Re:Speaking of Saddam Hussein...

A Few of the Questions and Thoughts Stimulated by the Gulf War by Morton Deutsch, Teachers College, Columbia University.

1. There has been an upsurge in interest in peace psychology during the Gulf War. How can we keep salient the recognition that the problems involved in creating a peaceful and just world are enduring and require steady work during quiet periods as well as during crises?

2. Having lived the major part of this century, I know there have been and will continue to be evil leaders in the world. Saddam Hussein belongs in the Rogues Gallery that includes Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Assad, and many others. How can such leaders be deterred from initiating war against other nations and from committing genocide against segments of their own population? The answer to this question, I believe, involves the recognition of several basic principles: early recognition of the evil; lack of encouragement and support of the evil; awareness that the evil leader is not necessarily stupid (i.e., he may respond to appropriate and timely negative and positive incentives); and some "devils" are corrigible under the right circumstances. My impression is that the U.S. government did not wish to recognize the character of Saddam Hussein's leadership of Iraq until it was much too late; it provided him with encouragement and support during and after his war with Iran; it did not provide him with timely and appropriate incentives for a peaceful negotiation of his differences with Kuwait; and it did not treat him with sufficient respect or with sufficient recognition of Iraq's legitimate interests to find out whether he was corrigible.

3. Was the use of superior military force against Iraq a better way than the use of sanctions and an embargo to achieve the objectives of Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, a defanging of Iraq's military power, the achievement of a stable peace in the Middle East, and the creation of a new world order? We shall never really know since there was no sustained test of the effectiveness of the embargo and sanctions. We do know that the war and its wake has caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, enormous destruction in Kuwait and Iraq, vast environmental damage, considerable instability in the region, and an increased demand for new military weapons in the Middle East and elsewhere. While we can be grateful that relatively few Americans and allied lives were lost, should we not mourn for the dead Iraqis and Kurds who are also the war's victims?

4. Although Saddam Hussein and George Bush have very little else in common, they both were extremely "macho" during the period prior to the onset of the war against Iraq. They froze themselves into positions which did not permit the exploration of the possibilities of finding a peaceful resolution to the conflict which might have been responsive to the legitimate interests of all the parties involved. How can we help national leaders to recognize that "positive interdependence" and "external economic strength" is the key to success in today's world and not military supremacy? How can the world community induce productive negotiations between national leaders who are rigidly fixed in outmoded positions?

5. How can we educate ourselves and our leaders that modern war creates problems rather than resolving them, that it is no longer a tolerable mode of international conduct? I have suggested above that evil can be handled without war: by early identification and by consistent and unite opposition. Evil is as much the result of war as its cause.

Division 48 Newsletter, The Division of Peace Psychology of the American Psychological Association, Volume 1, Number 2, April 1991.

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Re:Speaking of Saddam Hussein..., by Carroll R. Thomas, 12/06/01

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