December 30, 2006


Saddam Hussein Executed

The BBC reports that Saddam Hussein has finally been executed. To be honest, I had totally forgotten about him. Hard to say whether this is good or bad, but it’s ironic to read what Bush had to say about Hussein’s death. Right, democracy and executions. Not.

“It is a testament to the Iraqi people’s resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial.

“It is an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the War on Terror.”

Sorry, I don’t believe in the U.S. interpretation of democracy and want to point out that my concept of democracy and human rights fits in with where I”m from. That is, even though my own government forgot everything they should represent, Europe rejects the death penalty, and the BBC also deals with this aspect of the Hussein trial.

The European Union has used Saddam Hussein’s trial and conviction to reiterate its deeply entrenched opposition to the death penalty. It led the way in calling for the former Iraqi leader not to go to the gallows.

[…]

The US stands alongside China, Saudi Arabia and Iran as carrying out the greatest numbers of executions per year. According to Amnesty International 94% of the 2005 executions took place in those countries - with about 80% of those taking place in China.

Great company the U.S. is keeping, and a wonderful example they’re setting.

Posted by Onnik @ 12:56 pm. Filed under: United States, Europe, Iraq




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  1. Interestingly, Global Voices has a round up of reactions from Iraqi bloggers to Saddam Hussein’s execution.

    http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2006/12/30/saddam-at-the-iraqi-blogodrome-2/

    Really worth a read and a great example of how the blogosphere can break through the sometimes very clinical media coverage.

    Also of note is reaction inside Armenia.

    Although I haven’t taken a poll, those who have expressed an opinion have reacted against news of Hussein’s execution.

    Comment by Onnik — December 30, 2006 @ 5:45 pm

  2. Robert Fisk: A dictator created then destroyed by America

    The Independent/UK
    30 December 2006

    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.

    Saddam: The questions that will live on
    From Andrew Buncombe in Washington

    The Independent/UK
    30 December 2006

    So why did George Bush decide to invade Iraq? Nearly four years and hundreds of thousands of casualties later, the reasons appear both as obvious and as elusive as they were in the spring of 2003.

    The official reasoning was always straightforward. Key among the claims included in the so-called Iraq War Resolution passed by Congress in October 2002 was that Iraq “poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region”. It added that Saddam’s regime harboured chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to develop a nuclear arsenal.

    In an address to the nation just three days before the invasion, Mr Bush declared: “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

    It quickly became clear that central claim was not true, and it became equally clear the administration had been manipulating uncertain and “caveated” intelligence to make the case for a war that had been decided on long before. The famous Downing Street memo suggests that as early as July 2002 ” intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy”. Indeed, within hours of the attacks of 9/11, senior elements within the administration were seeking for a strike against Iraq even though there was no evidence it was involved.

    But if the alleged threat of WMD was based on manipulated intelligence ` some provided by Iraqi exiles such as Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress - what else motivated the US? Many remain convinced the overwhelming factor was a desire to control Iraq’s oil supplies, the second largest proven reserves in the world. Such a view has been reinforced by recent recommendations of Iraq Study Group which said: “The United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganise the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise, in order to enhance efficiency, transparency, and accountability.”

    Veteran dissident Noam Chomsky said: “It is glaringly obvious that Iraq is estimated to have the second largest energy reserves in the world and is right at the heart of the world’s major energy producing region, and that establishing a client state in Iraq would considerably enhance policies that go back to the dawn of the oil age, and in particular to the post-war period when the US was taking over global domination, and established as a very high and natural policy principle the need to control this `stupendous source of strategic power’.”

    He added: “It takes remarkable obedience to authority to believe that the US would have ‘liberated’ Iraq - or taken revenge - if its main exports were lettuce and pickles, and the major petroleum resources were in the South Pacific.”

    Some point out that a desire among some in government to oust Saddam predated 9/11, and suggest in the aftermath of those attacks, a climate existed in which it was easier to pursue an invasion. Indeed, among the signatories to the 1998 letter from the neo-con Project for the New American Century calling on President Clinton to take on Saddam were former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.

    Mr Wolfowitz later said Saddam’s alleged possession of WMD was just one of many reasons for invading. “For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said.

    David Swanson, a founder of afterdowningstreet.org, a coalition of peace and activist groups, said: “The one thing we know is that the reasons they told us were false. [I think] they wanted an Iraq that looked free but isn’t and they wanted to control it¿They wanted the oil and the power that comes with controlling that oil and making profits for British and US oil companies.”

    Did other factors influence Mr Bush? Was he seeking revenge against “the guy who tried to kill my dad” ` a reference to an alleged plot to kill the president’s father during a visit to Kuwait in 1993 or was there even a broader strategic rationale, one that would benefit Israel ` something claimed by peace activist Cindy Sheehan.

    What does seem certain is that there was a confluence of factors and interests coming together in the aftermath of 9/11 that allowed Mr Bush to proceed to war with little opposition from the Congress, or indeed, the media.

    Comment by Onnik — December 31, 2006 @ 3:06 pm

  3. Press fears over Saddam execution

    Arab-Israeli press

    Newspapers in the Arab world and Israel reflect a combination of cynicism, anger and fear over the execution of Saddam Hussein.

    Arab commentators are angry about the timing of the execution on one of the holiest days of the Muslim calendar. Some argue Washington rather than Baghdad dictated the timing and ask why Americans have not been brought to justice for all the Iraqis killed since the 2003 invasion.

    Commentators in Israel fear that Saddam’s death will only lead to an increase in Iranian influence and Shia dominance in the region, posing a greater threat to the country.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6220833.stm

    Comment by Onnik — December 31, 2006 @ 9:33 pm

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