December 30, 2006

• Get It While It's Hot

  Yes, get it while it's hot....my vicarious response to the death of Saddam Hussein, and to Xcholo4u's recent post about it.

  December 30, 2006
  The Independent (UK)

  A Dictator Created Then Destroyed by America
  Robert Fisk

  Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy
  equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that
  crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler
  of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent
  Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell
  us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the
  Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi
  "government", but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid
  al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the
  Arab world.

  But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and,
  indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a
  question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not
  the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what
  about the other guilty men?

  No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas
  our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He
  only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and
  thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the
  Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime
  Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the
  weapons we used, with great brutality.

  In the aftermath of the
  international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have
  murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our
  shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to
  forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator
  we created.

  Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the
  greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a
  half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which
  he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled
  Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in
  the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for
  sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also
  expose our culpability.

  And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with
  our depleted uranium shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous,
  the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of
  anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" -
  our "mission accomplished" - who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as
  we might expect will come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and
  Bush, written in comfortable and wealthy retirement.

  Hours before
  Saddam's death sentence, his family - his first wife, Sajida, and Saddam's
  daughter and their other relatives - had given up hope.

  "Whatever could
  be done has been done - we can only wait for time to take its course," one of
  them said last night. But Saddam knew, and had already announced his own
  "martyrdom": he was still the president of Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All
  condemned men face a decision: to die with a last, grovelling plea for mercy or
  to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in their last hours
  on earth. His last trial appearance - that wan smile that spread over the
  mass-murderer's face - showed us which path Saddam intended to walk to the
  noose.

  I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I have
  talked to the Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia who rose up against the
  dictator at our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us - and whose
  comrades, in their tens of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like
  thrushes by Saddam's executioners.

  I have walked round the execution
  chamber of Abu Ghraib - only months, it later transpired, after we had been
  using the same prison for a few tortures and killings of our own - and I have
  watched Iraqis pull thousands of their dead relatives from the mass graves of
  Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted artificial hip and a medical
  identification number on his arm. He had been taken directly from hospital to
  his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I have even shaken the dictator's
  soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal finished his days in power writing
  romantic novels.

  It was my colleague, Tom Friedman - now a messianic
  columnist for The New York Times - who perfectly caught Saddam's character just
  before the 2003 invasion: Saddam was, he wrote, "part Don Corleone, part Donald
  Duck". And, in this unique definition, Friedman caught the horror of all
  dictators; their sadistic attraction and the grotesque, unbelievable nature of
  their barbarity.

  But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At
  first, those who suffered from Saddam's cruelty will welcome his execution.
  Hundreds wanted to pull the hangman's lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia
  outside Iraq welcome his end. But they - and millions of other Muslims - will
  remember how he was informed of his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid
  al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a
  commemoration which even the ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by
  releasing prisoners from his jails. "Handed over to the Iraqi authorities," he
  may have been before his death. But his execution will go down - correctly - as
  an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this -
  that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from
  Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out
  for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a "martyr" to
  the will of the new "Crusaders".

  When he was captured in November of
  2003, the insurgency against American troops increased in ferocity. After his
  death, it will redouble in intensity again. Freed from the remotest possibility
  of Saddam's return by his execution, the West's enemies in Iraq have no reason
  to fear the return of his Baathist regime. Osama bin Laden will certainly
  rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there's a thought. So many crimes
  avenged.

  But we will have got away with it.
  

  • 3:18 pm
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