Oliver Kamm: Saddam: good riddance!

Oliver Kamm: Saddam: good riddance!: "If you're to credit David Cox's scabrous apologetic for Saddam Hussein, it's a crying shame the tyrant was put in the dock at all. The political congealment of an isolationist and anti-American left with an obdurately reactionary right has been a singular part of political debate in the last five years. But not even the collection of Leninists and Islamists that makes up the misnamed Stop the War Coalition has yet advanced cynicism on Cox's scale.

Cox languidly concedes that 'living under tyranny may not be ideal', and that 'Iraq's dissidents would have paid a price' if Saddam were still in power. I dislike using the cliche 'moral equivalence' about this sort of thing, if only because Cox plainly doesn't think in equivalences. He hyperbolises abridgements of liberty in democratic countries whereas, in Ba'athist Iraq, he perceives a 'fortress of stability' that 'offered women opportunities unimaginable in nearby countries'."