Disgrace

Every so often, fate intervenes and juxtaposes two apparently unrelated articles in short order.

First, I read an interesting piece in the UK Independent about the reign of Uganda's Idi Amin. Amin, who terrorized the country from 1971-79, is the 'gold standard' of the thuggish murderous, African misruler. Essentially, he is the cartoon character who personified the stereotypes.

Idi Amin was an embarassment to both the west and to Africa at the time not solely because he was a mass murderer. He became this embodiment of evil because he was a bufoon. A former boxer, he just looked like a thug. That he reportedly engaged in cannibalism only added to the aura around him.

By 1979, neighboring Tanzania was being inundated by a wave of refugees from Amin's nightmare. Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere invaded Uganda to remove Amin; the bufoon's demoralized army evaporated. Tanzania installed Milton Obote, who Amin had overthrown in 1971, as the country's new ruler. Everyone thought the nightmare was over.

In reality, the main difference between Amin and Obote was personality. Amin was a brutish, uneducated mass murderer. Obote was a well-spoken mass murderer who'd studied at what was then Africa's most prestigious university. Because he was comparatively suave, Obote was seen as a welcome relief following the unpredictable Amin. Obote was seen as a founding father of pan-Africanism and thus, like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, was generally given a free pass by the African elite. But while he was seen as a relief by the outside world after eight years of the erratic Amin, Obote was no better to many Ugandans.

Amin had killed anyone who threatened him, and purged the army with massacres of ethnic groups that he thought did not support him, but on the whole he left the little people alone. His successor was very different. Between 1980 and 1985 in the Luwero triangle around Kampala, the number of civilians murdered by Obote's British-trained soldiers approached genocidal levels, as whole villages were exterminated, notes The Independent.

Some estimate that Obote's regimes were responsible for the deaths of as many as half a million people. By some accounts, 'liberator' Obote was responsible for as many, if not more, deaths than 'Evil incarnate' Amin.

Then I read a piece noting that according to the UN, over 34,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by violence in the year 2006 alone, with another 36,000 injured. was after the UN refugee commission reported that nearly 3.7 million Iraqis (out of a population of 28 million) were either refugees or internally displaced.

Anywhere between 100,000 (according to a low figure from Iraq's health minister) to as many as 655,000 (according to an estimate by the medical journal The Lancet) Iraqis have died in the not quite four years since 'liberation.'

The US State Department itself estimates that Saddam was actively responsible for some 400,000 deaths during his 24 years in power.

If you factor in the destruction, instability and chaos faced by ordinary Iraqis caused by the Aggression and the resulting power vacuum (to say nothing of the collapse of US international prestige and the increased threat to US security), the invasion of Iraq is yet another example of the cure being worse than the disease.

But we wouldn't want to leave Iraq. Because if we did, there might be death, instability, violence and chaos!

Update: The greatest insanity of all is that we have spent close to $400 billion in not quite four years to bring all this death, instability, violence and chaos to Iraq. By contrast, the US spent some $660 billion in today's dollars on its over decade-long involvement in Vietnam.