John Lloyd, in the Lefty British Magazine, the New Statesman:
The death of Slobodan Milosevic, and the occasion it affords to read again details of the malignity of his rule in Serbia - 200,000 casualties and two million people displaced in Bosnia; thousands of deaths and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo; murder, torture and imprisonment of his enemies in Serbia - bring home the cost of leaving mass murderers in power: a cost not borne, at least for now, by the rich and well-defended states of the west, but by those who have neither power nor defence and who find themselves under the dictator's sway.
So it was with Saddam's Iraq. The repeated invasions of contiguous states; the massacres of Kurds and southern Shia; the licence given to torturers, rapists and murderers wearing the uniforms of secret police; the complete arbitrariness of Saddam's kleptocratic rule; the development of chemical and biological weapons and the attempt to develop a nuclear weapon - all of these made Iraq an internal hell and an external danger which, sooner or later, would have to be faced down.
The glad hosannas of those who see in the apologies of some who backed invasion a vindication of their own opposition to it are simply signs of self-delusion. Worse, they are yet another evasion of the central question, which George W Bush and Tony Blair did have the nerve to face: what is to be done about dangerous tyrants, beyond hand-wringing, ineffectual and decaying sanctions and ever-more hollow-sounding resolutions at various international levels?
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