Few Iraqis wept last month when Ali Hassan al-Majid - "Chemical Ali" - received five death sentences for ordering the use of nerve agents against his country's Kurdish citizens in the late 1980s. His trial summed up the horrors of Saddam Hussein's rule, but unfortunately, some leaders continue to play down the gross violations in Iraq under Hussein's republic of fear, at the same time they ignore the potential for a human rights catastrophe should the United States withdraw.

As the hideous violence in Iraq continues, it has become increasingly common to hear people argue that the world was better off with Saddam Hussein in power and that Iraqis were better off under his fist. In his final interview as U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan acknowledged that Iraq "had a dictator who was brutal," but said that Iraqis under the Baathist dictatorship "had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school." In the same spirit, John Pace, who recently left his post as U.N. human rights chief in Iraq, noted that, "under Saddam, if you agreed to forgo your basic freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK."

This line of argument began soon after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. By early 2004, some prominent political and intellectual leaders were arguing that women's rights, gay rights, health care and much else were suffering in post-Hussein Iraq.

	Advertisement

The truth is that in totalitarian regimes, there are no human rights. Period. For most people, life under totalitarianism is slavery, with no possibility of escape. That is why, despite the carnage in Iraq, Iraqis are consistently less pessimistic about the present and more optimistic about the future of their country than Americans are. In a national poll of 5,019 people, conducted this spring by Opinion Research Business, a British market-research firm, only 27 percent of Iraqis said they believed that their country "is actually in a state of civil war," and by nearly 2 to 1 (49 percent to 26 percent), the Iraqis surveyed said they preferred life under their new government to life under the old tyranny. That is why, at a time when many Americans are abandoning the vision of a democratic Iraq, most Iraqis still cling to the hope of a better future. They know that under Hussein, there was no hope.

By consistently ignoring the fundamental moral divide that separates societies in which people are slaves from societies in which people are free, some human rights groups undermine the very cause they claim to champion. Consider one 2005 Amnesty International report on Iraq. It notes that in the lawless climate of the first months after Hussein's overthrow, reports of kidnappings, rapes and killings of women and girls by criminal gangs rose. But the organization ignored the possibility that reports of rape at police stations may have increased for the simple reason that under Saddam it was the men of the regime who were doing the raping. When Saddam's son Uday went on his legendary raping sprees, victims were not about to report the crime.

Of course, Saddam Hussein's removal has created a host of difficult strategic challenges, as well as numerous human rights atrocities. But Saddam was a mass murderer who tortured children in front of their parents, gassed Kurds, slaughtered Shi'ites, started two wars with his neighbors and launched Scud missiles into downtown Riyadh and Tel Aviv. The price for the stability that Hussein supposedly brought to the region was mass graves, hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, and terrorism and war outside it. Difficult as the challenges are today - with Iran and Syria trying to stymie democracy in Iraq, with Al-Qaeda turning Iraq into the central battleground in its holy war of terrorism against the free world, and with sectarian militias bent on murder and mayhem - there is still hope that tomorrow may be better.

No one can know for sure whether President Bush's "surge" of U.S. troops in Iraq will succeed. But those who believe that human rights should play a central role in international affairs should be doing everything in their power to maximize its chances. For one of the consequences of failure could well be catastrophe.

A precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces could lead to a bloodbath that would make the current carnage pale by comparison. Without U.S. troops in place to quell some of the violence, Iranian-backed Shi'ite militias would dramatically increase their attacks on Sunnis; Sunni militias, backed by the Saudis or others, would retaliate in kind, drawing more and more of Iraq into a vicious cycle of violence. If Iraq were to descend into full-blown civil war, the chaos could trigger similar clashes throughout the region as Sunni-Shi'ite tensions spill across Iraq's borders.

In this respect, the debate over Iraq is beginning to look a lot like the debate about the Vietnam War in the 1960s and '70s. Then, too, the argument in the United States focused primarily on whether U.S. forces should pull out. But many who supported that withdrawal in the name of human rights did not foresee the calamity that followed, which included genocide in Cambodia, tens of thousands slaughtered in Vietnam by the North Vietnamese and the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of "boat people."

My hope is that as U.S. leaders decide their course, they will make the human rights dimension a central part of any decision. The consequences of not doing so might prove catastrophic to Iraqis, to regional peace and, ultimately, to U.S. security.

The author, a former Soviet dissident who was imprisoned for nine years in the gulag, is chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies, at the Shalem Center, in Jerusalem.