Christopher Hitchens: It happened, Mr Adams
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,574
4,10283837%5E7583,00.html

FELT no more than the usual pang of boredom and exasperation when
I read Phillip Adams, writing on this page last Tuesday, recycling the
bogus accusation that Washington's "spies" had given their "masters" -
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz - the "excuse" of
WMD for a long-planned invasion of Iraq.

I repressed a sigh - of annoyance and tedium - when he went on to
repeat a long-exploded claim about Wolfowitz's "confession" to Vanity
Fair (a magazine which I ought to say that I serve as a contributing
editor and columnist).
But I shook off my torpor a bit when I read, from a man who I happen to
know cares about human rights, that all this stuff about Saddam
Hussein the butcher was a bit overdone. Where, Adams demands to
know, are the bodies of the victims?
So I'll skip the stuff about the Senate under Bill Clinton unanimously
passing the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, and about Hans Blix's belief -
shared by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder - that Iraq's non-
compliance on the UN's WMD resolutions should be taken as evidence
of yet another attempt to conceal weapons and cheat inspections. This
is all on the record, as is Wolfowitz's actual statement on the WMD
consensus, and not even the fashion for Michael Moore-ism can
prevent a literate reader from looking it up.
But no serious person should even try to whitewash the record of
Saddam when it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity. So
gross and horrific is this record that even Adams concedes more than
perhaps he intends. Sure, he says breezily: "Saddam gassed the Kurds.
Yes, an unknown number of Iraqi citizens were tortured and
slaughtered." But that -- with its casually "unknown number" --
apparently counts only against today's regime-change because Iraq
was then being backed by Washington. (I interrupt myself to ask
whether or not one might approve of Washington's change of policy
here?)
Willing to concede the truth of anything Saddam might have done when
he committed the ultimate sin of being a temporary American ally,
Adams becomes beady-eyed and parsimonious when we get to the
present day. Only 55 out of 270 mass-grave sites, as he says, have yet
been fully examined. And while some of these contain "hundreds",
others have yielded no more than a dozen corpses! So what's the great
sanctimonious fuss?
Well, I am no friend of sanctimony. But when I stood on the mass grave
at Hilla, near Babylon, about a year ago, I was upset not just by the
huge number of cadavers, which by the way ran into the thousands. I
was upset by the relatives who'd had to wait a decade to inspect the
place, and who had found that the water table had washed a lot of the
bodies away. A possible shred of clothing, or fragment of an identity
card, is not much consolation in these circumstances. Indeed, many of
the relatives had acted against their own interests, here as elsewhere,
by rushing to the site as soon as the murderer had fallen, and by
digging with their bare hands.
As we have learned from grim experience -- everywhere from Argentina
to Ethiopia to Bosnia -- the cold and determined forensic search for "the
disappeared" is at odds with the urgent need of the survivors for
information. Often, they also want to learn the most heart-shrivelling
thing: not whether he or she is dead but how long it took them to die.
Mercifully, this evidence is not always available either. I would have
expected Adams to know that.
But I would not have expected him to make light of the matter. You can
go anywhere in Iraq, perhaps especially in Iraqi Kurdistan, and you can
interview any Iraqi exile family, and you will have a hard time finding
anyone who is not related to one of "the missing".
It is quite conceivable that this horrific fact has in itself led to some
over-counting. Tony Blair, scorned by Adams, has mentioned a figure of
400,000. The late UN special representative for Iraq, Sergio Vieira de
Mello, specified a figure of 290,000 Iraqis over three decades. (That
was before the Saddamist-jihadist alliance put an end to de Mello's life
by blowing up the UN headquarters in Baghdad last year, thus adding
to a toll that is by the way still rising.) Bear in mind that those are only
statistics of Iraqis. But perhaps Adams doesn't wish to take the word of
the man who assisted East Timor to liberation, and who was sceptical of
the intervention in the first place.
Very well, he can consult the still-extant UN resolution that demanded
in vain that Iraq provide an accounting of what happened to the many
hundreds of Kuwaiti prisoners who vanished during the illegal
obliteration of Kuwaiti statehood in 1990. Or he can inquire after the
hundreds of thousands of young Iranians and Iraqis who perished as a
consequence of Saddam's lunatic invasion of Iran. If he wants to do
Baathist body counts, I can keep him busy for the rest of his journalistic
career.
Saddam is now in the dock for his fantastic career of sadism and
mayhem. Just one of the counts in the indictment -- the whereabouts of
the Kurdish inhabitants of the town of Barzan, trucked off and never
seen again -- could occupy humanitarian investigators for decades.
Where is everybody? That's what the survivors want to know. Adams --
who uses the suggestive phrase "forced to confess" only when jeering
at Blair, and who incidentally attributes all casualties in the anti-
Saddam wars only to the Coalition -- now offers the only defence that
Saddam's attorneys haven't come up with. Why didn't they think of
pleading "No big deal"?
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of A
Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (Penguin, 2003).

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