Corridors Of Power: Should America Police The World? review: Why the Americans tolerated, then toppled, murderous tyrant Saddam, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
Corridors Of Power: Should America Police The World? (BBC4)
However vicious the infighting among Tories, it's unlikely their autumn conference in Birmingham next month will be as bloodthirsty as Saddam Hussein's first party assembly as president of Iraq.
Six days after he took power in 1979, he summoned hundreds of officials from his Ba'ath party to a meeting in Baghdad. As the delegates took their seats, the doors were shut and bolted. Unless you're at a lock-in at a village pub, that's always an ominous sign.
Archive footage on Corridors Of Power showed the grinning dictator chomping on a cigar, like Magnum star Tom Selleck doing a Winston Churchill impression. Traitors and conspirators were among them, he declared, and slowly announced their names.
Saddam Hussein waves to supporters in Baghdad, Iraq in October, 1995
'Ahmed . . . ' he began, and every Ahmed in the room broke into a muck sweat. Each of the men he identified as an enemy was marched outside, blindfolded, bound to a stake and then, after the rest of the party bigwigs gathered round to watch, shot dead. And shot a few more times, for good measure.
This cold-blooded execution, without any charges or trial, was a statement of intent. 'The message was unmistakable,' said narrator Meryl Streep: not only did Saddam film the murderous performance but he distributed thousands of copies across the Arab world.
Hiring triple-Oscar winner Meryl to do the voiceover is a pretty emphatic statement of intent itself. This eight-part series promises to be a major work of political philosophy, asking whether the USA — as the only democratic superpower — has a moral duty to act as the world's policeman.
So far, it's short on real philosophy or analysis, but the array of retired policymakers is impressive. It opened with former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, segued into soundbites from Henry Kissinger, and then in quick succession lined up Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, George Schultz and more.
Since all of them, bar Clinton, are now dead, this documentary has clearly been some time in the making.
Former United States Secretary of State Colin Powell speaks during the show
Former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright speaks in the programme
Former United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also speaks in the programme
For the first five minutes, they offered differing opinions on their nation's duty to step in and prevent genocides. The question could not be more timely, with presidential frontrunner Donald Trump threatening to dial down U.S. involvement in Nato. But the rest of this hour focused solely on geopolitics in the 1980s and early 1990s, with American support of Saddam the central issue.
Until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Baghdad was seen as a disreputable but useful ally against the mullahs in Iran. Even Saddam's genocidal massacres of Kurdish villages, spraying civilians with poison gas, were tolerated for a time.
Some of the newsreels, showing the bodies of children slaughtered with chemical weapons, were unbearable. This comes less than a week after equally horrible images were aired in BBC2's Atomic People, about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
These atrocities need to be remembered, but it's also important that we don't become blasé about screening such footage.
