Archivist of Atrocity

By Jim Hoagland
Washington Post, 20 November 1997

Nearly 18 months ago, U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq discovered videotapes showing
stomach-turning scenes of the testing of biological weapons on donkeys, sheep and dogs at the
Hakam laboratory in Baghdad. The tapes showing the animals dying in agony are so gruesome
that they were not released publicly or disseminated widely within the United Nations itself.

They should have been played on closed-circuit television for all U.N. delegates. Boris Yeltsin and
Yevgeny Primakov, now busy trying to find “light at the end of the tunnel” for Saddam Hussein,
should have been strapped into chairs and forced to watch the handiwork of their client.

The existence of the tapes, as well as of the poison gas sprays they reportedly show over the
animals’ stalls and cages, provides graphic evidence of the nature of the man and the regime the
world confronts in Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

What kind of regime videotapes such horror and then places it in archives?

The kind that ordered the massacre of innocent Kurdish civilians and filmed that killing on a
massive scale in 1987. The kind that has systematically taped the show trials and grisly executions
of those who have fallen afoul of Saddam Hussein since he and his murderous colleagues came to
power in 1968.

There is in Iraq, some U.N. inspectors and Iraqi dissidents believe extensive documentary
evidence of biological and chemical experimentation on human prisoners by the Iraqi regime. The
New York Times suggested plausibly in a front-page article last week that the Iraqis forced an
end to U.N. inspections on Oct. 29 by banning the team’s American members to avoid discovery
of that evidence.

Few if any other rogue regimes would permit such evidence to be recorded and kept. But the
nature of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship requires the archiving of atrocity.

He periodically shows tapes of the brutality with which he treats enemies on Iraqi television to
terrorize his people. Moreover, his system requires filmed records to show that the dictator’s
savage orders have been carried out as he directed. He trusts no one, which is one key to his
survival.

Saddam Hussein is no simple psychopath. He is, as former CIA director R. James Woolsey
recalled on television this week, “a professional killer.” That is no metaphor: Saddam Hussein’s
occupation before going into government was that of hit man. In the art of murder and
extermination, he leaves nothing to chance.

Release of the animal testing tapes by the United Nations would have reminded the world of that
reality. But political sensitivities as well as emotional ones come into play at this point: What is
the point of stirring up public outrage and revulsion if you are not prepared to remove the cause
of it?

Publicizing the experiments using biological agents might well have brought immediate and
justifiable comparisons between the Saddam regime and Germany’s Nazis, and turned public
opinion toward demands for dramatic action. Disclosure of Serb concentration camps and mass
rape and killing in Bosnia had just that effect in 1992.

But until Saddam Hussein put President Clinton on the spot by ousting the American inspectors,
Washington was content to proclaim its “containment” of Iraq a triumph. But containment
resembled what the world would have looked like in 1940 if the Roosevelt administration had
pushed the German army out of France, taken away most (but not all) of its V-2 rockets and left
Adolf Hitler in place to do what he liked to those who lived in Germany.

Containment was a policy that was bound to be overtaken by events, and the swift transformation
of Iraq in U.S. official statements from a non-problem to the world’s most urgent danger proves
this has now happened.

Three weeks ago Saddam Hussein and Iraq were routinely described by U.S. official statements as
being tightly contained in a box of American making. This week President Clinton said Iraq
presents a threat to “the safety of the children of the world” that must be dealt with urgently.

That transformation raises a fundamental question for the American people to put to its
government:

Were you fooling us then, or are you fooling us now?

It is not an idle or vindictive question. Clinton must quickly close the gap between the vivid
dangers to global stability he is describing and the still muted methods he is pursuing to combat
them.

The president has sensibly kept his diplomatic and military options open to this point. But he
cannot go very long having it both ways, publicly suggesting that he suddenly sees the gruesome
and dangerous nature of the Iraqi threat while he keeps the door open for a disguised diplomatic
deal that will grant Saddam Hussein new legitimacy.

Saddam Hussein does not shrink from looking into the face of the horror he has created. The
United Nations and the United States no longer can afford the luxury of looking away from the
evidence the regime itself collects.