by Trey Smith
Daily Lobo columnist
It's pretty much commonly accepted these days that the United States made a mistake invading Iraq - especially based on the arguments made for the war before it began.
The justification that Saddam Hussein was building banned weapons has proven false. The belief the Iraqi people would embrace an American presence was tragically wrong. The Iraq War has become a dangerous distraction from the war on terrorism and has cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
Yet we still have fringe Americans in this country who believe the war was justified because Hussein was killing his people. That's an argument we should examine more closely. Under Hussein, Iraq had the death penalty. So does the United States. In Iraq, a person could be killed for a crime other than murder. Ditto for America.
The strongest argument is Hussein gassed the Kurds and massacred Shiites. The gassing occurred during Iraqi Kurds' support for Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, and the majority of anti-Shiite violence came in response to the Shiite uprising urged on by the United States after the 1991 Gulf War.
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Has the United States used unfair and immoral tactics and weapons - including torture - during its wars? You bet.
It should go without saying that the Hussein regime was murderous. But we must look critically at the pre-war situation in Iraq and compare it to what occurs in the rest of the world. It is hypocritical for any American to decry the abusiveness of Hussein while not giving a second thought to similar or worse examples of violence employed by states against their citizens.
For example, if you are like the majority of Americans, you probably could not find Darfur on a map. Darfur is the western region of Sudan, an East African nation south of Egypt. The ethnically Arab government of Sudan is forcing its interpretation of Islam on everyone in the country and systematically exterminating those who resist, especially the black Christians in Darfur.
The government is using militias and bombs to attack hospitals, places of worship and entire villages, killing tens of thousands and making refugees of nearly two million others. That does not include the tens of thousands of Sudanese who have been sold into slavery under the Sudanese government.
A government that is killing its people? No doubt the United States is rushing to the rescue this very second.
Unfortunately, the United States doesn't seem to be concerned with the Darfur region. Perhaps America is preoccupied with the war on terror and does not have time for genocide. Of course, members of the Sudanese government have been connected to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and served as hosts to Osama bin Laden in the mid-1990s.
Here is a regime that commits genocide against its own people and participates in global terrorism. Why does the United States not act immediately, as the Bush administration claimed was necessary with Iraq?
The State Department under Colin Powell went so far as to explicitly label the situation in Darfur as genocide, which is more than the Clinton administration did for Rwanda during its 1994 genocide. But there has been little tangible American response to the genocide in Sudan.
Other than threatening sanctions, the United States has remained silent on what is to be done. While we sit comfortably in our homes in this relatively safe corner of the world, we need to think about events on the opposite side of the world. Is an American life worth more than the life of an Iraqi? Is an Iraqi life worth more than a Sudanese?
If America was truly concerned about the well-being of the Iraqi people living under the threat of violence and persecution, it is time it thought of the people of Sudan in the same way.
Hussein was a mass murderer who killed his political opponents and mercilessly crushed Kurdish and Shiite rebellions, but his actions were not genocidal. Yet we have been idle in the past and continue to stand by while worse violence occurs in Rwanda, Sudan, North Korea and many other places in the world.
The next time you hear the argument that the Iraq War was necessary because Hussein was killing his people, think long and hard about the commitment the application of that principle requires.
