This is dated, of course, but it's been on my mind to blog about Saddam's execution since even before the trapdoor dropped; it’s just that the siren song of World of Warcraft proves more alluring than ranting about the mess in the Middle East.
Saddam died as he lived, in violence and inequity. Though I generally oppose the death penalty, Saddam was one of a handful of people whose execution I would not oppose in principle. He was a tyrant and mass-murderer and never really expressed any remorse for his actions. Instead in the grand tradition of James I or Louis XV (or XIV or XVI) he believed in his absolute rights as leader, even to kill his own countrymen; a view that was not only echoed by Ramsay Clark but even expanded into a duty! The world was better off with him out of power and his execution for millions of deaths caused by his suppressive internal actions and aggressive wars would serve eventually as closure for the survivors and relatives of his victims.
But on a practical level, this execution was the saddest mistake we made in a war filled with horrendous blunders. Let’s start with the biggest, most obvious result: now that Saddam and his closest cohorts are dead, they are no longer defendants in the other trials into even larger crimes. Not to demean the victims of Dujail, but the Anfal campaign killed tens of thousands and involved chemical weapons; the suppression of the Shiites in 1991 also killed and displaced thousands; the casualty lists for the war with Iran run to the millions; the suppression of the Marsh Arabs involved calculated destruction of an environment. Now none of these will be examined I detail - Saddam is guilty, period! He’s not around to mount a defense, and the lesser figures who may face trial still will simply claim that they were following his orders. Not a great defense, but effective enough I’d imagine.
We don’t need to even go into the drawbacks of the Dujail trial. Human Rights Watch and others have laid out the many deficiencies more than adequately. And I do believe that even had the trial been conducted as it should have been, the outcome would have been largely the same. But the way appeals process was handled was appalling; worse it raised extremely uncomfortable questions. Not only did the Iraqi government make it clear that they were going to execute Saddam, they also made it clear that it would be done as soon as they could, with absolutely no interest in making him face the rest of the trials. What was the extreme rush? Surely Premier al-Maliki did not believe that executing Saddam was going to end the insurgency, much less endear him to the Sunnis? And if he had any such illusions, the manner of the execution and the leaked video put paid to them. Perhaps al-Maliki really allowed his hatred for Saddam to overcome his common sense and perception of reality. Perhaps Saddam was , as he suggested in a different sense, a sacrifice, to Moqtada al-Sadr and Abdul al-Hakim who lost close relatives to Saddam’s secret police.
But let us leave the follies of the Iraqis aside for the nonce; after all, I have never bought the claim that this war was ever about the Iraqis themselves. It was, from the start, about us - our fear of Iraq’s imaginary non-conventional weapons, our fear of the mythical link to al-Qaida so skillfully played up by proponents of the war, our desire to see a pro-western government countering Iran and breaking up the anti-Israel coalition further, our wish to secure the world’s second largest reserves of oil. So where were we when this parody of justice played out?
Our men on the ground waited till after the execution and then tried some damage control, with muttered comments about how they would have done it differently. Really? Let’s stop pretending: we had every chance to change the course of events and chose not to lift a finger. From the day after the initial verdict, the message from the Iraqi government was clear: they wanted to execute Saddam post-haste. First peripheral voices were heard; when we said and did nothing to oppose it, the more central figures of authority joined the chorus. By Christmas, Saddam was dead, but for the hanging, and still we continued our deafening silence. We may try to hide behind the fig leaf of Iraqi sovereignty, but that’s a sad joke. If the Iraqi government was really conducting this, Saddam would not have been in an American prison camp - he would never have had even the sorry excuse of a trial that he did get; he would have been hung long ago. We overthrew Saddam, we captured him and we were holding him - if we had any interest in delaying his execution we could have done it. We didn’t even have to do it publicly. A few words in the ears of al-Maliki or President Talabani early on would have resulted in a policy of delaying execution till all the trials were done.
And therein lies the question: did we want Saddam to be executed quickly (I’ll lay odds that we did not expect a “Moqtada” chant during the hanging, though) and take many unpleasant truths to the grave with him. The war crimes trials are supposedly to expose the truth about the many crimes and criminals and in this case, the list of criminals include France, Germany, Britain, China, Russia and last and certainly not least, the United States. The Sunni Arab states of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the gulf Emirates are all complicit in the Iranian war.
Many questions will now remain unanswered. One example is this controversy over whether Iraq actually used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians. This book discussion explains why the most widely publicized attack was probably committed by Iran - the Tribunal could have cleared the question, but did anyone, including the Kurdish leaders want a contrary truth revealed? Mind you, the Anfal campaign was a huge crime against humanity in itself and very likely did involve some use of chemical weapons. But we and the world media had also convicted Iraq especially based on pictures from Hallabjah. To find that those searing images were not the work of the Butcher of Baghdad may have been more than we were ready to accept. Above all, none of Saddam’s erstwhile backers want their roles exposed to the light. Not the countries that provided the chemical agents and certainly not the men who shook his hand. Another question that should have faced scrutiny was Saddam’s decision to invade Kuwait: did he in fact think he had US backing for that move, based on his conversation with Ambassador April Gillespie. Did we give him tacit approval only to change our mind for various reasons? Or lets turn to the Kurds who have suffered enormously under Saddam, but also under Iran and Turkey and today proudly wear the badge of past suffering under Saddam: despite Anfal and Hallabjah, when civil war erupted between the KDP of Massoud Barzani and Talabani’s PUK, Barzani had no problem in asking Saddam to send his army in to crush the PUK. Did the Kurdish leaders want this to be aired in public again and before a wider audience? Did we want the world to hear the details of how we were helping armed militias of the Iraqi National Congress to attack the Iraqi army from bases in our safe zone in the Kurdish north? Through the 90’s we’d hear about how Saddam was violating the safe zone and we’d drop a few bombs on him to stop his actions - but no one talked about how we were provoking him. Did we want to learn about how our claims about the al-Qaida affiliated group were wholly misleading, that we blamed Saddam of harboring terrorist who were actually in our protected zone? Did we or the Kurds want the world to know that the terror group we talked about was actually Kurdish?
So many questions and now we will never know the real truth. The whole world, except maybe Burkina Faso, carries some guilt in the war crimes of Saddam Hussein. But rather than let the tribunal establish and proportion the guilt, we have opted to wash our hands in the blood of a tyrant and let him carry the weight of our sins as well as his own. Somehow, I never imagined that Saddam would end up serving the world in this way. Probably he never did either. But such is the irony of life and somewhere in the lowermost Circle of Hell, Saddam’s sole pleasure will be the certainty that his death did not absolve us.
Saddam died as he lived, in violence and inequity. Though I generally oppose the death penalty, Saddam was one of a handful of people whose execution I would not oppose in principle. He was a tyrant and mass-murderer and never really expressed any remorse for his actions. Instead in the grand tradition of James I or Louis XV (or XIV or XVI) he believed in his absolute rights as leader, even to kill his own countrymen; a view that was not only echoed by Ramsay Clark but even expanded into a duty! The world was better off with him out of power and his execution for millions of deaths caused by his suppressive internal actions and aggressive wars would serve eventually as closure for the survivors and relatives of his victims.
But on a practical level, this execution was the saddest mistake we made in a war filled with horrendous blunders. Let’s start with the biggest, most obvious result: now that Saddam and his closest cohorts are dead, they are no longer defendants in the other trials into even larger crimes. Not to demean the victims of Dujail, but the Anfal campaign killed tens of thousands and involved chemical weapons; the suppression of the Shiites in 1991 also killed and displaced thousands; the casualty lists for the war with Iran run to the millions; the suppression of the Marsh Arabs involved calculated destruction of an environment. Now none of these will be examined I detail - Saddam is guilty, period! He’s not around to mount a defense, and the lesser figures who may face trial still will simply claim that they were following his orders. Not a great defense, but effective enough I’d imagine.
We don’t need to even go into the drawbacks of the Dujail trial. Human Rights Watch and others have laid out the many deficiencies more than adequately. And I do believe that even had the trial been conducted as it should have been, the outcome would have been largely the same. But the way appeals process was handled was appalling; worse it raised extremely uncomfortable questions. Not only did the Iraqi government make it clear that they were going to execute Saddam, they also made it clear that it would be done as soon as they could, with absolutely no interest in making him face the rest of the trials. What was the extreme rush? Surely Premier al-Maliki did not believe that executing Saddam was going to end the insurgency, much less endear him to the Sunnis? And if he had any such illusions, the manner of the execution and the leaked video put paid to them. Perhaps al-Maliki really allowed his hatred for Saddam to overcome his common sense and perception of reality. Perhaps Saddam was , as he suggested in a different sense, a sacrifice, to Moqtada al-Sadr and Abdul al-Hakim who lost close relatives to Saddam’s secret police.
But let us leave the follies of the Iraqis aside for the nonce; after all, I have never bought the claim that this war was ever about the Iraqis themselves. It was, from the start, about us - our fear of Iraq’s imaginary non-conventional weapons, our fear of the mythical link to al-Qaida so skillfully played up by proponents of the war, our desire to see a pro-western government countering Iran and breaking up the anti-Israel coalition further, our wish to secure the world’s second largest reserves of oil. So where were we when this parody of justice played out?
Our men on the ground waited till after the execution and then tried some damage control, with muttered comments about how they would have done it differently. Really? Let’s stop pretending: we had every chance to change the course of events and chose not to lift a finger. From the day after the initial verdict, the message from the Iraqi government was clear: they wanted to execute Saddam post-haste. First peripheral voices were heard; when we said and did nothing to oppose it, the more central figures of authority joined the chorus. By Christmas, Saddam was dead, but for the hanging, and still we continued our deafening silence. We may try to hide behind the fig leaf of Iraqi sovereignty, but that’s a sad joke. If the Iraqi government was really conducting this, Saddam would not have been in an American prison camp - he would never have had even the sorry excuse of a trial that he did get; he would have been hung long ago. We overthrew Saddam, we captured him and we were holding him - if we had any interest in delaying his execution we could have done it. We didn’t even have to do it publicly. A few words in the ears of al-Maliki or President Talabani early on would have resulted in a policy of delaying execution till all the trials were done.
And therein lies the question: did we want Saddam to be executed quickly (I’ll lay odds that we did not expect a “Moqtada” chant during the hanging, though) and take many unpleasant truths to the grave with him. The war crimes trials are supposedly to expose the truth about the many crimes and criminals and in this case, the list of criminals include France, Germany, Britain, China, Russia and last and certainly not least, the United States. The Sunni Arab states of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the gulf Emirates are all complicit in the Iranian war.
Many questions will now remain unanswered. One example is this controversy over whether Iraq actually used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians. This book discussion explains why the most widely publicized attack was probably committed by Iran - the Tribunal could have cleared the question, but did anyone, including the Kurdish leaders want a contrary truth revealed? Mind you, the Anfal campaign was a huge crime against humanity in itself and very likely did involve some use of chemical weapons. But we and the world media had also convicted Iraq especially based on pictures from Hallabjah. To find that those searing images were not the work of the Butcher of Baghdad may have been more than we were ready to accept. Above all, none of Saddam’s erstwhile backers want their roles exposed to the light. Not the countries that provided the chemical agents and certainly not the men who shook his hand. Another question that should have faced scrutiny was Saddam’s decision to invade Kuwait: did he in fact think he had US backing for that move, based on his conversation with Ambassador April Gillespie. Did we give him tacit approval only to change our mind for various reasons? Or lets turn to the Kurds who have suffered enormously under Saddam, but also under Iran and Turkey and today proudly wear the badge of past suffering under Saddam: despite Anfal and Hallabjah, when civil war erupted between the KDP of Massoud Barzani and Talabani’s PUK, Barzani had no problem in asking Saddam to send his army in to crush the PUK. Did the Kurdish leaders want this to be aired in public again and before a wider audience? Did we want the world to hear the details of how we were helping armed militias of the Iraqi National Congress to attack the Iraqi army from bases in our safe zone in the Kurdish north? Through the 90’s we’d hear about how Saddam was violating the safe zone and we’d drop a few bombs on him to stop his actions - but no one talked about how we were provoking him. Did we want to learn about how our claims about the al-Qaida affiliated group were wholly misleading, that we blamed Saddam of harboring terrorist who were actually in our protected zone? Did we or the Kurds want the world to know that the terror group we talked about was actually Kurdish?
So many questions and now we will never know the real truth. The whole world, except maybe Burkina Faso, carries some guilt in the war crimes of Saddam Hussein. But rather than let the tribunal establish and proportion the guilt, we have opted to wash our hands in the blood of a tyrant and let him carry the weight of our sins as well as his own. Somehow, I never imagined that Saddam would end up serving the world in this way. Probably he never did either. But such is the irony of life and somewhere in the lowermost Circle of Hell, Saddam’s sole pleasure will be the certainty that his death did not absolve us.
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