Try Saddam or Scowcroft?

The English are so good at “send ups.” David Aaronovitch presents the 1946 trial of Hitler as it would be reported today by leading British and world newspapers. We’ve seen similar reportage in leading American and British newspapers of Saddam Hussein’s trial.

A sample dispatch, as USA TODAY would report it if existing in 1946: “One needs to ask: Is Hitler that different from other rulers? The USA and Britain justified mass bombing because of national imperatives. Hitler justified his actions because of the war with the Jews.”

Jim Hoagland, nationally syndicated foreign affairs columnist from the Washington Post, quotes Saddam’s lead trial lawyer planning his defense. “Americans…want to blame Saddam for the mass graves and killing Kurds. But they forget that they supported Saddam back then.”

Hoagland, while not necessarily really in favor of allowing Saddam’s trial to be distracted from the specific guilt of the defendant, does support a deeper examination of the prior decades’ foreign policy of the United States. Hoagland quotes a leader of France’s Socialist Party, in his introduction to a comprehensively detailed book of Saddam’s crimes, “Le Livre de Saddam Hussein,” as concluding that Iraq’s “most important weapon of mass destruction was Saddam Hussein.” Hoagland adds, “Yet, it is worth remembering – and atoning for – those who blindly or deliberately helped such a monster.”

Hoagland’s point is well taken. As he says, “Americans cannot simply walk away from that history – or from Iraq. They owe Iraqis, and themselves, more than a sudden case of moral amnesia to bolster precipitous withdrawal.”

Brent Scowcroft’s broadside at the George W. Bush administration’s policies toward Iraq present a good place to start. In a lengthy article in The New Yorker magazine (only available on dead-trees), his interviewer cites Scowcroft saying, “he would not let his feelings about good and evil dictate the advice he gave the President.” The interviewer continues, “Scowcroft does not believe that the promotion of American-style democracy abroad is a sufficiently good reason to use force.”

However, as the modern godfather of realpolitick, Henry Kissinger, reminds us, “The war in Iraq is less about geopolitics than the clash of ideologies, cultures, religious beliefs. Because of the long reach of the Islamist challenge, the outcome in Iraq will have an even deeper significance than Vietnam.” Ideologies are ultimately about concepts of good and evil, right and wrong. Scowcroft’s dismissal of this central fact reveals much about his other blindnesses.

In August 2002, seven months before the U.S. entered Iraq, Scowcroft wrote that the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is the primary source of unhappiness in the Middle East. The interviewer notes: “Unlike the current Bush administration, which is unambiguously pro-Israel, Scowcroft, James Baker, and others associated with the elder George Bush believe that Israel’s settlement policies arouse Arab anger, and that American foreign policy should reflect the fact that there are far more Arabs than Israelis in the world.”

Scowcroft’s morally clouded spectacles do not seem to see, as to many other aspects of that situation, the 1948 and 1967 attacks by the Arab states on Israel’s very right to exist in peace came long before any settlements. Apparently, he’s in the James Baker camp, of “f—k the Jews.”

The interview goes on, admitting, “Like everyone else in Washington, Scowcroft believed that Saddam maintained stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but he wrote [in the August 2002 piece] that a strong inspections program would have kept him at bay.”

Scowcroft’s un-realism does not account for the crumbling of any international will to have a strong inspections program, nor that – even in the discovered absence of such stockpiles – Saddam used every means at his disposal to retain the capacity to restart production once the weak inspections petered out, and that Saddam ably employed his $10-billion skim from the UN’s oil-for-food program and illegal oil exports to buy technology and UN Security Council defenders and appeasers.

There’s much more self-revealing inanity in the full interview.

Back to Jim Hoagland’s point. It was the timidity of Scowcroft and his compatriots in the first Bush administration that left Saddam in power in 1991. It was this unreal amoralism that encouraged the Shia to revolt, and stood aside as they were slaughtered by Saddam. Going back to Scowcroft’s then lesser, but important, role in the earlier Reagan administration, it was then that Iraq was supplied and supported in its aggressive war against emergent militantly Islamist Iran.

As I’ve written, there are clear international legal and moral grounds for trying Saddam, and the procedures are in accord with established international law and precedent.

Brent Scowcroft, and his fellow moral myopics, also have much to answer for.