By the recollection of Saddam's murderous rise to power; of his Stalinist purges; of his megalomaniacal provocation of a terrible war with Iran; of his genocidal solution for the Kurds; of his use of chemical weapons and threat to "burn half of Israel" with weapons of mass destruction.

The thought which might occur to all but the most closed minds is pretty basic - that if the subject of these obituaries had not been removed from power in 2003, then he would still be in power today. That is not to gainsay the arguments for or against his removal, far less to justify much of what has happened since. But it is a necessary corrective to any delusion about the alternative - which was, yet again, to leave the successful tyrant exactly where he was.

My own complaint about the removal of Saddam is not that it eventually happened, but that it took so criminally long to get there (and then that such a mess was made of it). The historic scandal is that coalition forces did not keep going in 1991 after his eviction from Kuwait when the road to Baghdad was open, the Kurds of the north and Shias of the south ready for insurrection. There would have been no need to bolster evidence of his aggressive intent and the problems of transition would have been as nothing compared to those that later existed.

It is worth remembering, however, that many who have been most vocal in denouncing the action to remove Saddam in 2003 were equally opposed to the first Gulf War which led to him being denied the fruits of his Kuwait adventure. Left to those champions of highly selective moral causes, the mass murderer of Falujah would still be in power not only over Iraq but also Kuwait - and presumably anywhere else that he then chose to turn on.

The moral imperative of liberating Iraq from under the tyrant's heel was as much anathema to the self-styled liberal left as it ultimately was to the US State Department of the day. To both, there was a greater evil than the regime of Saddam Hussein. For the left, it was the ghastly thought of successful western intervention in an oil-rich country, while for the right, it was the fear (stoked by the paranoia of Saudi Arabia) of Iraq's break-up in the absence of a "strong-man". So the insurrectionists were betrayed and Saddam stayed in place for another dozen years, to cause more mayhem and suffering.

And therein lies the enigma of all such calculations. For the left as much as the right, the pecking-order of hatreds creates grotesque distortions of priorities. Tyranny can be sustained for fear of something worse. Even the vilest regime can be rationalised into legitimacy because it was someone else's fault that it was there in the first place. And so convolutedly on. I do not suggest a cure for the enigma, though self-awareness of its existence, at all points on the political spectrum, would sometimes help.

The glib explanation of why "regime change" later became an acceptable, if unstated, principle of American (and hence British) foreign policy is that the "neo-cons" achieved ascendancy under George W Bush. The events of 9/11 provided the licence they required to overthrow undesirable regimes with a view to putting democratic institutions in their place. The "war on terror" created a rationale for these activities and democratic objectives gave them an ostensibly high-minded purpose.

Against that background, it is worth considering another recent obituary subject. In a season of celebrity deaths, too little attention was paid to the passing of Jeanne Fitzpatrick, the godmother - in the word's most sinister sense - of the neo-con movement in US foreign policy. As ambassador to the UN and theologian of the ultra-right, Fitzpatrick was a hugely influential figure in the 1980s foreign policy of Ronald Reagan.

She made her name by scorning Jimmy Carter's commitment to human rights and ended up with no greater regard for Bush's enthusiasm for "democracy" in place of dictatorship. Fitzpatrick believed that pro-American dictatorship was as close to an ideal form of government as one was likely to come in many parts of the world. Whimpering to them about human rights only undermined the relationship. She would have tied Saddam up as a permanent ally and darn the excesses.

Within a month of going to the UN, Fitzpatrick defended El Salvador's junta over the murder of four American nuns on the grounds that "the nuns were not just nuns; the nuns were political activists". The fact that she was being wined and dined at the Argentinian embassy in Washington on the very evening that her friend Galtieri attacked the Falklands helped create the belief that the US would sit on its hands.

They don't make 'em like old Jeanne any more. Or at least we hope not. But her era reminds us that while American self-interest in foreign policy is a constant, its interpretation is ever-changing. The real question for Britain, rarely faced up to in any serious way, is whether our permanent role is to be ever-following, whatever Washington's direction.