The New Saddam
Why Omar al-Bashir is the dictator we should hate now.
By Bryan Collinsworth
Tuesday January 9, 2007
At dawn on Saturday, Dec. 30, 2006, Saddam Hussein was hanged in one of his own execution chambers.
America’s favorite dictator is dead.
To certain U.S. foreign policy elites, he was, for a long time, a genuine favorite. During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the Reagan administration lavished aid upon Hussein’s regime even after reports of genocidal attacks on Iraqi Kurds became incontrovertible. It took Rumsfeld two decades to decide that he could no longer turn a blind eye to the gassing and shooting of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
By the 1990s, Saddam had become a different kind of favorite: He was the tyrant that Americans loved to hate. As one reporter observed on the eve of his execution, "Hussein is an unusually familiar dictator for American [television] viewers." Throughout his quarter-century reign of terror, there were plenty of other competitors for the title of world’s worst human being, but their names—Slobodan Milosevic, Kim Jong Il, Charles Taylor, and Theoneste Bagosora and Agathe Habyarimana—never achieved the instant recognition that Hussein’s did in the United States.
We were on a first-name basis with him. “Saddam’s” special place in the American psyche was expressed through popular culture in everything from Bridget Jones’ Diary (“I’d rather have a job wiping Saddam Hussein’s arse,” Renee Zellweger says when rejecting Hugh Grant) to, of course, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (“Is sex the only thing that matters to you?” a frustrated Satan asks his detached lover, Saddam).
In hindsight, the reason for Saddam’s special status seems clear. He made his debut as America’s Villain Laureate almost immediately following the collapse of Soviet communism and the Cold War paranoia that had accompanied it. In the early 1990s, the American public could no longer see communist conspiracies behind every unsettling world event. We had no scapegoat for our lingering fears, no focus for our righteous anger—and then came Saddam Hussein, like the last-minute prom date, waltzing into Kuwait and our hearts.
It didn’t matter that a few power brokers had carried on a quiet love affair with him in the 1980s. Hussein marched into a perfect storm of elite concern for regional stability and popular desire for a new foe. To paraphrase another classic Renee Zellweger line, he had us at “These oil fields are mine.”
But all of this begs the question: What do we do now? Saddam is dead and buried. Americans need another focus for our ire, and fast.
Therefore I’d like to humbly submit, for the American people’s consideration, Mr. Omar al-Bashir. You’ve never heard his name before, but that’s okay—few had heard of Saddam before the first Gulf War. And let me assure you, he’s an impressive villain. He deserves to be the focus of our wrath as much as Hussein ever did. But more importantly, he needs to be.
Bashir has ruled as dictator of Sudan for almost two decades. He came to power by leading a 1989 military coup that overthrew a democratically elected government, purged unfriendly officials, and immediately abolished all political freedoms. Even worse, Bashir staged the coup in order to prevent his government from signing a peace deal with southern Sudanese rebels that would have ended Sudan’s nasty civil war between northern Muslims and southern animists and Christians.
Once Bashir was in control, he ensured that Sudan’s civil war dragged on into one of the bloodiest conflicts in modern history. Using revenues from the country’s massive oil reserves, the tyrant purchased all the armaments necessary to bomb and machine-gun entire villages of southern Sudan off the map. Sudanese troops and proxy militias—the latter a Bashir trademark—not only raped and tortured survivors, but practiced a widespread slave trade. The land cleared of villages was then transformed into more oil fields, and the cycle continued.
In the past few years, with the death toll reaching two million, Bashir has finally acceded to a peace settlement—while simultaneously opening up a whole new war in the Darfur region of western Sudan. Today in Darfur, Bashir finds an outlet for all the evil now denied him in the south: firebombing villages, slaughtering through proxy militias and driving millions into refugee camps. He’s even prevented food and humanitarian aid from reaching countless Darfurians displaced by his brutality.
We also should not forget the small matter of Bashir playing happy host to Osama bin Laden and his terrorist training camps throughout the early 1990s.
In short, in 17 years under this vicious murderer, Sudan has known vast suffering and almost no peace. Yet Bashir has faced precious little censure from the international community. This is in part because he has a dictator’s talent for playing global leaders for fools; it is also because no global leaders have the will or courage to confront him.
And this is why Omar al-Bashir needs to become the next Saddam Hussein in Americans’ minds: If we hate him, our leaders will be much more likely to act against him.
Just look what happened to Saddam. Perhaps the reason most Americans were so comfortable with deposing Hussein was that we knew who he was, and we’d spent the last decade despising him.
I still clearly remember the day in third grade when my friend Kenneth told me what he wanted to be when he grew up. We were playing in the sandbox and he said, "When I grow up I’m gonna be a fighter pilot, so I can learn how to fly a jet, and then fly over to Iraq and bomb Saddam Hussein."
I lost touch with Kenneth long ago, but for all I know, his wish has now come true. And when an entire generation of American children grew up dreaming of carrying out regime change in Baghdad, is it any wonder that President Bush wasn’t the only person in the country—at least initially—who could casually ignore Kim Jong Il’s nukes, turn his back on bin-Laden and Afghanistan, and rally behind an invasion of Iraq?
Of course we would not want similarly intense disgust toward Bashir to lead to a repeat of the Iraq debacle. But that’s both politically and militarily improbable at this point. Widespread clamoring against Bashir would much more likely drive our leaders to a long-sought middle ground: Without declaring outright war, they would finally implement a variety of multilateral and minimally dangerous actions in Sudan that have already been proposed and stalled on for far too long.
A well-trained and well-equipped peacekeeping coalition from either the U.N. or NATO would be placed in Darfur over Bashir’s unending objections and manipulations. Humanitarian groups would be assured access to displaced persons camps by force, if necessary, and the displaced themselves would be protected as they went about their daily routines. Relatively ineffective sanctions would be strengthened and enforced, including, perhaps, through arrests of Sudanese officials and a blockade of Sudan’s only port to prevent oil from getting out and weapons from getting in.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine that Bashir could be quickly elevated to Hussein’s special place in the minds of the American public. But it would certainly be worth it for the Darfur advocacy movement to try to put his name on the map.
Rallying cries like “Authorize a UN peacekeeping mission!”, “Appropriate $50 million for the AU!” or even “Save Darfur Now!” just don’t have the visceral potency of “Omar al-Bashir is a murderer who must be stopped.” Providing the Darfur crisis with the sort of motivating villain who has always existed in past conflicts—from World War II to the Cold War to Bosnia to Iraq—could do more to galvanize the American public (and subsequently, American politicians) than even George Clooney’s exquisitely toned forearms.
It also does a disservice to the millions who have suffered under this tyrant to pretend, for the sake of political correctness or nuance, that he does not lie at the heart of their suffering. Omar al-Bashir is a murderer, and worse. He deserves to hang beside Saddam Hussein. And all of America and the world should know it.
Bryan Collinsworth was student co-ordinator for the Genocide Intervention Network until July, 2006.
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Comments
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Um, why doesn’t anybody talk about what’s happening in Somalia? The US is again making yet another catastrophic military blunder with potentially devastating humanitarian consequences. Yet liberals like yourself only want to talk about the killing in Sudan – not Somalia or Iraq.
— AndrePetrovrovski - Jan 9, 08:17 PM - #Yes yes — liberals aren’t talking enough about Iraq! Darfur keeps pushing it from the front page of The New York Times!
Seriously, though, you’re right that there are egregious humanitarian disasters unfolding in Iraq because of the United States’ invasion (and also right that many high-profile liberals helped facilitate that disaster). And you’re right that the potential for the US wreaking havoc in Somalia is acute.
But I do not think that the argument then becomes “and so we should talk about the genocide in Sudan less.” A comprehensive critique could be made that the US’s war-mongering in Iraq and indifference to genocide in Sudan combine to create a hypocritical and dehumanizing foreign policy, and thus we should be skeptical about its “interests” in Somalia — that’s a completely reasonable argument.
But saying we should pay more attention to Somalia and Iraq and less attention to Darfur seems short-sighted at best, and disingenuous at worst. We should be paying more attention to all the ways the US is harming people around the world, through comission and omission, in order to (one would hope) begin to lessen this harm in favor of the ways the US could (and sometimes does) help people around the world. I would argue that Darfur should be at least a high a priority as Iraq, as genocide is the worst crime against humanity and, beyond all the other heart-wrenching conflicts around the world, this one if no other should command our attention. But the point is always more attention (and praxis) not less.
— LiberalsLikeMe - Jan 10, 12:13 AM - #Well I agree, but look, 655,000 Iraqis have died since the US invasion. When you compare that number with Sudanese casualties they are about the same. So although genocide in Darfur deserves attention, I still think liberals should highlight the genocide in Iraq more than anything else.
— AndrePetrovrovski - Jan 10, 01:53 PM - #Since when is this a death count competition?
— Andrew Garib - Jan 10, 04:28 PM - #Andrew has a point. Any war or genocide caused death is a war or genocide caused death and is unnecessary, inhumane, and a waste of human life be it in Darfur, Baghdad, or the Kurdish north. We looked the other way long enough in Yugoslavia, we didn’t willingly grit our teeth in Rwanda, how long are we to stand around and let people be murdered? We can’t stop all war all the time all around the world. But we can at least try.
— Steve-O - Jan 11, 01:35 AM - #Right. But unlike Iraq, America’s government is only INDIRECTLY responsible for the situation in Darfur. Why then should Americans focus on Darfur when they should FIRST stop the crimes of their own government?
— AndrePetrovrovski - Jan 11, 07:31 AM - #Hmm, how about discussing the article and not treating genocide as an interesting discussion piece?
— Claire McManus - Jan 11, 07:18 PM - #I think it is a very good idea, and an important one, to focus on Omar al-Bashir. People rally behind defeating the evil enemy, and it needs a name-Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, that’s what people remember. Saving people’s lives, sadly, is something that people nod their heads to, agree it should be done, and then compare body counts. I admit I had never heard of al-Bashir before, and I’m glad I got the chance to learn something new from this article. We need new strategies to fight this kind of pure evil, because the current ones are not working.
What the hell is this? Young Americans for Freedom?
Disgusting war-mongering tripe.
— Louis Proyect - Jan 11, 09:23 PM - #War for Chinese oil?
— Ignatius - Jan 11, 10:47 PM - #Do we really need war to solve problems like this? I think a simple assasination would fix it. Besides, all of these events are horrific and we certainly should not rank them. How can you measure evil?
— Sue - Jan 25, 02:30 PM - #