World's Stupidest Public Figure on Iraq

The bigger fool is one of those economics 101 paradigms: there's always someone out there who will buy into a Ponzi scheme who is dumber than the original investors, until it all comes tumbling down.

Jimmy Carter is long behind us and so the biggest fool in active public life has to be Kofi Annan, who managed to mismanage Rwanda into close to a million deaths. So he has a reason to admire his companion in death-dealing, although much more proactive, Saddam Hussain. Taranto at WSJ begs to enter a contrarian view:

Iraq today certainly has its problems, here, from the U.S. State Department, is a reminder of what is not going on in Iraq today:

Saddam Hussein is the first world leader in modern times to have brutally used chemical weapons against his own people. His goals were to systematically terrorize and exterminate the Kurdish population in northern Iraq, to silence his critics, and to test the effectiveness of his chemical and biological weapons. Hussein launched chemical attacks against 40 Kurdish villages and thousands of innocent civilians in 1987-88, using them as testing grounds. The worst of these attacks devastated the city of Halabja on March 16, 1988.

5,000 civilians, many of them women, children, and the elderly, died within hours of the attack. 10,000 more were blinded, maimed, disfigured, or otherwise severely and irreversibly debilitated.

And here's a report from PBS of how Saddam responded to the Shiite uprising in 1991:

Saddam's Republican Guard fought the resistance in Karbala. Civilians and rebels fled the city. On the roads leading out, Iraqi army helicopter crews poured kerosene on the refugees, then set them on fire. . . . There were mass executions of civilians, some of whom were tied to tanks and used as human shields. In Karbala, some of Shiite Islam's holiest shrines were destroyed. Others were used as centers for murder, torture and rape. In Najaf, residential areas were bombed, and hospital staff and patients were murdered.

Let's just repeat Annan's description of Iraq under Saddam:

They had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying, "Am I going to see my child again?"

Annan isn't just claiming that Saddam, though brutal, made the trains run on time. He is saying that Saddam actually looked out for the safety of the Iraqi people, the very people his regime was gassing, setting ablaze, tying to tanks, torturing and raping. Is Annan just ignorant, or is he depraved? We suppose it could be a little of both.

Annan comes from a continent where being ignorant comes with the gene pool, and being depraved comes from being in public life. So it's both.