ramm.stein
26.11.06, 19:59
Jonathan Chait: Bring back Saddam Hussein
Restoring the dictator to power may give Iraqis the jolt of authority they
need. Have a better solution?
November 26, 2006
THE DEBATE about Iraq has moved past the question of whether it was a mistake
(everybody knows it was) to the more depressing question of whether it is
possible to avert total disaster. Every self-respecting foreign policy
analyst has his own plan for Iraq. The trouble is that these tracts are
inevitably unconvincing, except when they argue why all the other plans would
fail. It's all terribly grim.
So allow me to propose the unthinkable: Maybe, just maybe, our best option is
to restore Saddam Hussein to power.
ADVERTISEMENTYes, I know. Hussein is a psychotic mass murderer. Under his
rule, Iraqis were shot, tortured and lived in constant fear. Bringing the
dictator back would sound cruel if it weren't for the fact that all those
things are also happening now, probably on a wider scale.
At the outset of the war, I had no high hopes for Iraqi democracy, but I paid
no attention to the possibility that the Iraqis would end up with a worse
government than the one they had. It turns out, however, that there is
something more awful than totalitarianism, and that is endless chaos and
civil war.
Nobody seems to foresee the possibility of restoring order to Iraq. Here is
the basic dilemma: The government is run by Shiites, and the security
agencies have been overrun by militias and death squads. The government is
strong enough to terrorize the Sunnis into rebellion but not strong enough to
crush this rebellion.
Meanwhile, we have admirably directed our efforts into training a
professional and nonsectarian Iraqi police force and encouraging
reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites. But we haven't succeeded. We may
be strong enough to stop large-scale warfare or genocide, but we're not
strong enough to stop pervasive chaos.
Hussein, however, has a proven record in that department. It may well be
possible to reconstitute the Iraqi army and state bureaucracy we disbanded,
and if so, that may be the only force capable of imposing order in Iraq.
Chaos and order each have a powerful self-sustaining logic. When people
perceive a lack of order, they act in ways that further the disorder. If a
Sunni believes that he is in danger of being killed by Shiites, he will throw
his support to Sunni insurgents who he sees as the only force that can
protect him. The Sunni insurgents, in turn, will scare Shiites into
supporting their own anti-Sunni militias.
And it's not just Iraqis who act this way. You could find a smaller-scale
version of this dynamic in an urban riot here in the United States. But when
there's an expectation of social order, people will act in a civilized
fashion.
Restoring the expectation of order in Iraq will take some kind of large-scale
psychological shock. The Iraqi elections were expected to offer that shock,
but they didn't. The return of Saddam Hussein — a man every Iraqi knows, and
whom many of them fear — would do the trick.
The disadvantages of reinstalling Hussein are obvious, but consider some of
the upside. He would not allow the country to be dominated by Iran, which is
the United States' major regional enemy, a sponsor of terrorism and an
instigator of warfare between Lebanon and Israel. Hussein was extremely
difficult to deal with before the war, in large part because he apparently
believed that he could defeat any U.S. invasion if it came to that. Now he
knows he can't. And he'd probably be amenable because his alternative is
death by hanging.
I know why restoring a brutal tyrant to power is a bad idea. Somebody explain
to me why it's worse than all the others.
www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-chait26nov26,0,991459.column?coll=la-home-commentary
