Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

December 05, 2005

The Big Black Book of Horrors

Reader PCWhoopass clued me in to this article in The Weekend Australian.

WITH the trial of Saddam Hussein under way, those in the God-damn-America camp find themselves uncomfortably wedged. Should they justify their opposition to the war by downplaying Saddam's crimes while sheeting home blame for the present turmoil to the US and its allies? Or do they opt for the defence of moral equivalence, conceding that Saddam was indeed a monster but those US presidents who once backed his regime, including George H.W. Bush, are the real monsters.

The best riposte to this warped analysis is a scholarly and sober 700-page volume recently published in France, of all places. Le Livre Noir de Saddam Hussein (The Black Book of Saddam Hussein) is a robust denunciation of Saddam's regime that does not fall into the trap of viewing everything in Iraq through a US-centric prism. The writers - Arabs, Americans, Germans, French and Iranian - have produced the most comprehensive work to date on the former Iraqi president's war crimes, assembling a mass of evidence that makes the anti-intervention arguments redundant.

Intrigued? You might well be. The fact that the book has authors from multiple countries helps to ensure a balanced view of not only the current war in Iraq, but the events that led up to the war...events the left seems to gloss over in its zeal to discredit George W. Bush.

"The American war was perhaps not a good solution for getting rid of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. But, as this book shows, after 35 years of a dictatorship of exceptional violence, which has destroyed Iraqi civil society and created millions of victims, there wasn't a good solution," Kutschera writes.

The entire article is a must-read, as it includes excerpts from people whose families were executed and more. I wish I could read the book itself...