Iraqi People Deserve to Be Liberated

A gray day in 1990, a cup of tepid coffee, an unwiped table in a London student cafeteria. The haggard man sitting opposite me is an Iraqi Kurd, a poet. In the early 1980s, he wrote a verse whose metaphors were read somewhere in the Baathist hierarchy as incitement to Kurdish nationalism. He was invited to a meeting at which the yogurt beverage served to him was laced with thalium--rat poison. He did not drink all of it, and so he survived, to get across the border, to be treated in a Western hospital, to be granted asylum, to live.

In a middle-class house in southwest London, there is another Iraqi, a Shiite. She is an obstetrician and gynecologist, married into a family of venerable Shiite clergy. In the 1980s, every male member of her husband’s family between the ages of 12 and 70 was rounded up and executed.

But in 1990, we do not talk about this outrage, which is famous and thoroughly documented. We talk instead about her own work--how she wasn’t legally allowed to prescribe contraceptives of any kind to her patients, who were expected to serve as baby factories, making men to replace the casualties of Saddam Hussein’s constant wars. How she risked her job, and maybe more than that, every time she failed to report an illicitly inserted IUD. How once, during a difficult delivery, a patient had moaned that she hoped her child would be a girl, not a boy who would grow to be a soldier for Hussein. On hospital rounds the day after, when she went to check on her patient, a nurse whispered that the security police had taken her away in the night.

It is one thing to hear such stories, and quite another to see the physical evidence of such crimes. A few days after the Kurdish uprising that followed the Gulf War, I was in the basement of the office of Amen, Hussein’s feared security police, in the northeastern Iraqi city of Sulaimaniya. Rebellious Kurds had liberated the complex, which, at street level, was a bland office block. Below ground, it was a warren of lightless dungeons, with excrement on the floor and meat hooks in the ceiling. In one room, a Kurdish guide spoke passionately and drew me toward something nailed to the wall. I couldn’t quite make out what it was, so I leaned close as he struck another match. It was a withered piece of cartilage--part of a human ear.

Outside, above ground, was a small modular building of the kind they use at my child’s elementary school. By the steps was a pile of discarded women’s clothing. Kurdish things--brightly colored skirts and scarves woven through with shiny thread. Inside, the room was bare except for a stained mattress and a medicine cabinet that, when opened, revealed a bottle of valium. This, my guide explained, was a raping room, where the relatives of male detainees--mothers, daughters, sisters--the women of his blood, on whose sexual purity his honor depended, were brought, drugged and violated in his presence, in an attempt to break his morale.

The U.S.-led policy in the aftermath of the Gulf War has been morally indefensible, from the day Kuwait was liberated until today. When the victorious allied armies gave Hussein’s helicopter gunships permission to fly, they flew directly north, and I was under them, with thousands of fleeing civilians trying to reach safety over mined mountain passes into Turkey. I will never forget the faces of the people around me, who couldn’t understand why the first President George Bush had encouraged them to rise up against Hussein, only to betray them so cruelly. Worse things happened to the Shiites and marsh Arabs of the south.

There would be more betrayals, a decade’s worth, when the CIA pulled the plug on its liaison with the dissident Iraqi National Congress and left its locally recruited Kurdish assets defenseless; when it became clear that Hussein had manipulated the postwar sanctions regime to enrich himself and his cronies while conveniently keeping what had been the middle class so destitute that it had no energy left for dissent.

To be fair, allied analysts from Colin L. Powell on down did not expect Hussein to survive a defeat of the magnitude they had inflicted. The metaphor of choice was the piece of rotting fruit: Hussein’s hold on power was tenuous, he would fall from the tree within days, weeks, months at the most. Now a decade has passed, and many are gone from power: two U.S. presidents (George Bush and Bill Clinton). Two British prime ministers (Margaret Thatcher and John Major). One Arab monarch (Jordan’s King Hussein). Three Israeli leaders (Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu). Even Syria’s sinewy strongman, Hafez Assad. Yet, Hussein is still there.

If there is any joy at all in the business of war, it is the securing of a better peace. Even those who deplored the bombing of Afghanistan must celebrate the reopening of girl’s schools, the restoration of personal liberties of all kinds, the prospect of a nation beginning to rebuild. Iraq is a far richer country than Afghanistan, gifted with oil, water, good farmland, scenic beauty, rare antiquities. Were it were not for the bleak and terrible regime of Hussein, it could be the showplace of the region. Now is the time to make some belated amends for a tragic mistake. Some in the Bush Cabinet want to strike Iraq to safeguard the West from future terrorism. That is a reason. But there is an even better one. It should be done for the sake of the Iraqis.

*

Geraldine Brooks, a former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, is the author of “Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women” and the novel “Year of Wonders.”