Sesungguhnya, seorang penguasa lalim dan ganas, yang sempat membantai
begitu banyak manusia, dan merusak kehidupan orang lebih banyak lagi,
sudah patutlah dikhasiati dengan bermacam rupa atribusi negatif, hanya
saja, entahlah apakah "bodoh" dalam hal ini termasuk di antaranya.
Selamat tahun baru,
Waruno
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www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/12/31/do3101.xml
Only stupid, sadistic dictators hang... and Saddam was both
By Niall Ferguson, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 31/12/2006
Only a minority of modern dictators have been executed for their
crimes. The most bloodthirsty of all, Stalin and Mao, died in full
possession of their powers, if not their faculties. Franco pulled off
the same trick. Hitler cheated the hangman with a bullet in the
bunker. Pol Pot lost power, but was never brought to justice and died
in his bed, as did Idi Amin.
Slobodan Milosevic stood trial for his crimes, but died of a heart
attack in March with 50 hours of testimony still to be heard. Augusto
Pinochet, too, suffered the indignity of arrest; three weeks ago he
also expired naturally before prosecution could even begin. Suharto
is another fallen dictator who has avoided standing trial on the
grounds of ill health. And let's not forget that dwindling band of
dictators who are still alive and in power: Fidel Castro, Robert
Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi.
Dictators, by definition, have absolute power. For a dictator to end
his life hanging from a rope, or facing a firing squad, therefore
requires a rather rare combination of wickedness and stupidity:
enough of the former to incur the hatred of his countrymen, enough of
the latter to take on armies mightier than his own. Both these
qualities Saddam Hussein possessed in abundance. That is why, in the
wake of his execution at dawn yesterday morning, he deserves to be
remembered as the Mussolini of Mesopotamia - if not the Ceausescu of
Baghdad.
These were not, of course, Saddam's intended role models. Even before
he came to power, he boasted to KGB agents in Iraq of the admiration
he felt for Stalin. And the majority of his crimes were perpetrated
in an authentically Stalinist spirit of paranoia and sadism. The
atrocity for which Saddam Hussein was hanged - the murder in 1982 of
148 Shias in the town of Dujail - was only one of many murderous acts
directed, like so many of Stalin's crimes, against supposedly
unreliable ethnic groups.
As Stalin persecuted the Poles and Ukrainians of the Soviet Union, so
Saddam hounded the Shias and Kurds of Iraq. Among his worst crimes
was the so-called "Anfal" ("Spoils") campaign he launched against the
latter in 1988. Thousands died as poison gas and other weapons were
deployed against Kurdish towns like Halabja. Even more Kurds and
Shias were killed in the wake of their 1991 revolt.
Saddam shared more than a few traits with his hero Stalin. Like
Stalin, his origins were humble (he was a shepherd's son from
Tikrit). Like Stalin, he was attracted as much to nationalism as to
socialism, which made the Ba'ath Party his natural political home.
Like Stalin, he had no fear of revolutionary violence; indeed, he was
wounded in the leg during an abortive Ba'athist rising in 1959. And,
like Stalin, he rose through the party ranks until powerful enough to
establish a ruthless dictatorship.
As Deputy President after the 1968 Ba'athist coup, Saddam brought to
Iraq an authentically Stalinist combination of modernisation and
repression. Under his direction, revenues from the newly nationalised
oil industry were poured into education and infrastructure. At the
same time, however, he tightened his grip on both party and army.
Having forced his way to the presidency in July 1979, he gathered
together the leading members of the Ba'ath Party and read out the
names of 68 people he suspected of disloyalty. Each was immediately
arrested. After being tried for treason, in true Stalinist fashion,
22 of them were executed. A pattern of exemplary terror was soon
established that owed as much to The Godfather as to "Koba the Dread"
(Stalin's nickname). One minister who ventured to criticise Saddam
was literally diced up and presented to his own widow.
The People's Army - the military wing of the Ba'ath Party - and the
Mukhabarat (Department of Intelligence) were his chosen instruments
for terrorising real and imagined opponents. The facade of legitimacy
was provided by a classic personality cult. The gargantuan statues,
the garish murals, the bombastic propaganda: all were taken from the
1930s Soviet playbook.
Yet Stalin would never have been as stupid as Saddam was - to pit his
own army not once but twice against the most powerful military in the
world.
The first mistake was perhaps understandable. Between 1980 and 1988,
Saddam had tried and failed to annex the Iranian province of
Khuzestan. Weighed down by war debts, he turned his eye to
neighbouring Kuwait. The United States was at best equivocal in its
support of the Kuwaitis in the months before Saddam's invasion;
indeed, President George H W Bush seemed to Margaret Thatcher to be
"going wobbly" even after Iraqi troops had crossed the border. Yet
Saddam had fatally miscalculated. The collapse of Soviet power after
the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that he could no longer play one
superpower off against the other. Facing a clear-cut ultimatum from
the UN Security Council, Saddam should have backed down. Instead he
fought - and was thrashed.
Saddam's second and ultimately fatal blunder was downright stupid. In
George W Bush he faced an antagonist very different in temper from
the elder President Bush; a leader persuaded by his advisers that
Saddam's overthrow was desirable in three ways: as retaliation for
the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (though Iraqi complicity was
conspicuous by its absence); as pre-emption before Saddam acquired
weapons of mass destruction (though the evidence for their existence
was woefully thin); and as proof of the superiority of democracy over
dictatorship (though history offered no evidence that democracy could
be imposed at gunpoint in the Middle East). Saddam had been
Bush-whacked once; to suffer the same fate twice was worse than
carelessness. Rather than confess that his WMD programmes had been
abandoned in the 1990s, he continued to bluff, apparently ruling out
the possibility that Bush Jnr was hell-bent on invading Iraq, with or
without UN backing.
Today, of course, we can look back and understand Saddam's
miscalculation better. In Saddam's eyes, as in the eyes of Bush Snr,
the lesson of history was that the alternative to Saddam was civil
war, not democracy. The US had stopped short of regime change in 1991
and had cynically left the Shias and Kurds to face Saddam's wrath,
having initially urged them to rise up in revolt. All that has
happened since 2003 has vindicated those who argued that, without
Saddam's iron fist, Iraq would disintegrate, not democratise. The
dictator's nemesis proved to be a president so naive that he did not
even know the difference between Sunni and Shia.
The decline and fall of Saddam Hussein has been too tawdry to pass
muster as a Shakespearian tragedy. Its protagonist was too crass a
character, more Don Corleone than Coriolanus. This play has been part
Marlowe, part Brecht: a cross between The Massacre at Paris and The
Threepenny Opera. Like the Duc de Guise in Marlowe's bloodthirsty
drama, Saddam was responsible for more than enough mass murder to
justify his own violent end. Unlike Macheath in Brecht's musical,
Saddam was not pardoned in the last minute before his execution, but
his death seems to pose a version of Brecht's old question: "Who is
the bigger criminal: he who robs a bank, or he who founds one?"
In the same spirit, we may ask ourselves this New Year's Eve: who is
the bigger criminal: he who tyrannises a people, or he who first
bankrolls the tyrant - and then replaces his tyranny with anarchy?
For Saddam's career would have taken a very different course had he
not, at vital times, received support as well as opposition from the
United States. He was given training by the CIA in Egypt following
the abortive coup of 1959. Though Iraq appeared to be drifting into
the Soviet orbit in the early 1970s, Saddam won favour in Washington
for purging the Iraqi Communists. After 1979, he received copious
quantities of arms and aid to prosecute his war of aggression against
Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran.
President Bush yesterday described Saddam's execution as "an
important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can
govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the War on
Terror". Another way of regarding it is as just the latest of tens of
thousands of acts of vengeance perpetrated by Iraqis against other
Iraqis since the American invasion.
The dictator is dead, hoist by the petard of his own Stalinist
cruelty and Mussolini-like miscalculation. But Iraq's road towards
democratic stability has a very long way still to run. If every
milestone is an execution, it will be a hellish highway indeed.
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard
University www.niallferguson.org
