Ford, Saddam, and the Era of Realpolitik

"Nothing is more annoying than to be obscurely hanged," Voltaire once wrote. By that measure, Saddam Hussein would have been satisfied with his own death.

As the weekend passed, millions of Americans downloaded the images of his execution from a wobbling cell phone video. The room looked disturbingly dim. Viewers saw Saddam on the scaffolding, calling out, then his neck snapping like a gunshot amid a cacophony of voices that arose as the living in the room shouted over what to do next.

Saddam had been sentenced for the 1982 killing of Shiites in Dujail after an assassination attempt upon him. But he had also been on trial for the massacre of some 100,000 Kurds in the 1988 Anfal campaign. The undignified video of his death made a lot of us uneasy, especially because we watched it between views of the most dignified images of former U.S. President Gerald Ford, lying in state in the Rotunda of the Capitol.

The fact that the intentional murderer and the accidental president died in the same week gives us cause to reflect on some other aspects of the period in which both began to lead their countries. These aspects put the image of the bearded man at the end of a noose in a new perspective.

Saddam's name first began making it into American newspapers as "Saddam Hussein Takriti" when Ford was minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives during the 1970s. The news reports spoke of "Mr. Takriti" as a strongman of Iraq's secular Baath Party. There were other groups pushing for power -- the Iraqi Communist Party and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by General Mustafa al-Barzani.

Filling the Vacuum

At that time, Vietnam and the Soviet Union preoccupied Washington; the rest of the world was detail and shadow. In that context, a non-communist group like the Baath Party looked like something the U.S. could live with or even support.

"Baath fills a vacuum in the Arab world; it offers the Arab left an alternative to communism," the New York Times wrote in 1971, quoting a diplomat summing up that view. Christmas week in that year brought reports of the consolidation of Saddam's power as well as a doubling of Iraq's income from oil.

The decision to ignore the Kurds didn't happen all at once, but rather slowly. In February 1972, there came news that a high- ranking delegation from Iraq, including again "Mr. Takriti," was off to Moscow, looking to buy arms with its new cash, and perhaps to strengthen its alliance. That April there was news that Soviet Premier Alexey Kosygin was in Baghdad for a state visit. Barzani invited Kosygin to visit him, too.

Reaching Out to U.S.

In the summer of 1973, a few months before Spiro Agnew resigned as Richard Nixon's vice president, a handsome and young Saddam reached out to the U.S., saying, "Up to this moment, Iraq has viewed American and British policies as hostile." Nonetheless, he said, "Iraq will never close the door in the face of any positive development that occurs in these policies." One of the developments that Saddam sought was freedom to deal with the minority Kurd population as he liked.

The U.S. at that time was suffering a power vacuum of its own, mostly due to Watergate. Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state, stopped the Kurds from joining in the retaliation of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. By 1974, the year Ford became president, Barzani was pleading with Washington to save his people from Saddam.

Two years later, columnist William Safire replicated Barzani's note to Kissinger: "Our movement and our people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way with silence." Hundreds of thousands of Kurds had fled over the border to Iran; the Iranians pushed 40,000 back into Iraq and the arms of the Baathists.

Hanging the Kurds

Nobody was willing to stand up for the Kurds. By the mid- 1970s, C.L. Sulzberger of the New York Times invoked Voltaire's phrase about hanging. Sulzberger titled a column "To Be Obscurely Hanged" about the unnoticed fate of the Kurds.

The message from the rest of the world -- Nixon, Kissinger, Ford, Jimmy Carter and other leaders -- was the same: No one will stand up for the Kurds. In the 1980s, Saddam killed Kurds by the tens of thousands at another moment of U.S. preoccupation. For decades, Saddam remained sure he could get away with it.

My own view is that this story doesn't reflect on Ford, a thoroughly decent man who lacked -- along with all other American presidents -- the ability to police every injustice in every country on the globe. But it does remind us of the cynical killings that happen when the rest of us are looking away.

Realpolitik, the policy of getting along with other nations, rather than righting injustices within them, is newly fashionable. That's all right, but we should remember its negative consequences.

Most importantly, all this history reminds us of why Saddam had to go on trial in the first place. When you hang a hangman in a most public way, you give future murderers pause -- at least some of them. And you step a bit more confidently into the light of the new year.

Miss Shlaes is a visiting senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and is a columnist for Bloomberg News.