In his recent Washington Post article, Richard Cohen laments the shallow mockery of Saddam Hussein’s trial in Baghdad, while chiding anti-war protesters for totally ignoring the “thug’s” removal as, at least, one real justification for the most recent Iraq war. I say “most recent” because Cohen completely overlooks the fact that war in earnest against Iraq began with Desert Storm in l991, and that was closely followed by severe sanctions and “coalition” bombing of Iraq’s superstructure throughout the subsequent Clinton administration, which meant that Bush’s (the most recent) moral authority was already non-existent in ‘03—particularly in light of the pre-‘war’ figure of almost 500,000 Iraqi deaths (mostly children) resulting directly and indirectly from those sanctions and bombing.

I would suggest to Mr. Cohen that no single act of Saddam’s barbarism is credited with as many deaths, excepting, perhaps, the Iran-Iraq war.

It is little wonder, when one ponders the wide-ranging pre-War publicity that revealed the ½ million figure, that Saddam’s atrocities almost pale in light of America’s.

And I would also reiterate another point: namely that it has yet to be proven it did not require a cruel strongman to hold Iraq together as a state. It would be redundant to go into the sectarian fighting, etc., all over the Sunni Triangle, and elsewhere, that currently holds sway over the sad situation that is Iraq.

The simple (and bitter) truth is that America instigated mass murder in Iraq well before G.W. began his own dirty, little war.

And when he wonders, particularly out loud, why Hussein’s trial doesn’t inspire more outrage than it does, let’s recall the fiction proposed by an earlier PR campaign describing Iraqi soldiers throwing Kuwaiti infants out of their incubators.

And before that, we had Grenada and Panama. And before that, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Before that, Chile. Vietnam. Ad nauseam.

And Mr. Cohen might well wonder why Saddam is old hat and doesn’t make a more erstwhile villain.

It is because our militarized Plutocracy, in concert with a popular culture and media dedicated to public policy amnesia and desensitization to violence via virtual reality war games, and such government prohibitions as disallowing photos of returning war dead and televisions’ proscribing grisly war violence from the idiot screen, has been making war on the globe since the end of WWII, and beyond: anything to get our two-cents worth. Or is it our 98% worth of the action?