The War is Justified by Saddam’s Evil…It Will Give Iraq a Better Future

By Richard Chesnoff

There's a lot of hand-wringing over what happens to Iraq after Saddam Hussein is ousted, which he will be very shortly, now that the war has begun.



Predictably, many of the same people who have been moaning about the Bush administration's determination to oust the Butcher of Baghdad predict that once he's gone, Iraq will disintegrate into a sort of Arabic-speaking Yugoslavia – fractious rival states that spend more time murdering each other than building a nation.



Worse yet, they say, America will be caught in the middle, with U.S. taxpayers footing the monumental bill for an unpopular occupation.



I think they're wrong – just as they were wrong to suggest that we and our allies could save the world from Saddam by putting our faith in the likes of France's Jacques Chirac or the UN's Hans Blix and Kofi Annan.



To be sure, Iraq always has had major mess potential. A largely artificial nation of a gazillion ethnic groups and religions, it was cobbled together after World War I by Lawrence of Arabia and other British Arabists. But this mix of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, of Chaldean and Assyrian Christians, of Kurds and Turkomans, of exotic swamp, desert and mountain tribes, is still one of the Middle East's wealthiest and best-educated nations.



Twenty-three years of Saddam's dictatorship have left once-proud Iraq bereft of many of its finest political minds.



But scores of bright leaders – rivals though they may be – have survived in exile, awaiting the chance to return and build a democratic nation.



A pipe dream? Actually, the role model for that progressive new state already exists in the Kurdish-controlled areas of northern Iraq where one of the Mideast's few free societies has emerged under the cover of the Anglo-American war planes that patrol the area.



According to Oxford University historian Andrew Apostolou, the new Iraq could be an extension of this Kurdish achievement: free and democratic, a pro-Western federation of provincial states with extensive autonomy for all major ethnic groups.



In a recent report for the Washington-based Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Apostolou says that during the last 10 years, the Kurds have tripled the number of schools and doctors and have rebuilt villages and cultural institutions.



Unlike Yasser Arafat's Palestine, there's freedom of the press, with scores of publications and broadcasts in Kurdish and even in Aramaic, the language of Jesus and of the once-persecuted Assyrian Christian minority.



There's even cooperation among once-squabbling political factions. “The Kurds are now committed to a pragmatic future in a federal Iraq instead of an impossible independence,” says Apostolou.



Twelve years ago, I covered the first Persian Gulf War with U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq. Of all my Desert Storm memories, none is more poignant than standing on the outskirts of the southern Iraqi city of Basra soon after the ceasefire watching Shiite rebels who had sneaked across the lines pleading for the American and allied military support they had been promised before they rose up against Saddam.



That support never came, and most of these rebels and their families were brutally slaughtered.



Now's our opportunity to make it up to their memory and prove to the naysayers that while it's not going to be easy, there is promise for a democratic Iraq that uses its monumental oil assets for all its people, not just its dictator and his cronies.