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Think of Iraq. If the first image to enter your mind has a bushy mustache, then the chances are that United States foreign policy propaganda is working in the way it is supposed to. As we shall see, the U.S. has its reasons for demonizing Saddam Hussein, and those reasons exclude the interests of the Iraqi people.

Before we go any further, we should establish one important point. Ever since Saddam Hussein came to power, the Iraqi president has pursued his own aims with little or no concern for the interests of the Iraqi people.

The history of Iraq under Saddam Hussein is one of harsh oppression, with widespread abuses of human rights, and frequent torture and murder of political opponents, or just those who displease him. Political rights such as freedom of assembly, expression and movement are denied in Iraq. Summary arrests and executions are carried out, while civilians of Turkoman and Kurdish origin continue to be ousted from the cities of Kirkuk, Khanakin and Douz.

If you are in any doubt as to the terror of the regime, read the reports of the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Iraq, Max van der Stoel (the most recent of which can be found in UN press release HR/CN/856). Saddam Hussein fits into the Machiavellian model perfectly, caressing or crushing people based on their utility to him. Speak of this man fondly, and you will most likely be treated well; speak against him, and you will die. It is by no means the purpose of this article to defend Hussein: it would be a sad day when the Peace Letter could sympathize with the agenda of a dictator.

The purpose of this article is, however, to look more closely at why the United States chooses to focus on Saddam Hussein. The current U.S. position is that Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator, who is bad for the Iraqi people. But this has not always been the U.S. position.

Throughout the years of 1980 to 1988, the period of the Iran/Iraq war, United States foreign policy was firmly in support of Iraq. During this war, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, as well as the other industrialized nations, saw their interests as threatened. The war shifted in Iran’s favor, which had revolutionary ideals, an extremist regime, and a determination to export its ideas.

If Iran had toppled the Iraqi regime, Iraq would have become a mirror of the political situation seen in Iran. In order to tip the scales back in the favor of Iraq, the international community began to supply technologically advanced weapons, credit facilities and important military information to Iraq in order to give it an advantage over Iran’s greater numbers. (For a fuller discussion of this subject, see Ghazi Algosaibi’s The Gulf Crisis: An Attempt to Understand.)

But was Saddam Hussein a different person then? No, for his rule was oppressive from the time he gained power. Indeed, we should not forget that it was Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran which sparked the Iran/Iraq war in the first place! But the superpowers and most of the rest of the world were more concerned about their strategic interests in the Middle East, largely through worries over oil supply, so the issue of Saddam Hussein’s rule was conveniently ignored. Iraq was the underdog, and Iraq was vital to western interests, so Iraq would be supported economically and militarily.

But, of course, the West saw its interests change in August of 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Through the same fear that altered policy at the beginning of the Iran/Iraq war, western oil companies perceived a new threat to their supply, and western political allegiances changed accordingly. Suddenly, our media informed us of the horrors of Saddam Hussein, of his despotic control, of his endless paranoid quest for power.

Once again, it is good that these issues are firmly on the agenda, for abuses of human rights anywhere are fundamentally wrong and should be condemned. But Saddam Hussein’s human rights record was never an issue before Iraq invaded Kuwait, so we need to ask why it suddenly became one. The answer is that, rather than the industrialized countries suddenly developing humanitarian foreign policies, it became politically expedient to demonize Saddam Hussein. Consider which is the easier: to mobilize public opinion against an entire nation, a people, or to mobilize it against one man who happens to be a brutal dictator.

We are not even being asked to demonize the Iraqi people, we are being forced into doing something far worse. We are being made to ignore the Iraqi people; to forget about them.

The argument runs something like this. Saddam Hussein is an evil, oppressive despot, so we should bomb him, or issue sanctions against him. But this is not what we are doing. Our political leaders would bomb the Iraqi people, and already hold in place the U.N. sanctions against his people. Surely this is the last thing that the Iraqi people need.

The United States has no intention of ousting the Iraqi president, and the plight of the Iraqi people is not of concern to the U.S. Iraq remains distant, both geographically and politically. Its political power is being effectively controlled by the fact that it cannot afford to do anything, and so therefore cannot be a threat to any western interests in the region.

To maintain this control, whenever the issue of Iraq is discussed, public attention must be immediately focused upon the evils of the dictator. This focus of our attention on Hussein is a distraction, a measure to force us to look away from the suffering of the Iraqi people. In clouding the issue, the people of Iraq are forgotten.

Steve Pickering was the spring intern with the Washington Peace Center and the D.C. Coalition to Stop the U.S. War on Iraq. He has returned to his home in the U.K.

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