We will never know what would have been the fate of Iraq if Saddam Hussein had remained in power 20 years ago.
The American invasion and, above all, the occupation that followed was a monumental mess. A tragic error whose repercussions we have not finished measuring, in Iraq as in the rest of the world.
Only, in the geopolitical analyzes offered to us to mark the 20th anniversary of this invasion, it seems to me that we sometimes have a short memory. We tend to pass a little too quickly on the fact that Saddam Hussein corresponded perfectly to the definition of the bloodthirsty dictator.
For 35 years, the tyrant with the mustache held Iraq with an iron fist. In the late 1980s he waged a genocidal campaign against his own Kurdish minority. In the north of the country, he razed 2,000 villages. Massacred tens of thousands of civilians.
PHOTO CHRISTOPHE SIMON, ARCHIVES AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
US Army marines take position near a portrait of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in April 2003.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not defending a war that has caused so much misfortune over the years; an illegal war, waged on the basis of evidence doctored by Pentagon hawks.
But it’s all a matter of perspective. On March 15, 2003, while 200,000 people demonstrated in the streets of Montreal against the imminent invasion of Iraq, I was surrounded by Iraqi Kurds who were calling for this invasion.
Days before the outbreak of war, they were terrified of being the target of the final attack that the beleaguered dictator might launch against them. But they were ready to make this last sacrifice, in the name of freedom.
I landed in Iraqi Kurdistan about a month before the start of the war. Around me, people frantically stockpiled dishcloths, towels, and cans of bleach. To decontaminate the skin, just in case.
They sealed their windows with duct tape. In the souk, diapers were out of stock; for lack of anything better, we would make homemade gas masks. If ever.
The existence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, the Kurds believed in it only too well. And for good reason: they had received a lot of it.
I will never be able to forget my meeting with Aras Abid Akram, in Halabja. His chilling account of March 16, 1988, when 5,000 civilians died in the rain of chemical gases dumped on this rebel city in northeastern Iraq.
He had told me about the cellar where he had taken refuge to escape the fire from Iraqi army planes. The whistles and thuds, as if the bombs weren’t going off. The sweet smell of apples that had pervaded the air. And this apocalyptic vision, when he had ventured out of the cellar, at nightfall.
Haggard survivors, staggering like zombies. Bodies slumped on the sidewalks. Friends, neighbors, old people, mothers hugging their babies. Dead. All dead.
A massacre orchestrated by Saddam Hussein against his own population. Not since the Holocaust has deadly gas been used to exterminate women and children.
That day, Aras Abid Akram had lost his family members. All, to the last. “As soon as war breaks out, I will flee to the mountains,” he told me. What else can I do? We know Saddam hates us and will do anything to destroy us. »
We’ll never know how things would have turned out for Iraq if the Americans hadn’t gotten involved. Could Saddam Hussein have continued like this for another 20 years? Could the Iraqis have found the strength to get rid of their executioner?
What we do know is that the invasion plunged Iraq into civil war, destabilized the Middle East and allowed the Islamic State armed group to seize large territories in Iraq and Syria.
Above all, it cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
And yet, a civil society has emerged from the rubble of the dictatorship. Despite endemic corruption, Iraq has experienced political pluralism, a rarity in this region of the world.
Through the chaos, Iraqis were able to taste the fruits of freedom. Terribly bitter fruit.
Does this mean that George W. Bush and Tony Blair are no better than Vladimir Putin? That they too should be indicted for war crimes?
Some believe it. They argue that Bush and Blair, like Putin, are guilty of illegally invading a sovereign nation.
There is however a world of difference between Volodymyr Zelensky, democratically elected president in Ukraine, and Saddam Hussein, recidivist aggressor and collector of international sanctions.
Still four months before the invasion, in November 2002, the Security Council of the United Nations had adopted yet another resolution, asking Iraq to destroy its weapons of mass destruction and submit to UN inspections.
Saddam Hussein had refused to open his game. In fact, he had dismantled his nuclear program a long time ago. He no longer had chemical and biological weapons.
But he was bluffing in front of the world, wanting to pretend he still had the ability to exterminate masses of people. Ultimately, it was this bluff that caused his downfall.
Jean Chrétien entertained the gallery last week1launching on Radio-Canada that, on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, George W. Bush “did not have enough evidence to convince a municipal court judge in Shawinigan”.
PHOTO TOM HANSON, CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES
Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, after announcing in the House of Commons that Canada would not participate in a war in Iraq without the approval of the UN Security Council, March 17, 2003
At the time, however, no one could know for sure that these weapons did not exist. Jean Chrétien himself had proposed a compromise at the UN: give Saddam Hussein an ultimatum to disarm, failing which his country would be attacked.
The Canadian compromise had been rejected out of hand by Washington. Weapons or not, the hawks were determined to swoop down on their prey. They were wrong, all the way.
Their biggest fault was having had the presumption to believe that they would be able to build a stable state on the ashes of a totalitarian regime. The resulting disaster is a painful lesson that the world had better not forget too quickly.