1-05-07, 9:18 am

Last week, two men died. One of them was an insignificant nonentity who hardly troubled people’s thoughts when he was in office thirty years ago, a man universally hailed for his “decency” and collegiality toward fellow politicians and members of his country’s political elite; the other, a brutal tyrant who ascended to ultimate power with a thoroughgoing purge of his own erstwhile political allies and once reportedly personally executed one of his ministers, a man who somehow contrived to loom large over the collective consciousness of what is usually called “the West” for 15 years.

The death of one, Gerald Ford, at 93, was met with a storm of hagiography in the mainstream media; many times, journalists who had cut their teeth on Watergate and despised Ford for his pardon of Nixon, decided retrospectively that it had been a necessary act to allow the nation to “heal.”

The death of the other, Saddam Hussein, 69, though it garnered criticism for the unseemly haste of the rush to execute, was generally regarded as the slightest of down-payments on his just desserts.

It was left to the perpetually and reflexively contrarian Christopher Hitchens to connect the two. After Saddam signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union and nationalized Iraq’s oil in 1972, the United States turned against him, even though it had likely been involved in the ascension of the Ba’ath Party just four years earlier. Ford inherited a policy of supporting the Kurds in the north, with the aid of the Shah of Iran, in order to de-stabilize the Iraqi government.

But when the 1975 Algiers accord was signed, briefly ending the enmity between Iraq and Iran, the Shah abandoned his support of the Kurds, and Ford lost no time in hanging them out to twist in the wind of Saddam’s deadly counterinsurgency. Henry Kissinger justified this to Congress by explaining that “covert action should not be confused with missionary work.”

Similarly, little mention was made of Ford’s giving the “green light” to Indonesia’s Suharto to invade the tiny nation of East Timor, which had just shaken off the yoke of Portuguese colonialism. As Ford and then Carter supported the Indonesian military’s genocidal killing of over 200,000 people, one-third of the country’s population, with military aid and diplomatic interference, the issue got almost no coverage in the American media.

It is probably true that Ford was a decent man, to those who entered into his moral calculus – this would include Washington insiders and the U.S. political elite, on both sides of the aisle, but did not include Iraqi Kurds and East Timorese, and at best marginally included the American underclass, or African-Americans.

Saddam, who came up in a rather different and much less collegial environment, had a moral calculus with perhaps an even more restricted ambit. Everything was a potential sacrifice to his personal power and his vision of Iraqi greatness.

No mention needed to be made for Americans of his crimes – the phrase “gassed his own people” has been ringing in our ears for 15 years – although, oddly enough, we never ever heard the phrase while he was doing it 18 years ago. It would, I suppose, enter the heads of few journalists to compare what Saddam did in Iraqi Kurdistan in the late 1980’s with the support of Reagan and Bush with what Indonesia did in East Timor in the late 1970’s with the support of Ford and Carter.

Given the brutality of Saddam’s mostly U.S.-backed crimes, it is sad to think that the United States and the new Iraqi government handled the entire affair in such a way as to engender doubts in the minds of many across the world – even here – about those crimes. For many, their knowledge of Saddam came first from feverish TV rhetoric about those crimes followed by feverish TV rhetoric about his weapons of mass destruction. Small wonder that when the U.S. case about WMD was revealed as a pastiche of lies, deceptions, and fabrications that they began to wonder the same about his other crimes.

In both cases, the victims of these men have been terribly dishonored. Neither of these men, living lives far longer than most of those they cut short, ever confronted the consequences of their actions or repented of them. The good die young.



--Rahul Mahajan is publisher of the blog Empire Notes and occasionally teaches at New York University. He has been to Iraq twice and reported from Fallujah during the siege in April 2004. He has been published widely, including in USA Today, Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, the Times of India, and the Jordan Times. His first book, 'The New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism' (April 2002, Monthly Review Press), has been described as 'mandatory reading for anyone who wants to get a handle on the war on terrorism.' His second book, 'Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond' (June 2003, Seven Stories Press), is a wide-ranging look at the war on Iraq, the plans of the Project for a New American Century, and the Bush administration's imperial policies in practice since 9/11.