We hear constantly about the strategy of the current crisis in Iraq. These concerns about national security lead a majority of Americans -- 54 percent, according to the latest Time magazine poll -- to favor invading Iraq. However, recent large protests throughout the western world demonstrate that arguments centered around security leave others unconvinced.
But there is another angle to the Iraqi crisis that deserves attention. It is a moral angle -- a humanitarian one. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair noted when anti-war demonstrators occupied London's Hyde Park: "If there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for. If there are one million, that is still less than the number of people who died in the wars he started."
Indeed, those who protest the coming war with Iraq should not be so quick to forget what a luxury such protest is. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to dissent with the government -- these are privileges of democracy. The right to such protest is not shared by the millions of innocent Iraqis who live under the thumb of Saddam Hussein. In America, protest is respected and can even be chic. In Iraq, the Butcher of Baghdad takes a slightly different attitude towards dissent.
In Iraq, the authority of Saddam Hussein is unquestionable. The official penalty for speaking ill of Saddam or his family is amputation of the tongue. Should the standard penalty seem insufficient, dissenters are instead beheaded with swords. According to Amnesty International, victims are dragged out in front of their homes and then beheaded in front of their neighbors and their children, so as to set an example for others. There are no trials, there are no appeals, there are no rights. There is only death.
These details of the inhuman abuse that shapes life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- collected by the United Nations, intelligence agencies and watchdog groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch -- have been compiled in a dossier by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which is available online. I strongly encourage all readers to download it and read it. Be advised: it is revolting material. But we cannot shirk from the unpleasant truth about life in Iraq as we ponder questions of war.
For example, thousands of Iraqis are summarily thrown into prison camps. Their torture is commonplace, involving such methods as eye gouging, piercing of the hands with electric drills, electric shocks, caning on the souls of the feet, mock executions and baths in acid. Women are raped systematically; one Iraqi soldier's personnel card gave his occupation as the "violation of women's honor" -- in other words, he was a professional rapist. Children are forced to watch the torture of their parents and are not immune from torture themselves. Said one ex-prison guard to a BBC reporter, "we could make a kebab out of a child if we wanted to."
Saddam's prisons are nightmarish places. The Mahjar prison in Baghdad holds 600 prisoners; some live in what were formerly police dog kennels. At the Sijn Al-Tubut prison, inmates are kept in rows of rectangular steel boxes -- the type used in morgues to store dead bodies. Purges of the prisons are common -- an escaped Kurdish inmate told intelligence officials that in one night 2,000 prisoners were put to death, some by guillotine. Relatives of these victims are often prevented from burying the bodies in accordance with Islamic practices and are sometimes charged for the bullets used in the executions.
In Iraq, there are no such things as human rights. No wonder between three and four million Iraqi refugees have already fled Saddam Hussein's brutal dictatorship. Yet many more remain. To stand by and do nothing when we have the power to help the people of Iraq is unconscionable. We have a moral obligation to them. War with Iraq will be a war of liberation. In the words of Abdel-Majid Khoi, an Iraqi exile and son of the late Grand Ayatollah Khoi, Iraq's foremost religious leader for almost 40 years: "The Iraqi nation is like a man who is kept captive and tortured by a gang of thugs. The proper moral position is to try to help that man liberate himself and bring the torturers to book. When you are being tortured to death you are not fussy about who will save you."
America can oust Saddam Hussein and bring democracy to Iraq. The process may not be perfect, and it may not be painless, but it is a worthwhile endeavor; given a chance, the liberated Iraqi people will hoist the banner of freedom, just as the liberated peoples of Germany, Japan and now Afghanistan have done before. For the first time the Iraqi people will not be controlled -- they themselves will be in control and free to pursue the democratic freedoms that so many of us take for granted. If concern for national security provides the logic for ousting Saddam Hussein, simple benevolence for the Iraqi people should provide the moral impetus.
