In one more rehash of Hannah Arendt's befuddled thesis about the so-called banality of evil--Hitler, Stalin, and Goering were anything but--the journalist John F. Burns in the International Herald Tribune seemed to get a personal kick out of describing shackled former Iraqi leaders as going to their Nuremberg. Hussein was implicitly compared to Hitler. History will set the record straight. But let's start now.

In the world at large in which Saddam Hussein was defeated and captured and treated like a common felon, many other things had happened or were happening. In Arabia, millions of residents had no legal rights and could be deported at the whim of the autocratic authorities. It was routinely affirmed that torture was regularly applied in Egypt. Pakistan was a military dictatorship which had been abetting nuclear proliferation. Myanmar was a notorious violator of human rights. (Iran, contrary to America's wrath, was just a theocratic semi-democracy.) Thailand had become a democracy barely a few years before and when some Muslims went berserk (but unarmed) they were killed by the dozens. In Indonesia, Timorese separatism had excited the ire of the military resulting in ten thousand or more dead. In Gujarat, India, Hindus slaughtered over a thousand Muslims with the connivance of the local authorities. In Liberia and Sierra Leone, "liberation movements" had been maiming thousands and turning children into callous killers. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a name on a map where millions of civilians have died. In Colombia, rightists and leftists were regularly engaged in reciprocal butcheries. Jail conditions in some Latin American countries are so hideous that riots regularly produce hundreds of dead. Despite evidence to a limitless number of possible judicial miscarriages, executions in the USA were being carried out regularly. In China, the total of executions year in year out is in the thousands, and some for economic crimes that in America would warrant short sentences in minimum security establishments.

When Iraq was invaded law and order in that country made terrorism unthinkable. There was an independent judiciary except when, for political reasons, the executive interfered. Current descriptions of notorious Fallujah are of a city with boulevards and clinics in every neighborhood. Sadr city in Baghdad is usually described as a slum, but the streets there are wider than Madison avenue. Obviously, less opulent. The rich cultural heritage of Iraq was intact. Hussein supposedly stole billions under tolerant UN eyes. But why has this loot not been discovered? In May 2003, US treasury official said they had recovered nearly one billion dollars that Hussein and his family had "looted…hours before war began in mid-March". So far, no proof has been presented that Hussein was a common thief.  

It is a fact that Saddam Hussein had Kurds attacked with gas, because there are photographs of bloated corpses from Halabja, where a notorious gassing occurred. It has been said that Hussein's cousin, Gen. Ali Hassan al Majid, so-called Chemical Ali,  "minimized" his atrocities against Shiites be saying that the figure of victims was no more than 100,000. The occupation turned up some large suspicious graveyards, but no killing fields such as Cambodia spawned. And America, for hatred of Vietnam, actually was opposed to the Vietnamese overthrow of the Khmer Rouge.

Today, Iraq is a dismembered country with a weak central authority and the future likelihood of unresolvable civil war. If Palestine is any sort of precedent, America will be taking losses for years to come. If it just ups and leaves, which it will not if only because of the oilfields (which anyway it cannot protect adequately), the chances for peace are remote but possible.

So, in all honesty, is Bush's argument of last resort about the Second Iraqi war--that it was of democracy against tyranny--worth squat?