Cooking it

In this morning's Times there's a column by William Rees-Mogg in which he writes (among other things) the following:

Dictatorships which are based on a very narrow section of the population, and are opposed by a large majority, have to use exceptional force to maintain their power. Saddam used torture, genocide, poison gas and war. Such dictators have no option but to be anti-democratic and brutal. At any opportunity, the majority would be glad to sweep them away.

There are indeed many empires in history that have enjoyed substantial consent from the peoples they ruled, but Saddam never even sought such consent. People obeyed him because they were afraid of him; they feared him because he was a murderous thug, surrounded by an entourage of murderous thugs. If there had been no American invasion, he would still be in power...
.....
[T]he critics of the Iraq policy ought to recognise that they were mistaken, though for the best of motives. Robin Cook got it wrong; the Liberal Democrats got it wrong; many of the London Arabists got it wrong; the Democrats got it wrong in the United States. President Bush got it right; Tony Blair got it right. We ought to be grateful to both of them for their courage and their judgment.

... The world tolerated Saddam Hussein's genocidal regime in Iraq for far too long...

Rees-Mogg was on the BBC's Today programme this morning and so was Robin Cook. You can listen again here (scroll down to 0850 - it's about eight minutes in). After having a passage from Rees-Mogg's column read to him, and being asked what he thinks about it, Cook begins in a charmingly polite way, saying he hasn't had the 'delight' of reading the column but that, judging by the extract, it's 'garbage'. Then he's on to WMD and the terrorist threat that the war was really supposed to be about and...

If the elections were to be the justification for the war, George Bush needed to say that at the time of... the invasion.

This is the Jonathan Steele manoeuvre once again - 'as if democratization wasn't part of the regime change project from the start', if I may repeat myself. [You may - Ed.]

Rees-Mogg comes back:

Well, Robin Cook is basically saying that Saddam Hussein ought still to be in power. That was the real choice: should we go on accepting the Saddam Hussein regime which had committed genocide, which had used poison gas against its own people, which had engaged in two wars of aggression against its neighbours, which used torture on an extremely extensive scale, and which was a minority regime? Should that regime have continued?...

Cook returns to the matter of WMD, and disarming Iraq, and whether Iraq was a threat, and is then asked by the interviewer, 'Would Saddam still be there?' Here is the money passage, Cook's reply to that question:

Umm... Well, that of course... the longer the period that passes... it is now some two years since the invasion... the longer, that becomes a speculative question. Anybody who has seen Saddam Hussein emerge from his hole and has seen the disordered, deranged mind that he now has, is bound to ask whether those that were actually saying at the time of the invasion that Saddam would fall in his time, would probably have been right by now.

Better read it again. (You're right - there's no reference to the Hussein boys, Uday and Qusay.) I referred in my previous post to the 'self-comforting ways' in which some people manage to evade the fact that but for George Bush and Tony Blair Saddam Hussein's regime would still be extant. Robin Cook's answer here is one of those ways, although the particular variant is new to me; and so this post does not fulfill the intention I expressed in that post when I said 'more of which in due course'. More of which, therefore, in due course.

Asked, finally, whether he sees the Prime Minister as coming out of the shadow of Iraq, Rees-Mogg replies:

Yes I do... [T]he basic judgment was correct; I think that will prevail because it seems to me that Robin Cook's argument is basically an argument for not having done anything effective about the issue of Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

(Thanks: Judy K for the heads up; SdeW for the transcript.)