I did wonder how long after an Iraqi court found him guilty of crimes against humanity it would take before the first political salute to Saddam’s legacy was published.
The Guardian obliges with this piece only twenty four hours after the judgment by ‘writer and television producer’ David Cox.
Read the whole miserable apologia for yourself – the following excerpts are only an edited selection.
As he goes to meet the hangman, the world has cause to rue his demise.
Why is that?
First up weapons – Saddam’s nuclear weapons programme was apparently nothing for us to be concerned about because they wouldn’t neccessarily have been pointing at Europe:
Had he acquired nuclear weapons, this might have proved a useful check on Iran’s regional ambitions.
That’s an awfuly tenuous might for turning a blind eye to the development of WMD’s by an unstable mass killer though, isn’t it?
The author gets round the problem of not knowing for sure what Saddam would have done with nukes by reassuring us the dictator’s previous targets were all locals:
When he had such weapons, he chose to use them against Iranian armed forces and Iraq’s own dissident Kurds, rather than for any purpose that threatened the wider world.
Ah, well, that’s alright then. As long as it’s Tehran or Kurdistan fried to a crisp we can turn the other cheek without needing to worry our heads too much…
Apparently the literature inspired by living under a warmongering torturing dictator is good too:
Living under tyranny may not be ideal, but it is not impossible. In the Soviet Union, life took on a character of its own, in which the human spirit managed to flourish in spite of the political constraints. The literature generated in those conditions can still inspire us.
Super-dooper. A good novel is worth a few hundred mass graves filled with hapless victims, I’m sure you’ll all agree.
Sunday Times television critic AA Gill frequently takes the mickey out of those out of touch ‘radicals’ who produce television programmes in this country by inventing for them the collective noun ‘Tristrams’.
David Cox currently deserves the honorific title – Undisputed King of all the Tristrams.