Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, is a murderous brute who runs a totalitarian police state. He should not be trusted with a kitchen knife, let alone with chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Should we therefore support the threats by the USA - backed by the British government - to bomb Iraq unless Saddam keeps his promise to allow international inspection of his military-industrial installations? No. Tools of mass murder in the hands of Saddam do not justify tools of mass murder in the hands of the USA. The Iraqi regime's ambitions to be a big power in its region - a "sub-imperialist" power - do not justify the USA's ambitions to be the world's policeman.
The USA is not a fascistic police state. Yet it is a regime where Bill Clinton could boost an election campaign by making a big show of signing a death warrant, where supreme power could rest for years with the semi-senile Ronald Reagan, and where Richard Nixon could base his foreign policy on the "madman theory" - telling his envoys to warn rebel governments and movements that they should toe the US line because "Nixon is a madman; he could press the nuclear trigger any day".
History shows that a government staffed by smooth-talking "democratic" lawyers can be as brutal and dangerous on the world scene as any military dictatorship. The USA dropped atom bombs on Japan, slaughtering hundreds and thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It came close to "nuking" China during the Korean war and Cuba during the "missile crisis" of 1961. In just ten days at the end of 1972, it dropped more bomb-power on Vietnam than was dropped all over the world in the whole of World War 2. When it finally retreated from Indochina, it left millions dead and maimed, societies shattered, fields and forests poisoned. The International Monetary Fund, essentially run by the USA, routinely compels debt-crippled Third World governments to push through "free market" policies which will drive millions into malnutrition and starvation.
The Gulf War of early 1991, when the USA, with Britain and other allies, pounded Iraq, was waged for oil, not for human rights. The USA and Britain had aided and supplied Iraq while it nerve-gassed its Kurdish minority. After the end of the war, they did very little to help the Kurds, and left Saddam a free hand to suppress and slaughter the discontented Shi'ite people of southern Iraq.
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, which sparked the war, was a brutal act of greed. But the USA was not motivated by concern for the people living in Kuwait. As was said at the time: "If Kuwait grew carrots, there would be no war".
At the end of the war, the USA deliberately decided to leave Saddam in power in Iraq. They had discussed marching on to Baghdad and imposing a new pro-American government; but they could not find a suitably cooperative group of Iraqi generals to form a stooge government. Better to keep Saddam - a vicious dictator, but a chastened one, and one who would keep the Iraqi state intact - than risk revolutionary rebellions by the oppressed peoples of Iraq, possibly sparking other rebellions throughout the Middle East, which might follow the installation of a weak and makeshift stooge government.
Instead of deposing Saddam, they punished the people of Iraq, with a continuing economic blockade which has cost the lives of tens of thousands of Iraqi children. Saddam's luxuries have not been affected by the blockade, and his political control has probably been strengthened by the Iraqi people's natural impulse to rally round against foreign aggression. Our answer to Saddam is not support for US imperialist bombs, but working-class solidarity with the workers, peasants, and oppressed minorities of Iraq in their struggles to rid themselves of the dictator.
