Invited, almost seduced, by the BBC reporter Lyse Doucet, Kofi Annan said what I least wanted to hear. Hadn’t things, as “some Iraqis” suggest, been better under Saddam Hussein? “If I were an average Iraqi,” replied Mr Annan, “obviously I would make the same comparison, that 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?’”



Playing this discussion at the level of rhetoric would be easy, but stupid. I didn’t want to hear Mr Annan’s opinion because, of course, I worry it might be true. In January 2005 Iraqis voted in their millions, and were — as far as anyone can tell — happy to do it, also presumably hoping that this meant peace and liberty. In December 2006 bodies turn up in their dozens on wasteland and in backstreets, US and British soldiers die, and the people who went back to Iraq in 2003 are leaving again. Things may be less catastrophic outside Baghdad and the Sunni triangle, but they’re still pretty bad.

Perhaps then, we should have left Saddam alone. Or, even, if we were to be more honest, co-operated with him as we did in the ’80s, knowing — as was argued then — that the present chaos was quite possible in the eventuality of him being toppled. This alternative was spelt out with great honesty by Kevin Toolis (and with more subtlety by Anatole Kaletsky last week) on these pages last month when he wrote: “Sometimes we need to praise tyrants rather than depose them. No one deserves a dictator, but in the real world the vast majority of mankind will have to endure one. The very least the Western powers can do is not to replace the devil the oppressed know with the madness of the death squads that now rule Baghdad.” I hope some of my anti-war and instinctively anti-interventionist colleagues won’t mind me saying that Toolis represents the logic of their own views. And let’s agree that they could be right.

It’s an old question, of course. What do we wish for others; do we want order or democracy? Peace or liberty? Yes, both of course, but what if there has to be a choice? Do we prefer tyranny and safety to freedom and terrible insecurity (in so far as you can be safe under tyrants and free when you are insecure)? Perhaps the concentration on freedom and democracy is the middle-class journalist’s obsession, when what “ordinary” people want is bread and shelter. Security first, a free press second.

It isn’t meant as a confession when I remind myself and you that I was brought up in a family and in a social grouping that was committed to the cause of communism. There were many things that communists did (always outside communist countries, it has to be said) that were admirable. They supported independence for India, civil rights for blacks, majority rule in South Africa, when the establishment parties in this and other countries were apathetic or even hostile to all those causes.

And then we made excuses for Russia, and when we talked about democracy we didn’t mean it. We wanted strike votes to be by show of hands, not by secret ballots, lest the bourgeois press contaminate the process of decision — and because we knew that we were more likely to win that way. We celebrated the anniversaries of Lenin’s coup d’état, and airbrushed out his contribution to the eventual Stalinist tyranny.

Titanic forces and impersonal events had almost necessitated the monster, we reasoned. You cannot make the omelette of earthly paradise without breaking a few hundred thousand eggs. Hadn’t Russia been historically chaotic and therefore historically authoritarian? And hadn’t Stalinism mobilised the necessary resistance to Hitler, without which we in the over-scrupulous West would all now be dead or wearing lederhosen? The same was true for China. Without Mao, and despite his “excesses”, China would have been a country of warlords and bound feet.

Later we said that the Russians might be given to “dealing administratively” with dissidents, having an unfortunate tendency to find them insane and slap them in asylums, but the Soviet education and welfare system was supposedly wonderful, just as the main defence of Fidel Castro today is based on ignoring the jailed and occasionally tortured opponents and concentrating on what Castro has done for the Cuban health system.

Democracy — who for? You can’t have democracy when people have no jobs, no homes or whatever it is they have none of at the moment. The German Democratic Republic may be a bit dour and repressive, but look at the youth clubs it builds for its fair-haired teenagers! And then, sometime later, the Wall is down, the extent of the Stasi’s activities exposed and the nature of the failure of the system becomes apparent to all but a few diehards and a group of anti-American eccentrics who — to this day — take the tyrant’s shilling in order to tell the world that Belarus is better off under its journalist-murdering regime.

Our cynical use of the word “democracy” was mirrored by some cold warriors on the Free World’s side, who could use the same logic to help oust democratic governments in Latin America and encourage pro-Western despots — neo-fascists in the service of democracy. There were other groups then who would tell you that it was Generalissimo Franco or another civil war, so the West should get behind the old man. Which, tacitly, is what it did.

And perhaps these early Toolises were also right. In January 2005 it seemed that the majority of Iraqis wanted democracy — but maybe we should have realised both that an ultra-violent minority wouldn’t permit it, and that unless they were allowed to have their way, then they would create chaos. Of course, left alone, they would rule with electrodes, committees for public safety and bans on internet sites, but if their citizens didn’t speak out (or weren’t confused with someone who might speak out) they’d make it through. Just say what the authorities wanted you to say, shop your neighbour as required, and reflect on the fact that even if things aren’t hunky-dory, everyone would still have to agree that they were.

Let’s say that Kevin Toolis is right and I — because my history has made me over-compensate — am wrong. How many deaths is the right to vote actually worth? None? A thousand? Or the right of women to education? Or the right to speak out? If the answer is “not many”, then let’s get cosy with the murderers . . . try to edge them towards civilised behaviour. Let’s agree that the process of arguing for the freedom of others, let alone acting on it, is likely to be counter-productive. But please let us not commit the hypocrisy of voicing support for the work of Amnesty International or expressing shock at the killing of Anna Politkovskaya. Eggs break.

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