The U.N. inspectors found no ticking nuclear bomb or any other forbidden weapon when they searched one of Saddam Hussein's palaces the other day, but they dealt him a blow of sorts anyway. Talk about your wretched excess.
Not that Saddam had exactly been on a public-relations roll anyway. The recent British report detailing his murders, tortures and, for the lucky few, false imprisonments was only the latest bill of particulars indicting the tyrant for the deaths of, give or take, some 700,000 of his own citizens during his 23 years in power.
Books, reports and articles journalizing Saddam's cruelties and atrocities are by now so plentiful they nearly qualify as a genre in their own right.
But the rare look inside one of his palaces gilded the black lily of his reputation.
In the past, the palaces were forbidden fruit. Earlier U.N. inspectors were either barred outright or allowed in only if they first made specific arrangements, making any attempt at inspection pointless. Saddam had drawn himself up in a sovereignty huff and had said any inspection would violate Iraq's very nationhood, as if he had ever allowed it to have one.
There are some 20 palaces just in the Baghdad area, and there are dozens more scattered around the country.
The Al Sajoud Palace, which the inspectors rattled around in this week, has walls that run a half-mile on each side. They enclose a palace for which the word "lavish" is pitifully inadequate. The flowers in the meticulous gardens are watered by marbled channels. Inside are rich mosaics and inlaid marble floors. Heavy wood doors are carved with Saddam's initials, and the walls carry Arabic poetry in gold lettering.
The rare public display of this level of wealth puts the definitive lie to Saddam's constant claim that United Nations economic sanctions were starving and sickening Iraqis to death.
Not a few in the United States and Europe fell for that hustle, signing petitions and generally wringing their hands over the inhumanity of it all. Every so often, Saddam would let TV cameras cruise the infants' ward to record the tragically emaciated babies, just to keep the political pot stirred.
In truth, however, the United Nations allowed Iraq to sell enough oil to buy food and medicine, if Saddam would only allow an honest accounting of how the money was spent. (He often wouldn't.) And it was an open secret that Iraq was evading the sanctions with vigorous smuggling and black-market trading anyway.
The simple, brute fact of the matter was that Saddam, even as he was spending fortunes on his palaces and other indulgences, was quite deliberately starving his own people and denying them medical care because, as wretches, they made good photo-ops for his campaign to have the bothersome sanctions repealed.
Hooray for do-gooders. Without them, a lot of good would be left undone. But the impulse can sometimes be self-deluding. It took a special obtuseness for all of those years to believe that the West was just being heartless and that Saddam was a wounded humanitarian.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn@coxnews.com. New York Times News Service