It happened, Mr Adams

Christopher Hitchens

The Australian 2004-07-30

I 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).

See also Letters re Hitchens-Adams: The Left supports the Iraq war