In my posts here and here, I took issue with the increasingly popular notion that Saddam Hussein, to coin a phrase, was a uniter not a divider — i.e., that his brutal repression was the only thing that could hold Iraq’s volatile opposing sects together. In this piece for openDemocracy, the Kurdish writer Dlawer Ala’Aldeen rebuts the argument far more effectively than I could:
[Saddam’s] totalitarian leadership rendered Iraq’s ethnic and religious diversities irreconciliable [sic], and deepened the gulf between the ruling Sunni elite and the rest. He maximised Iraq’s potential for disintegration, turning it into a bomb primed to explode at the slightest trigger.
In other words, the notion that Saddam kept the country “united” is the exact inverse of the truth. It’s important to recognize this even if one holds, as I do, that it was wrong to invade Iraq and topple the regime. The aftermath of Bush’s crackpot adventure has convinced a lot of people that totalitarianism has its benefits. But that’s simply wrong.
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