Saddam is evil, but so is the ruination of Iraq

Personal view Fiorella Sultana de Maria
Istood in the Iraqi Interests' office in Damascus and stifled a shudder at the portrait of Saddam Hussein hanging there. The instinct was almost irrepressible: Saddam is the hate figure of my generation. In childhood, we saw his face grimacing on the television screen and the front page of newspapers, the monster who gassed the Kurds in their own homes and invaded Kuwait.
He is a monster. There is no reason to deny the stories of children hanged in Iraqi prisons or of dissidents brutally suppressed — the crimes committed by the Iraqi regime has been well publicised since the invasion of Kuwait. But it is worth remembering that Saddam was a monster long before he incurred the wrath of the West. It has been quickly forgotten that the Kurds were gassed and the rest of the population subjected to the cruelties of a sadistic despot when the regime still received Western support.
That said, the Gulf War was easier to justify than the current situation; Kuwait needed liberating but to recall the way it was fought as restrained or humane is simply inaccurate. Whilst news reports, showed footage of smart bombs cleverly avoiding civilians (so cleverly, in fact, that they only destroyed 600 schools), the US Secretary of State threatened to "return Iraq to a pre-Industrial age", whilst General Schwarzkopf suggested that the US might just "obliterate" Iraq altogether. They very nearly did. During this focussed and humane war of liberation, the American military destroyed over 20,000 civilian homes as well as targeting water treatment plants, sewerage systems, electrical power stations, hospitals and places of worship, subjecting the Iraqi people to the equivalent of an atomic bomb every week for the course of the war.
However justified the war might have been, it is intellectually dishonest to pretend that human life was protected. Between 100,000 and 200,000 Iraqis are estimated to have been killed, half of them women and children. It must have been difficult for the Iraqi people to be reassured that the West had no quarrel with them and was merely targeting the regime whilst civilians were slaughtered in their thousands and Saddam slept safe and sound in a concrete bunker. For that matter, it must have been difficult to respect an army of liberation that buried hundreds of Iraqi soldiers alive in their trenches to save time and gunned down and incinerated retreating soldiers on the Basra Road in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention.
I am not trying to make a pacifist statement, but 12 years on with the prospect of another war looming, it is necessary to remember the harsh realities of that event. Far too many people still think of the Gulf War as a clean military operation in which Kuwait was quickly and clinically liberated without any unnecessary wastage of human life. But modern warfare does not work like that. Nor for that matter, does modern "diplomacy".
Ironically, the sanctions placed on Iraq as a bloodless means of controlling the regime have, instead, caused the collapse of the economy and the deaths of over a million Iraqis, many of them infants, through starvation and disease, whilst the monstrous Saddam enjoys a life of luxury and an unprecedented ability to control his people. It is true that there is plenty of food in Iraq, but when the weekly salary of a teacher buys a tin of baby milk, only the very rich — the ruling elite can afford it. The recently published "dossier" on Saddam's secret weapons, if it is to be trusted, have exposed the futility of economic and military sanctions — whilst UN officials has disallowed everything from lead pencils to Beanie Babies on the grounds that they could somehow be used in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction, Saddam has apparently been able to amass an arsenal of missiles, chemical and biological weapons without much hindrance.
If, as Catholics, we are to support another war against Iraq, we must ask ourselves a number of questions: 1) Have all other courses of action been tried and found to be ineffective?
2) Is it certain that such a war will not create greater evils than the target of the war itself?
3) Does a war against Iraq have a reasonable chance of achieving its goals?
4) Are these goals legitimate or even certain?
If the answer to any of these questions is "no" then it might be time for a rethink. If there is still time.