Iraq, Rwanda, and the Road to Libya

Remember when Saddam Hussein was toppled and all of Iraq's problems went away?

On the National Post’s blog, Christopher Hitchens makes the latest attempt to link the overthrow of Saddam Hussein to the recent spate of Arab uprisings. “Can anyone imagine how the Arab spring would have played out if a keystone Arab state, oil-rich and heavily armed with a track record of intervention in its neighbours’ affairs and a history of all-out mass repression against its own civilians, were still the private property of a sadistic crime family?” Hitchens asks. The fall of Saddam served as inspiration for repressed people in other nations, and Hitchens turns this into an argument to urge NATO to do to Moammar Gadhafi what George W. Bush did to Saddam. No doubt many would like to see Gadhafi go the way of Hussein, but startlingly absent from Hitchens’ analysis is what effect the toppling of Saddam had on Iraq. However you judge the strength of its fledgling democracy today, the past eight years have seen violence on a horrific scale as the post-dictatorship government struggled to survive. Are we willing to risk inflicting such chaos on the Libyans, especially when it’s uncertain who would take Gadhafi’s place?

Watching the international community intervene in Libya, the Globe and Mail’s Alice Musabende writes, “I must confess that, for a brief moment, I felt a little jealous of the Libyan people.” Jealous because, as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, Musabende says Libyans are on the receiving end of the kind of intervention her people clamoured for in vain in 1994. The tone of her piece is apt; not bitter, not angry, just genuinely confused and concerned. “What made the Libyan intervention a priority of the UN and the U.S., France and Canada, way ahead of Ivory Coast, a war-torn nation that’s descended into chaos?” she asks. “What made the world suddenly intervene in Libya, a country not far from Sudan, where another genocidal despot became the first sitting head of state to be indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court?” Nobody seems to have an adequate answer for that, least of all the people leading the Libyan intervention.