Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

It cannot be denied that Saddam Hussein was an authoritarian ruler who committed crimes against humanity. But comparisons with Hitler are outright ridiculous and lack all sense of perspective. The total number of people executed during the reign of Hussein--200,000--is less then the number of Hitler's victims in three months. It is also less then half the number of innocent Iraqi children who starved to death as a direct result of the economic embargo we imposed on Iraq through the UN between 1991 and 2003, which reached 500,000. The notorious mass graves unearthed by US soldiers in Iraq in 2003, claimed to be the consequence of Hussein's execution of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, actually contained the bodies of children who died from malnutrition as a result of the economic sanctions. The US State Department unintentionally confirmed this fact, reporting that the graves "contain members of every major religious and ethnic group in Iraq". In other words, the sanctions made no distinction between Shiite and Sunni Muslim or between Arab and Kurd, whereas it is well known that Hussein's attacks were directed primarily against the Kurds of northern Iraq and the Shiite Muslims of southern Iraq.

According to UN weapons inspectors, in July 1994 Hussein had fully obliterated all illegal weapons of mass destruction, closed his extensive nuclear production facilities, and allowed the installation of an intrusive monitoring and verification system that included periodic UN inspections, US reconnaissance flights, and "no-fly" zones in northern and southern Iraq. When Hussein refused to permit some of the required inspections later on, our pervasive hypocrisy came to the fore. We loudly decried Hussein's violation of international law and charged that his defiance meant he was hiding illegal weapons. But our country and Israel have consistently rebelled against UN inspection of our own arsenals for decades. Begun in the 1970s, Hussein's nuclear weaponry project was a defensive response to the Israeli nuclear weapons facility, which was built with the help of US materials and Israel's evasion of international inspections (sounds familiar).

The regime of Hussein was in many ways beneficial for Iraq. For one thing, he continuously permitted the Iraqi people their most basic rights to life, food, clothing, shelter, and travel within the country. Crime rates were low and terrorism was almost nonexistent. As a secular Arab state under Hussein, Iraq emerged as one of the most modern countries in the Arab world. The nation enjoyed security as well as economic prosperity and social equality, with Baghdad being a major center of learning and commerce. Iraq's gross domestic product rose steadily year after year. Abortion was illegal. Instead of dumping millions of tons of garbage in landfills, the country recycled its waste. Ancient cultural monuments were respected and carefully preserved.

In fact, our record of moral transgressions makes the presidential history of Saddam Hussein look tame as a pussycat. If Hussein was a cruel tyrant who deserved death, then President Clinton deserves death for killing half a million Iraqi children through an economic embargo, and President Bush deserves death for murdering more than 600,000 innocent Iraqi civilians and severely impoverishing millions more. I urge Hannity to be honest and fair!