Mick Hartley

Mark Steyn has an upbeat piece in the Spectator on Iraq one year on:

[H]ere are ten facts about Iraq today: 1) Saddam Hussein is in jail, his sons are in ‘paradise’, and of the 52 faces on the Pentagon’s deck of cards all but nine are now in one or the other of those locations.

2) The coalition casualties in February were the lowest since the war began.

3) Attacks on the Iraqi oil pipelines have fallen by 75 per cent since last autumn, and crude oil production in British-controlled southern Iraq is at 127 per cent of the target set immediately after the war.

4) The prewar potable water supply — 12.9 million litres — has been doubled.

5) The historic marshlands of southern Iraq, environmentally devastated by Saddam, are being restored, and tens of thousands of marsh Arabs have returned to their ancient homeland.

6) Public healthcare funding in Iraq is more than 25 times higher than it was a year ago and child immunisation rates have improved by 25 per cent.

7) Iraq’s only international port has been modernised and desilted so that it is now able to take large ships without waiting for the tide, and daily commercial aircraft departures are 100 times higher than prewar.

8) School attendance in Iraq is 10 per cent higher than a year ago.

9) Despite Saddam emptying his prisons of cutpurses and other ne’er-do-wells just before the war, coalition authorities report that crime in Basra has fallen by 70 per cent.

10) The interim Iraqi constitution is the most liberal in the Arab world.

Steyn mentions in passing one Hans von Sponek:

As for Iraq needing UN ‘legitimacy’, why not ask the people? The UN to them means decadent bureaucrats like Hans von Sponeck, the former UN co-ordinator for Iraq who the other day expressed his preference for the ‘order’ Saddam brought to the country, or the stinking sewer of the oil-for-food programme, a humanitarian intervention that turned into a money-laundering scheme for Saddam’s Western cronies.

Von Sponek was UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq from 1998 to 2000. Here’s what he had to say to the Guardian last week:

As for the argument that the war was justified because life will improve for Iraqis, a year is a long time. During that period, life for the average Iraqi has been a rollercoaster. Some are employed, some have lost their jobs, for others it’s the status quo. I would venture to say, based on phone conversations with Iraqis, that the overall picture is worse now despite what President Bush says about bringing freedom to Iraq. I’m sure it’s not the freedom the Iraqi people had in mind.

Many people are dead who would have been alive, many are psychologically damaged, the UN has been weakened, when it was on the path for a peaceful solution. I can’t agree with the reasoning that maybe in five years time, Iraq will be stable, that it will have a constitution and elections and that what happened will have justified that. I can’t accept this at all, it runs counter to any legally-minded, human rights-minded person.

As for the argument that war was the only way to remove Saddam Hussein, no human being lasts for ever. Saddam was very weakened. I have spoken to officials from his former regime who said at the end other senior officials, including Tariq Aziz (Saddam’s foreign minister) and General Ali Hassan al-Majid (Chemical Ali), were running the country in the last 12 months. Saddam Hussein was not the Saddam Hussein described to us as a danger to the US and Europe. That was absolute nonsense.

Yes Iraqis suffered under this man, but people in Iraq are not suffering any less in their daily life now, what order there was – even under a dictator – is gone. Whatever we see now is no fundamental improvement.

So Steyn is right: this man – a former UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq – really does believe that things were better under Saddam.