http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110003834
In part:
“I am fully aware in saying this that the present U.S. administration has made itself an obstacle in various ways to the development of a more robust and comprehensive framework of international law. But the thing cuts both ways. The war to depose Saddam Hussein and his criminal regime was not of a piece with that. It didn’t have to be opposed by all the forces that did in fact oppose it. It could, on the contrary, have been supported–by France and Germany and Russia and the U.N., and by a mass democratic movement of global civil society. Just think about that. Just think about the kind of precedent it would have set for other genocidal, or even just lavishly murderous, dictatorships–instead of all those processions of shame across the world’s cities, and whose success would have meant the continued abandonment of the Iraqi people.
It is, in any event, such realities–the brutalizing and murder by the Baathist regime of tens upon tens of thousands of its own nationals–that the recent war has brought to an end. It should have been supported for this reason, irrespective of the reasons (concerning weapons of mass destruction) that George Bush and Tony Blair put up front themselves; though it is disingenuous of the war’s critics to speak now as if the humanitarian case for war formed no part of the public rationale of the Coalition, since it was clearly articulated by both the president and the prime minister more than once.
Here is one approximate measure of the barbarities of the Baathist regime I have just referred to. It comes not from the Pentagon, or anyone in the Bush administration, or from Tony Blair or those around him. It comes from Human Rights Watch. According to Human Rights Watch, during 23 years of Saddam’s rule some 290,000 Iraqis disappeared into the regime’s deadly maw, the majority of these reckoned to be now dead. Rounding this number down by as much as 60,000 to compensate for the “reckoned to be,” that is 230,000. It is 10,000 a year. It is 200 people every week. And I’ll refrain from embellishing with details, which you should all know, as to exactly how a lot of these people died.
Had the opposition to the war succeeded, this is what it would have postponed–and postponed indefinitely–bringing to an end. This is how almost the whole international left expressed its moral solidarity with the Iraqi people. Worse still, some sections of the left seemed none too bothered about making common cause with, marching alongside, fundamentalist religious bigots and known racists; and there were also those who dismissed Iraqi voices in support of the war as coming from American stooges–a disgraceful lie.”