While the World Watched . . . : The Iraqization of Kuwait: ‘Where they make a desert, they call it peace’

Even in a world where abusive government is all too often the norm, Iraq’s tyrannical regime has long stood out for the singular brutality of its repressive rule.

Never a land where political pluralism was allowed to flourish or civil rights were exalted, Iraq under Saddam Hussein has become a place where--as Amnesty International’s new report says--”forced relocation and deportation, arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, ‘disappearance’ and summary political execution” are pervasive everyday occurrences.

Now this nightmarish system has been brought to occupied Kuwait.

The grisly evidence mounts that Iraq is routinely using torture, mutilations and murder as part of its systematic program to wipe out all local resistance to its aggression and to eradicate every vestige of Kuwait’s separate social and cultural life. Testimony to this effect comes both from exiled Kuwaitis and from former Western residents who report that they saw with their own eyes evidence of unspeakable mistreatment inflicted on hundreds of victims.

At the same time, the determined looting of Kuwait carried out by Iraqi occupation forces goes on. Anything of value, from medical supplies to traffic signals, from food to furniture, is being seized and trucked north.

There are credible accounts of infants being snatched from incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals so that the machines can be packed off to Iraq, of other patients being left to die after being removed from other life support systems. But more than Kuwait’s modern health-care system has been destroyed; the very foundations of its civil life are being demolished. “To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” The words, recorded by Tacitus, were spoken of the Romans. They are no less applicable to Iraq.

Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait is a grab for power and oil wealth, but it is no less a human calamity. The civilized world can’t pretend that it wasn’t warned. Year after year Amnesty International, the State Department and other monitoring agencies have issued documented reports on the abysmal state of human rights in Iraq. And year after year governments--including that of the United States--found it expedient to issue only pro forma statements of concern before resuming business as usual with Baghdad. These feeble and unpursued expressions of distress corrected nothing, deterred nothing, resolved nothing. Those unfortunate enough to be in Kuwait bear witness to that.