It was better under Saddam
Posted by: Dale Franks on Saturday, April 01, 2006
Ronald Steele writes for the The Guardian that, essentially, Iraqis were better off under Saddam Hussein than they are today. Since Saddam's passage from power, life, for Iraqis, has become nasty, brutish, and short. It's just a terribly violent place, you see.For Iraqis in Baghdad, duck and cover is already a metaphor for daily life. On each of the seven visits I have made here since Saddam Hussein was toppled, security conditions have worsened. The downward slide since my previous trip for the December elections seems particularly steep.
The spate of sectarian revenge killings that followed the bombing of the golden-domed shrine at Samarra last month is not yet over, in spite of an 8pm curfew imposed in Baghdad. Abductions and murders continue relentlessly. Bodies, often scarred by torture and with their hands tied, have been turning up on lonely roadsides at a rate of 13 a day. Shops close their metal shutters and streets start emptying at 4pm as people flee home well before the curfew. Many Baghdadis rarely venture out except to the corner store. Those who drive to work vary their routes. A doctor who uses taxis to get to her hospital says she tells the driver she's a patient, "since it makes kidnapping a bit less likely".
Even shopping has become risky. Eight people at an electrical-appliance store in the middle-class suburb of Mansour were lined up against a wall and shot dead this week by masked gunmen. Two money-exchange dealers and three other shops were also attacked by armed raiders in Baghdad. Whether the motives are criminal or political, the result is terror and chaos.Bodies turning up at a rate of 13 per day! People rushing home before curfew! It's intolerable, I tell you, intolerable!
Yet, Ronald Hilton estimates that, over the 24 years of Saddam Hussein's rule, about 600,000 people were killed by the Iraqi government. Now, maybe I ain't all that good at cipherin', but by my math, if you assume that Saddam Hussein was in power for 24 years (8,646 days, including leap years), and 600,000 people were executed during that time, you come up with an average of 69.4 people a day executed by Saddam Hussein's regime. That doesn't, by the way, include the 1,000,000 or so Iraqis who died during Mr. Hussein's wars of aggression agsint Iraq or Kuwait. That's just executions.
So, Mr. Steele's argument, essentially, is that Iraqis were better off when they had a tranquil public life with 70 people being bumped off by their own government every day, than they are now with 13 people dying in sectarian violence each day. Nevermind that, at the current rate, it will take 126 years for the daily death toll in Iraq to equal the death toll under Saddam Hussein. It just feels really unsafe.
And, frankly, Iraq is really unsafe. But it'as a fundamentally different kind of threat that existed under Saddam. Now the threat is overt violence; easily seen, and easily identified. Under Saddam Hussein, the threat was far more subtle. Your neighbors merely disappeared in the middle of the night, with hardly a ripple to mark their passing. Sure, you were five times more likely to be bumped off by Saddam Hussein, but at least he had the good breeding to ensure you went quietly, without making a big deal out of it.
And, really, that's all that counts, isn't it?
And, really, that's all that counts, isn't it?
A tip of the hat to:
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