Ten years on, Iraqis still divided over Saddam’s legacy
Ten years after the deposed Iraqi president's capture, Iraqi citizens are left with conflicting lessons from the Saddam Hussein era.
Dec. 13 marked the 10th anniversary of the apprehension of deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein at a farm near the town of Tikrit, during the “Red Dawn” operation by US troops.
Innumerable facts could be listed about the implications of this event and its aftermath. We could also discuss, ad infinitum, the fate that Hussein carved for himself and the whole country when he embroiled it in a series of frivolous and destructive wars that lay waste to its capabilities and caused great psychological and sociological damage to its population. We could also review the brutal past of Hussein’s regime and the horrific circumstances of its rule, reminding ourselves of the painful and bloody legacy that we inherited from the millions of innocent Iraqi victims.
But all these subjects seem irrelevant, for further evidence indicates that Iraqi history ended at that moment on April 9, 2003, when Hussein’s regime fell.
Ten years after the end of that era, it seems strange that Iraqis continue to be divided about its legacy. Some continue to strongly defend Hussein’s rule, and give the events that followed its demise as proof positive that the dictatorial approach adopted by Hussein was, in fact, the right one. Even worse, the intellectual elites that are supposed to form a vanguard in defense of democratic ideals now implicitly say that Iraq can only be ruled by a tyrant and that otherwise, its fate is to be partitioned.
