Saddam's Legacy

Links Updated: 04-17-05

With Monday marking the first anniversary of the capture of Saddam Hussein, this is an excellent time to reflect on the dictator's legacy:

-Mass Graves containing an estimated 300,000 victims.

-The gassing to death of 5,000 Kurdish civilians at Halabja in 1988.

-The genocidal Anfal Campaign of 1987-88, in which over 100,000 Kurds were murdered.

-The massacre of tens of thousands of Shia and Kurds in the wake of the failed 1991 uprisings.

-The systematic destruction of Iraq's southern marshes, and brutal deportation of their Marsh Arab inhabitants.

-The barbarous totalitarian repression of any opposition, by means of torture, rape, mutilation, and murder.

Saddam was not just another dictator. He was a genocidal mass murderer, the Arab world's answer to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. As UN Human Rights Special Rapporteur Max Van der Stoel told the National Press Club on March 26, 1992, Saddam's record of atrocities against his own people is "one of the worst since World War Two -- comparable in gravity to crimes of the Khmer Rouge (in Cambodia) or Idi Amin (in Uganda)". Read Van der Stoel's February 26, 1999 report (PDF) for details of Saddam's later crimes.

There is no question but that Iraq and the world are better off with this monster in prison than in power.