lessons from the past?

Analysis: Learning from Saddam
By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, March 3 (UPI) -- Say this for Saddam Hussein: He ran one of the most sadistic and merciless dictatorships in modern history, but at least he avoided a civil war.

The issue is not a minor one. Great political philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, author of "Leviathan," have long argued that dictatorships, however merciless and unjust, were preferable to unleashing the hellish chaos of civil strife. Ancient Greek philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle, who usually failed to agree on anything, were as one on that.

Political thinkers in the traditions of the three great monotheistic religions have struggled with the issue of how to deal with an unjust ruler without opening the doors to anarchy and civil strife that usually killed far more people than the dictator at his very worst did.

In general, Catholic and certainly Orthodox Christianity have far preferred autocracy, however harsh, to the miseries and collapse of basic society that anarchy invariably brings. Traditional Muslim respect for established rulers has taken a similar approach.

Even the Protestant Christian world's founding father, Martin Luther, was horrified at the chaotic peasant revolts across 16th century Germany that his teachings originally unleashed. Luther rallied to the support of the German princes in putting them down -- but millions of lives were lost before peace and stability could be reestablished. The Jewish rabbis also taught their followers to pray for the success of even the harsh Roman government since otherwise, they said, people would swallow each other alive.

None of the globally criticized excesses of Tsar Nicholas II, last tsar of Russia, or even of Nicholas I, most ruthless of the century of imperial rulers who preceded him, came close to matching the hideous death toll of the Russian Civil War of 1918-1919, or of the Bolshevik dictatorship of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin who succeeded it.

Saddam certainly killed over 100,000 people: The exact figure, while open to dispute, is probably much higher. At least a million people on both sides died in the eight-year war he unleashed on neighboring Iran.

Yet under Saddam, Iraq remained united. And even though it had a 60 percent Shiite majority in its 25 million people, the Iranian Islamic Republic, despite all its efforts at trying to do so, failed to significantly shake loose and provoke any significant part of that population into a military uprising against Saddam.

There was an obvious reason for this. Like Josef Stalin's long communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union, or that of Mao Zedong in China, both of which lasted around 30 years, everyone knew that to rise against Saddam was a death sentence not just for oneself but for one's entire family, and probably neighborhood and tribe as well.

As soon as it appeared after the 1991 Gulf War that Saddam's brutal yoke had weakened sufficiently, the Shiites of southern Iraq and the Kurds of the north wasted no time whatsoever in rising up in revolts. But without U.S. military support, they were ruthlessly repressed and slaughtered in their scores of thousands.

Obviously the ambitious, visionary efforts of the Bush administration to create a stable new democracy in Iraq were not going to rely on the power of repression and blind terror to enforce the peace. But the fact remains that along with his monstrous sticks, Saddam used many carrots to woo the Shiite majority of Iraq and ensure their toleration, if not favor during his 24 years as president of the country.

First, even with his bloody, futile, invariably unsuccessful wars with their huge body counts, Saddam kept the basic services of Iraq running smoothly. The basic necessities of life were met. From the earliest bungles of the U.S.-set-up Coalition Provisional Authority under L. Paul Bremer through the failure to yet get the long-running Sunni insurgency under control in central Iraq and the capital Baghdad, U.S. policymakers and their Iraqi political allies have so far entirely failed to establish the basic conditions for orderly life in key regions of the country.

And even across most of Shiite southern Iraq, where the Sunni insurgency has never managed to take any significant hold, peace has only been purchased by British forces at the price of tacitly allowing independent Shiite militias with close ties to Iran, especially fiercely anti-American Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, to establish de facto control. This development has also strengthened centrifugal secessionist forces and popular passions.

Lastly, as was the case during the first era of popular democracy in the United States from the presidential election of 1828 to the start of the Civil War in 1861, the dynamics of the new democratic political process have not only empowered broad areas of Iraqi society, they have also encouraged them to become more assertive, aggressive and go-it-alone. The Dec. 15 parliamentary elections confirmed this process as strong sectarian parties won big in every one of Iraq's three major ethnic or religious communities -- the Shiites, the Sunnis and the Kurds.

Finally, Saddam skillfully used the proceeds from Iraq's oil exports to buy the peace and loyalty of entire sectors of Iraqi life. By contrast, the consolidation of many fractious political parties into major blocks that was actually encouraged by Bush administration policymakers in their attempts to create Western-style democracy rapidly in Iraq instead converted politics into a winner-take-all process. There has been no effort by any Iraqi government so far to reach out and mollify or bribe large communities outside its own core constituency.

In general, the Kurds and the Shiites have joined forces to lock out the previously dominant Sunnis and this has fed Sunni support for the insurgency. Now, last week's destruction of the dome of the Golden Mosque in Samara has finally unleashed the sectarian passions among both Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq. Far from defusing them, the rapid imposition of the democratic process in the almost three years since Saddam was toppled has only fed them. It remains to be seen how bad things are going to get.