rather large picture (it was a lot bigger in the papers) of Saddam Hussein during his trial, arm and finger raised, yelling at somebody. Jonathan asked, "Do you think he's really evil?"
Well, I said yeah, he's evil, some of the things he's done are really too inhumane... Yet on the other hand, he did what he had to do in order to maintain some semblance of order in Iraq. I can't lay my hands on it right now, but I read a little blurb in a recent Newsweek, something along the lines of some U.S. government official saying (anonymously) that "...we feel like apologising and saying 'sorry, we didn't know you did what you did because you had to'." Or something like that, memory fails at the moment.
So now for the comparative morality... Was booting Saddam out of his palace really the right thing to do? For all the blood (and worse) he has on his hands, Saddam was able to maintain order of a sort. Of a sort. Yes, he was a cruel, tyrannical dictator. But here's the rub. Is that the only type of person who can keep Iraq from self-destructing? We've already seen that the Iraqis aren't likely to blossom into full-blown Jeffersonian democracy any time soon... Maybe the only type of diplomacy that works in Iraq is the kind that comes out the barrel of a gun.
I'm not in anyway supporting or endorsing Saddam or his practices, mind... Just wondering. What do the rest of you think?
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