A Kinder, Gentler Saddam Hussein

Sometimes it’s easier to admit our own faults than our enemies’ virtues. But to judge from the warrior press, the U.S. Government has no faults, and Saddam Hussein has no virtues. Has everyone forgotten the adage that there’s a little bit of good in the worst of us?

Moral lopsidedness should always make us suspicious. Saddam Hussein sounds like a pretty bad apple, all right. But his emergence into Bad Applehood occurred rather suddenly in the spring of 1990. Before that we had barely heard of him, except as a minor ally of the United States; then, all at once, the press began making him out to be a Hitler with body odor.

Why had this never been called to our attention before? How had a Hitler — particularly one with poor personal hygiene — eluded our notice so long?

The United States and Great Britain were particularly alarmed that he had annexed the tiny neighboring country of Kuwait. Throughout their histories, the pitch of indignation suggested, both countries had scrupulously avoided claiming other lands or molesting the natives. But the Iraqi dictator had not only grabbed Kuwait’s oil fields, but had specifically directed his soldiers to raid hospitals and destroy any infant attached to an incubator. He was not only a Hitler, but a Herod to boot.

Well! One can’t stand for that, can one? So the civilized nations took off the gloves and pummeled Iraq pretty soundly, desisting only when Hussein agreed to permit inspectors to monitor his weapons programs and neonatal units.

Today we are on the verge of another war with Iraq, because Hussein is said to be stubbornly working on weapons of mass destruction and also doing his bit for international terrorism into the bargain. This time, however, his Arab neighbors, including Kuwait, don’t share our enthusiasm for giving the blighter what he deserves. Nor do our traditional European allies. They seem to feel that he is less of a Hitler today than he was in 1990, and that any new war could cause a regional explosion in the entire Middle East, with such side-effects as a serious disruption of the flow of cheap oil to the West.

Possibly, as our warrior press insists, these are but the petty cavils of appeasing nitpickers. But there is another angle that needs to be considered here. And this is where the old credit-where-credit-is-due principle kicks in.

This time, even Saddam Hussein’s worst enemies aren’t accusing him of molesting the incubators. But they aren’t giving him any credit for improvement either, as a fair and balanced approach would warrant. And yet, the fact is plain: since 1991 there hasn’t been a single report of Saddam Hussein disturbing an infant ward.

Has he curbed his fiendish appetite for the blood of babies? Or has he been chastened by the walloping he took last time? His skeptical critics may argue that the cunning monster is only biding his time, waiting for his next opportunity to pounce on the newborn; but the burden of proof should be on them. Any objective observer must concede that the man has shown signs of genuine reform. At this point in his career, one would hardly be surprised to find the man cuddling an infant. Eleven years is a long time to go without raising hell in the neonatal unit. How many other world leaders could match that record?

This is not to say that the man has become a saint. It is merely to point out that his critics are being strangely silent on a matter they made a great fuss about a decade ago. If his treatment of the newborn was an index of his character then, why not now?

His critics may rejoin that he is simply feigning the softer sentiments for public-relations purposes; or that his attitudes toward infants have softened only because he has come to see them as potential terrorists or suicide bombers, if properly nurtured. What does he have to do to earn a mite of respect? Surely we can bomb Baghdad to bits while agreeing heartily that Saddam Hussein has confounded the critics who accuse him of child abuse.

One wonders what would satisfy such critics. They would probably question the bona fides of St. Francis of Assisi.

Joseph Sobran