IN A BRIGHT ROOM IN Baghdad, Saddam Hussein is on trial. In the din of America's public square, so is the invasion that overthrew him. An international stable of writers argue that the only evidence that matters, in both trials, is of Saddam's horrifying human rights violations. Nine years after the acclaimed Black Book of Communism appeared, another French publisher has issued a 701-page "black book of Saddam Hussein" that pushes to the background all talk of WMDs, skewed intelligence, terrorism, and democratization, and focuses our attention on the atrocities of a tyrant of historic proportions.

The book's editor, veteran French journalist Chris Kutschera, concludes that while "the American war may not have been the ideal way to put an end to Saddam Hussein's dictatorship," there was no better one, because overthrow was simply no longer possible from within a savagely repressed society. So: No invasion, more Saddam. And that was an outcome these authors--an array of Middle Eastern, European, and American journalists, academics, and activists--could not bear.

This hefty volume includes almost three dozen substantive chapters chronicling the rise and record of Iraq's Baath party, the operations of Saddam's secret police, his cult of personality, his sanguinary wars against Iran and Kuwait, and his international suppliers of arms and diplomatic support. They show that Saddam's quarter-century in power was a virtually uninterrupted exercise in bloodletting in nearly every direction...

...The pattern is plain: Over and over again, perceived abuses by Western societies--colonialism, the Vietnam war--are revisited in conversation and thought until they are part of our mental furniture. What happens to the crimes of others is very different. Some of them get sucked down the memory hole. Those of us of a certain age remember that the very independent Idi Amin was far worse, but it is Joseph Mobutu--portrayed as a U.S. ally, if not puppet--who has emerged as the durable symbol of abusive African rule.

More often, crimes committed by non-Westerners are blamed on Westerners. As in: America provided Saddam with chemical weapons; Palestinians mimic Israeli brutality; the Khmer Rouge was driven to madness by U.S. bombing. It was Belgian colonialism that taught Rwandan Hutu génocidaires to be tribal and to kill. And the CIA created Osama bin Laden, while U.S. excesses created his followers.

The soft bigotry here is not of low expectations but of no expectations. This suggests that only Westerners have moral agency. To deny a person the capacity to initiate evil is to deny them the capacity to initiate good, or anything in between...