Old Saddam's gonna hang by the neck - any joy for you in that?

1. The Logic of Kill and Be Killed
Bush's Carnival of Blood
By MIKE WHITNEY/Counterpunch

This is a dark day for Americans and Iraqis alike.

Killing Saddam Hussein isn't justice; its vengeance. Only Bush believes the two are the same.

How are we supposed to feel now that we know that Saddam will be hanged for his crimes?

Elated? Energized? Jubilant?

Will it wash away the oceans of blood that Bush generated with his misguided and tragic war?

The administration clings to the foolish notion that killing Saddam will somehow justify their unprovoked invasion and slaughter of 650,000 Iraqis.

It won't.

I expect that many people feel the same sense of disgust and emptiness that I do. The joy of executing Saddam is limited to a small cadre of men who revel in the suffering and subjugation of others. They are human in name only.

Nothing Saddam did in his life will make him seem larger in the eyes of his people than his death. Still, the administration doesn't care if they turn Saddam into a martyr as long as they get a bump in the polls before Tuesday's midterm elections. It's pathetic. Fortunately, the American people are not nearly as bloodthirsty as their leaders. All they want is an end to war and the safe return of the troops.

Sentencing a man to hang merely to improve one's prospects at the ballot-box is about as desperate as it gets. It may be the most cynical political-ploy we've seen in the last 6 years. It's a thoroughly vile act unworthy of anyone holding high-office.

The whole circus atmosphere of the Saddam trial has further eroded confidence in American justice and evenhandedness. The outcome was known from the very beginning. Everyone knew that he would be condemned to death.

So, why all the hoopla? Why not just shoot him outright?

Did Bush want to give Saddam the opportunity to grab the moral high-ground and look like a statesman? Now the deposed dictator seems like the unwitting victim of "victor's justice". How smart was that?

After the verdict was announced, Saddam issued brief a statement to his people which made him appear reflective and patriotic. He said:

"Pardon and do not take revenge on the invading nations and their peopleand unify in the face of sectarian strife."

Saddam's message of forgiveness and reconciliation won't be warmly received in Washington where they were hoping that he would fall to his knees and beg for forgiveness. That was another miscalculation. Saddam may be a brutal tyrant but he was never a coward. His courtroom performance will only strengthen the resolve of the resistance and make life that much more difficult for occupation forces.

The whole charade has been costly blunder for the Bush team; nothing was gained.

Saddam's death will have the same effect as the appalling photos of the hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib which offended the sensibilities of decent people everywhere. It will just generate more hatred and violence.

This isn't justice. It's another example of a nation's dark shame.

(Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com)


2. This Was a Guilty Verdict on America as Well -- by Robert Fisk/The Independent UK

So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he committed when he was Washington's best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday declaring it to be, in the White House's words, another "great day for Iraq". That's what Tony Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we're going to string him up, and it's another great day.

Of course, it couldn't happen to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn't be a more just verdict - nor a more hypocritical one. It's difficult to think of a more suitable monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched by his executioner, the equally monstrous hangman of Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Widad, who would strike his victims on the head with an axe if they dared to condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party before he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged at Abu Ghraib in 1985 after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned man. But we can't mention Abu Ghraib these days because we have followed Saddam's trail of shame into the very same institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we hope - don't we? - to look better than him, to remind Iraqis that life is better now than it was under Saddam.

Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life is now worse. Or rather, death is now visited upon even more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on his Shias and Kurds and - yes, in Fallujah of all places - his Sunnis, too. So we cannot even claim moral superiority. For if Saddam's immorality and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere 600,000 lives ("more or less", as George Bush Jnr said when he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam was much worse. We can't be put on trial. We can't be hanged.

"Allahu Akbar," the awful man shouted - God is greater. No surprise there. He it was who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag, the same flag which now hangs over the palace of the government that has condemned him after a trial at which the former Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now George Bush's Secretary of Defence. Remember that handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to talk about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the current US President's father. Little wonder, then, that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans had been urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-term US elections.

Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, blurted out yesterday, must be "smoking rope". Well, Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it might be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict - not the trial itself, please note - was "scrupulous and fair". The judges will publish "everything they used to come to their verdict."

No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that Saddam was not allowed to comment upon: sales of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant - so appalling - that he has been sentenced to hang on a localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale gassing of Kurds over which George W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when they decided to depose Saddam in 2003 - or was it in 2002? Or 2001? Some of Saddam's pesticides came from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled "United States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian Gulf War".

This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and the report informed Congress about US government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli. The same report stated that the US provided Saddam with "dual use" licensed materials which assisted in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system programmes, including chemical warfare agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility plans).

Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn't permitted to talk about this. John Reid, the British Home Secretary, said that Saddam's hanging "was a sovereign decision by a sovereign nation". Thank heavens he didn't mention the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in 1988, and another £50,000 worth of the same vile substances the following year.

We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only £26,000. Yes, I know these could be used to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But this was the same country - Britain - that would, eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on the grounds that it could be used for - you guessed it - "weapons of mass destruction".

Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for their own trial of Saddam, to hang him high for the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death sentence review period. But would the Americans and British dare touch a trial in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why the CIA - in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war crimes against Halabja - told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time our favourite ally rather than our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988.

And - dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded their country? - then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds after they staged an uprising against the Baathist regime at our specific request - thousands whom webetrayed by leaving them to fight off Saddam's brutal hordes on their own. "Rioting," is how Lord Blair's meretricious "dodgy dossier" described these atrocities in 2002 - because, of course, to call them an "uprising" (which they were) would invite us to ask ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath. Answer: us.

I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled on the hospital trains that brought the Iranians back from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds bubbling in giant blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their wounds. The British and Americans didn't want to know. I talked to the victims of Halabja. The Americans didn't want to know. My Associated Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The Americans and the British didn't care.

But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and circuses, the final hanging of Saddam, twisting, twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is no sympathy for this man. "President Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed," Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few days ago. "He will not come out of prison to count his days and years in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out of prison to go to the presidency or to his grave." It looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu went there. Milosevic escaped sentence.

The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass murderers, guilty of rape and massacre and throat-slitting and torture in the years since our "liberation" of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi government we are currently supporting, democratically elected, of course. And these war criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through the ministries we set up under this democratic government. And they will not be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism. And our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so obscenely joined?


3. Hollow Victory: The Hanging of Saddam -- by Ehsan Ahrari/Asia Times

The verdict on Saddam Hussein is in. He is guilty of "crimes against humanity" and is sentenced to death by hanging. His trial was generally regarded as devoid of fairness and was highly political. Even the timing of the announcement of the verdict was driven by the US mid-term elections.

The administration of US President George W Bush clearly hopes to reap benefit from the news for Republican candidates in Tuesday's election. The depth of the internal divisions in Iraq was underscored by the fact that the Shi'ites started celebrating the news of the verdict, and the Sunnis became angry. Saddam may be hanged, but that is not going to make Iraq a livable place. The future of political stability, democracy and civility in Iraq is as bleak today as it was a few weeks ago.

The "war on terrorism" was triggered as a result of the manifestation of intense hatred by al-Qaeda of Americans and all that the lone superpower represented. Everything about the "war on terror" - real as well as imaginable - was about hate and about getting even. The US invasion of Afghanistan was a genuine expression of anger.

But the toppling of Saddam was about getting even. It had no relevance to the fiction that the Iraqi dictator possessed weapons of mass destruction or that he had connections with al-Qaeda. The Bush administration was never forgiven by the international community for manufacturing those grand fictions.

When Saddam was captured, it was widely believed that he would be hanged after a semblance of a fair trail. The question that was never asked was why Slobodan Milosevic, another brutal dictator and a perpetrator of equally bloody ethnic cleansing, was tried in the International Court of Justice but Saddam was not.

Everyone took for granted that the United States wanted to hang Saddam by orchestrating a public trial under its hand-picked judges inside Iraq. Even the notion of fairness toward him was pooh-poohed in the US. The argument was that the US-controlled Iraqi officials would be fair to him. No one really said it, but it is possible that the notion of fairness toward a brutal dictator was itself unambiguously unfair.

But that sort of frame of mind, even if it does not take away the humanity from those who were in charge of trying him, certainly diminishes them. And the highly questionable trial of the Iraqi dictator seems to have diminished all the concerned parties, the US government as well as the Iraqi government. Even the international community, by not insisting on a fair trial for the Iraqi tyrant, is no less responsible for the charade of justice in the Iraqi court. As one US source observed:

The trial, or circus as it sometimes seemed, transfixed Iraqis as controversy swirled around every twist: its opening day when an imperious Hussein declared that he was still president and challenged the legitimacy of "this so-called court", the slayings of two defense lawyers, the resignation of the chief judge and the naming of a successor and a hunger strike that led to Hussein's hospitalization for several days as the end neared.

President Bush could not contain his delight at the news of hearing Saddam's death sentence. He called the verdict "a milestone" and a success of the Iraqi people "to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law". Iran and Kuwait also expressed their satisfaction with the verdict. These two countries had suffered most because of Saddam Hussein's adventurism in the 1980s and early 1990s.

When Saddam is hanged, the Shi'ites and the Kurds will have avenged the enormous number of atrocities that his regime committed against them. The Sunnis will sulk and will get even more bitter than they are today. They are likely to see the development as just another example of their unremitting "humiliation" as a religious sect.

They are likely to hate the Shi'ites and the Kurds as well as their occupiers, the Americans, even more severely. The Sunni insurgency is likely to intensify its pace, if that is possible given what is already happening in Iraq.

However, the hanging of Saddam is not likely to resolve the internal strife that is tearing apart Iraq as a society and as a polity. He has been utterly irrelevant to the future of his country for a long time. Now Iraq is a place where the United States is battling with Islamists, global jihadis, pan-Arabists and even the Shi'ites. This battle has far-reaching consequences for the Middle East as a region and for the US itself.

If the US is forced to withdraw from Iraq, its prestige is likely to suffer irreparable damage. The spillover effect of such a potential withdrawal is likely to be felt in Afghanistan, where the battle between the International Security Assistance Forces and the forces of al-Qaeda and the Taliban is steadily intensifying.

And Afghanistan is already a place, according to a US Central Intelligence Agency report leaked to the New York Times on Saturday, where President Hamid Karzai "has been significantly weakened by rising popular frustration with the American-backed government". The sad part is that most American politicians are pretty much oblivious to that ominous development.

Inside the United States, Iraq has become the ultimate symbol of the hubris of the neo-conservatives to establish America's hegemony. But some of their prominent members are already washing their hands of the original responsibility and ebullience with which they pushed for the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

Richard Perle, pejoratively referred to inside a number of circles in Washington as the "prince of darkness," is now placing the blame for failure in Iraq on the Bush administration. In an interview with the magazine Vanity Fair, he said that that the chief blame for this unfolding catastrophe should be placed on the devastating dysfunction within the administration.

He added, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly ... At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible ... I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."

Before Saddam is hanged come the charades of appeals and counter-appeals. But his fate was sealed the day he was captured. He had known it all along. That might be one reason he was putting up the show of defiance and utter contempt for his jailers and for the Iraqi government. Now the only purpose the former dictator seems to have is to go down as a defiant nationalist or even a martyr in the eyes of Iraqi Sunnis.

(Ehsan Ahrari is the CEO of Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, Virginia-based defense consultancy. He can be reached at eahrari@cox.net or stratparadigms@yahoo.com . His columns appear regularly in Asia Times Online. His website: www.ehsanahrari.com)