The noisy, curse-laden, pretty f-upped execution of a dictator

1. A Monster of Our Creation -- by Robert Scheer/ truthdig

Someone has to say it: The hanging of Saddam Hussein was an act of barbarism that makes a mockery of President Bush’s claim it was “an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy.”

Instead, the rushed, illegal and unruly execution of a former U.S. ally after his conviction in a kangaroo court blurred the line between terrorist and terrorized as effectively as Saddam’s own evil propaganda ever did.

In the most generous interpretation, the frantic killing of Saddam abetted by the United States was the third act in a morality play of misplaced vengeance for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks— in which the first act was the invasion of Iraq, based on trumped-up lies linking it to al-Qaida, and the second was the killing of the tyrant’s sons, whose bloody corpses were hypocritically displayed to the world like war scalps.

At worst, the handling of Saddam is just another example of an Imperial America under President Bush that recognizes no boundaries of national sovereignty or any restraint of international law. A nation that posed no threat to U.S. security was conquered for a range of base motives, from oil plunder to industrial profits to naked political gain. Of course, these are the same rationales that despots always use to explain their murderous wars, such as Saddam’s genocidal invasion of Iran and greedy occupation of Kuwait.

The president says the execution was warranted because Saddam received a fair trial even after Bush decided to bypass an international tribunal designed to handle such trials of national rulers and instead turn Saddam over to Iraq’s dominant partisan faction in the midst of a nascent civil war. While Saddam’s guilt of “crimes against humanity” may have been accurate, it was not, in fact, established by his trial, which was pushed through even as his lawyers were being assassinated. This, quite opposite to the spirit of the Nuremberg war crime trials (established by the United States but not repeated today by President Bush), where the accused had competent and unintimidated attorneys, free to make a complete case.

The trial dealt only with alleged crimes that occurred in the Shiite village of Dujail after an assassination attempt on Saddam. His bloody reprisals occurred 15 months before Donald Rumsfeld, then President Ronald Reagan’s emissary, traveled to Baghdad to initiate an alliance with Saddam. Rumsfeld conceded in classified memos that he was familiar with Saddam’s unsavory past, yet advocated forming an alliance with the dictator.

In fact, the most heinous crimes allegedly committed by Saddam, including the use of poison gas against Shiite Iraqis he suspected of being sympathetic to his Shiite enemies in Iran, were carried out during the years that he was our ally. With the United States having now put Iraqi Shiites with long political, military and ideological ties to those same Iranian ayatollahs into power in Baghdad, the bizarre circle of this foreign policy disaster is now complete, with Saddam’s broken neck a fitting coda.

The video images now broadcast widely on the Internet show, as The New York Times reported, that the execution proceedings deteriorated “into a sectarian free-for-all that had the effect . . . of making [Saddam] appear dignified and restrained, and his executioners, representing Shiites, who were his principal victims, seem like bullying street thugs.” As the executioners chanted “Moqtada! Moqtada! Moqtada!,” in reference to death squad leader Moqtada al Sadr, Saddam may have claimed for his Sunni followers an undeserved martyrdom.

“Is that how real men behave?” Saddam asked, smiling contemptuously. In the end, Sadr was presented figuratively with the head of Saddam by reluctant U.S. officials—the former dictator was in U.S. custody, after all—in order to placate the Shiite radicals running Iraq, even though Iraqi law bans executions on this past weekend’s religious holiday and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani refused to sign a decree upholding the death sentence, as is required by the country’s new constitution.

Fittingly, U.S. officials appeared in this spectacle as hapless Keystone Kops, morally implicated by their tepid support of a lynch mob. It perfectly mirrors decades of U.S. meddling in the history of Iraq, beginning with U.S. support for Saddam’s Baath Party when it overthrew Iraqi nationalist Abdul Karim Qassem because we feared he was tilting ever so slightly to the Soviets. In fact, Saddam, like Osama bin Laden and the other Islamist fanatics our CIA recruited and helped to wage holy war against the Soviets, was a monster at least partially of our creation.

Those deeply unsavory connections between Saddam and the United States would have been exposed in any honest trial. Presumably, this is the real reason why the Bush administration so assiduously undermined any equitable judicial accounting of Saddam’s criminality, right through his shamefully and illegally rushed execution.


2. Dancing in the End Zone -- by Joyce Marcel

America used to run on oil, but now it seems to run best on blood and death.

For no good reason, America becomes an occupying force in Iraq. Three thousand Americans dead. Who knows how many Iraqis? Much blood. Much death.

Americans catch Saddam Hussein, but everyone knows we wrote his death sentence long before that. Taunts. Jeers. More blood. One more death.

Saddam loyalists threaten to retaliate, to target US interests anywhere, anytime. More blood. More death.

"If it bleeds, it leads," shouts the American press. Heh, heh, heh. "Saddam Hanged" on the front page of the Reformer. A picture of him with a noose around his neck on the front pages of the tabloids.

We Americans love our death. It's the star of most of our television shows, don't you know? And we love our death penalty even more. The civilized world long ago put a lid on revenge killing, but we flaunt it, don't we?

It's so barbaric. How, at the start of the 21st Century, did we suddenly find ourselves in the 11th?

Did you know they used a new rope to hang Saddam? The Daily News reported that at the beginning of this new, American-branded regime, they used Saddam's old rope. And one day it broke. It broke on the 13th man. And they had 14 more hangings that day. They hung 27 men in one day, imagine that. And these are the good guys.

Right after Saddam's neck snapped so loud the witnesses heard it, they hung two more men on the same gallows. The News didn't say if they used the same rope.

The gallows? When was the last time those words appeared in an American newspaper? And those black ski masks on the hangmen? Could it get any tackier? O yeah, it could. The taunts and jeers. The dancing in the end zone. And the cell phone video of Saddam swinging by his neck, the one that made it onto Al Jazeera television.

A witness against Saddam said that when he was shown Saddam's body, he wept for his dead relatives.

"I remembered my three brothers and my father whom he had killed," he told Reuters News Service. "I approached the body and told him: 'This is the well-deserved punishment for every tyrant. Now for the first time my father and three brothers are happy."

Sure they are, kid. But how happy can they be when they're dead? Sorry for your loss, but they showed Saddam's dead body off like it was a carnival exhibit? Our tax dollars at work.

Saddam's now just another lifeless body. The Lord says "Thou shalt not kill," and we kill them anyway.

Death is the way, Lord. Death is the path. Whether it's smiting the infidel, the unbeliever, the insurgent or the occupier, it's all smiting, it's all blood, it's all death.

Death is how we enjoy those fine old feelings of self-righteousness, vindictiveness and sanctimony, the ones that come when we take revenge. But those feelings doesn't last an hour, and then all we've got is another dead body for the pile.

Death is the excuse Hillary Clinton has for not taking a stand against the war. Americans will think she's "weak." There has to be blood on her hands, lots of blood. She's lacking in graves, therefore she's lacking in gravitas.

Lots of blood on George W. Bush's hands, no problem there. Close to 150 executed in Texas during his governorship so he could take the helm of this country and kill millions more.

Saddam was a murderer. Chemical weapons on the Kurds. The Iraq-Iran War. The torture. The terror. Look at the language that the usually staid New York Times uses about him: "tyranny," "pitiless," "torture chambers," "charnel houses," "spider web of evil," "psychopathic pleasures... from inflicting suffering and death."

Yes, Saddam killed millions. He may not have invented the mass grave but he certainly refined the concept. Well, we can't kill him a million times with liberty and justice for all. We can't torture him a million times. We can't bury him a million times.

Doesn't anyone see that we're sinking to his level when we hang him, instead of putting him and his murderous cohorts away for the rest of their lives? (Remember Manuel Noriega? No? Proves my point.) Then why don't we just cut Saddam's throat in front of a camera and put the video on the Internet?

It's funny how sometimes you encounter music that reflects your exact thoughts. On Bruce Springsteen's new CD, "The Seeger

Sessions: We Shall Overcome," he sings an old folk song called "Mrs. McGrath." Mrs. McGrath sends her son off to war and he comes back with his legs blown off. And Mrs. McGrath says, "All foreign wars I do proclaim/Live on blood and a mother's pain/ I'd rather have my son as he used to be/Than the King of America and his whole Navy."

And in the hymn "O Mary Don't You Weep," Springsteen sings, "God gave Noah the rainbow sign/Said 'No more water but fire next time.'"

Fire? Maybe not. While the Iraqis were killing Saddam, a vast Arctic ice shelf melted away from an island in the Canadian Arctic. So maybe it will be water again next time.

Mrs. McGrath was right. All war lives on blood and a mother's pain. And to hell with the king of America.

(Joyce Marcel is a freelance journalist and a columnist in southern Vermont. A collection of her columns, "A Thousand Words or Less," is available through joycemarcel.com . Write her at joycemarcel@yahoo.com)


3. The Fatal Hazing of a Dictator -- by Ted Rall

Take note, dictators considering an alliance with the United States: we'll throw you to the wolves as soon as you cease to be useful.

Saddam Hussein's order to execute 148 men and boys in Dujail, in northern Iraq, in 1982 was his nominal casus morti . Actually, he was the fatal victim of a labor-management dispute.

Anyone who works for a difficult boss can sympathize with Saddam. After unsuccessfully attempting to reach President George H.W. Bush and other top officials (who were on vacation) to ask for permission to invade Kuwait, he finally touched base with Bush's ambassador to Iraq on July 25, 1990. At the time Hussein was a close American ally, receiving billions of dollars in arms shipments and subsidies. Baath Party-ruled Iraq, a U.S. client state, had waged the 1980-88 war against Iran largely at Washington's behest.

Then as now, human rights were not a consideration of U.S. foreign policy.

Tensions with Kuwait, whose territorial legitimacy had not been recognized by any Iraqi leader since the country's founding in 1920, had been rising over alleged "slant drilling" beneath the border into Iraqi oilfields and Kuwait's refusal to reduce oil production to raise prices as requested by the OPEC cartel.

At the fateful meeting, Saddam asked Ambassador April Glaspie: Would the U.S. object to an invasion? "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait," she replied. "Secretary [of State James] Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America."

The signal was clear. Bright green.

When Iraqi forces entered Kuwait one week later, President Bush stayed mum. He only turned against Saddam later, in response to diplomatic pressure from Britain, which had close economic ties to Kuwait, and Israel, which considered Iraq a mortal enemy. Everything that followed--the Gulf War, the sanctions of the 1990s, the 2003 invasion, the deaths of 3000 American servicemen and the Iraqi dictator's execution--resulted from Saddam's decision to rely on Glaspie rather than waiting for the boss (Bush) to return from vacation.

In the old days, a tyrant could torture and loot his country, secure in the knowledge that his American masters would dispatch a military helicopter to spirit him off the roof of his palace before falling into the hands of a raging mob, plunder-stuffed duffel bags in tow. In 1986 the U.S. Air Force delivered two of our pet dictators--Haitian strongman Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier and the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos--to exile in the French Riviera and Hawaii, respectively. U.S. Customs turned a blind eye to Marcos' 24 suitcases of gold bricks and diamonds stashed in diaper bags. Duvalier was similarly well provisioned, although he eventually lost his chateau, villa in Cannes and two luxury apartments in Paris to a bitter divorce. Reza Muhammed Shah Pahlawi of Iran, Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, and Nguyen Van Thieu--the last president of South Vietnam--also jetted off on Air America.

Leftist complaints that the government was shielding men who had murdered and looted on a grand scale were ignored. Years of doing America's bidding, reasoned the wise men of Langley, earned a dictator the right to a safe (and plush) retirement. Moreover, golden parachutes were attractive incentives when they tried to recruit new leaders.

The system of residual lèse majesté started to unravel in 1989. President Bush ordered American troops to depose Panamanian leader General Manuel Noriega after murders of political opponents had turned him into an international embarrassment. Previously his long pro-U.S. resume--he'd been on the CIA payroll since the 1950s--would have entitled him to preferential treatment. But Bush, a typical CEO, tried to lowball Noriega with a $2 million dollar payoff to go into exile in Spain. Insulted by the offer, Noriega refused.

Bush arranged for his former employee to be imprisoned for 15 years for drug trafficking and money laundering, charges that are now believed to have been wildly exaggerated if not entirely invented. Stripped of his dignity and treated like a common criminal, the former head of state was reduced to federal inmate no. 38699-079.

Now we use the veneer of legality to dispose of our former lap-dog leaders in circumstances that recall the mob that killed Mussolini and his mistress. Saddam's American-paid executioners failed to grant him basic courtesies traditionally extended to the condemned. The deposed dictator was denied his request to die by firing squad, not permitted the right to wear his military uniform, even refused a farewell visit from his wife.

Years of abuse by American guards who photographed him in his underwear and deprived him of sleep followed the release of humiliating videos of his capture and "medical exam" after he'd obviously been forcibly drugged. In 2004 American troops had murdered his sons and 14-year-old grandson, and released photos of their bloodied faces--an insult to Islamic tradition--on Iraq's collaborationist television. Death must have come as something of a release.

Hazing of high-profile prisoners isn't new. Albert Speer, the German architect and armaments minister sentenced to 20 years in prison at the Nuremberg Trials, recalled having been subjected to the same 24-hour lights and no-eye-covering torture as Saddam. Speer was dragged into the gymnasium where General Keitel and other top Nazis had just been hanged, and ordered to clean up the mess made by the dead men's loosened bowels and bladders.

Like Saddam, Speer had it coming. That's why it's so remarkable that the world recoils in disgust at their mistreatment. The New York Times reported that Saddam's hanging had deteriorated "into a sectarian free-for-all that had the effect, on the video recordings, of making Mr. Hussein, a mass murderer, appear dignified and restrained, and his executioners, representing Shiites who were his principal victims, seem like bullying street thugs." Only a nation run by frat boys could elicit sympathy for such monsters.

Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue " Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East ?" an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.


4. US-Ordered Rush Job
The American government wanted Saddam Hussein executed for the Dujail killings to avoid revealing its complicity in his bigger crimes.
By Gwynne Dyer/ Philadelphia Inquirer

It was not the Iraqi government but its American masters who chose to execute Saddam Hussein in a great rush as soon as the first sentence was confirmed, thus canceling all of the other trials on far graver charges that awaited him. The current Iraqi government had nothing to hide if those trials went ahead; the United States government did.

Cast your mind back to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Washington's pretext for war then was Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, with barely a word about bringing democracy to the downtrodden Iraqi people. But to persuade us that Saddam's WMD were a threat to the whole world, we were told a lot about how wicked he was, how he had even "gassed his own people."

Well, there weren't any weapons of mass destruction, so now the script has been changed to say that the war was about bringing democracy to Iraq. But that still requires Saddam Hussein to be a monstrous villain (which he certainly was), and it needs some dramatic supporting stories about how he abused his own people, like his poison-gas attacks on rebel Kurds in 1988. So let's try him for the slaughter of the Kurds in 1988, and then we'll hang him.

Fair enough, and the trial for the gassing of the Kurds actually did get started a couple of months ago. Other trials, for his savage repression of the Kurdish revolt in 1988 and the Shia revolt in 1991, were scheduled for the new year. But none will come to pass. All other trials have been canceled - what they hanged Saddam for was the judicial murder of 148 villagers in the town of Dujail, villagers who were allegedly involved in a plot to kill him in 1982.

Dujail? Here is a man who began his career in power in the late 1960s by exterminating the entire (mostly Shia) leadership of the communist party in Iraq, went on to launch an invasion of Iran in 1980 that cost up to half a million lives, massacred his own Kurdish population in 1987 and 1988 when some of its leaders sided with the Iranians, invaded Kuwait in 1990, and massacred Iraqi Shias in 1991 when they rebelled against his rule at the end of that war.

And they hanged him for Dujail?

It's as if they had taken Adolf Hitler alive in 1945, but ignored his responsibility for starting the Second World War and his murder of six million Jews and just put him on trial for executing people suspected of involvement in the July 1944 bomb plot. With all of Saddam's other crimes to choose from, why on earth would you hang him for executing the people suspected of involvement in the Dujail plot?

Because the United States was not involved in that one. It was involved in the massacre of the Iraqi communists (the CIA gave Saddam its membership lists). It was implicated up to its ears in Saddam's war against Iran - to the point of arranging for Iraq to be supplied with the chemicals to make poison gas, providing Baghdad with satellite and AWACS intelligence data on Iranian targets, and sending U.S. Air Force photo interpreters to Baghdad to draw Saddam detailed maps of Iranian trenches 'that let him drench them in poison gas.

The Reagan administration stopped Congress from condemning Saddam's use of poison gas, and the U.S. State Department tried to protect Saddam when he gassed his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja in 1988, spreading stories (which it knew to be false) that Iranian planes had dropped the gas. It was the United States that saved Saddam's regime by providing naval escorts for tankers carrying oil from Arab Gulf states while Iraqi planes were left free to attack tankers coming from Iranian ports. Even when one of Saddam's planes mistakenly attacked an American destroyer in 1987, killing 37 crew members, Washington forgave him.

And it was George W. Bush's father who urged Iraq's Shias and Kurds to rebel after Saddam was driven out of Kuwait in 1991, and then failed to use U.S. air power to protect the Shias from massacre when they answered his call. The United States was deeply involved in all of Saddam's major crimes, one way or another, so no trial that delved into the details of those crimes could be allowed.

Instead, the spin doctors in the current Bush administration put the Dujail trial first and scheduled the trials for Saddam's bigger crimes for later, knowing that they would all be canceled once the death penalty for the Dujail incident was confirmed. The dirty laundry will never have to be displayed in public. But it does mean that the man hanged Saturday morning was executed for the wrong crime.

(Gwynne Dyer writes on international affairs from London. His latest book is " War: The New Edition .")


5. Saddam Hussein: Death on Camera -- Editorial from the Guardian / UK

"It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man," wrote George Orwell after witnessing a hanging. Proximity to death, which shocked him as a police officer in pre-war Burma, has been brought to the world in a different form at the start of 2007 through the images and sounds surrounding Saddam Hussein's execution, recorded on a camera phone and released on the internet. John Prescott, who yesterday described the manner of the dictator's death as "quite deplorable" in an interview with the BBC, would not have been so outspoken had coverage been restricted to the official, edited and silent film.

Even in the still form used by some newspapers, including this one, after consideration, the second film has confronted the world not just with the brutish circumstances of Saddam's death but the wider reality of present-day Iraq. Mr Prescott's off-the-cuff response to it yesterday was authentic, just as Margaret Beckett's initial statement that Saddam had been "held to account" (which Downing Street said came on behalf of the whole government) was inadequate. The new film of events at dawn inside the former offices of Iraq's military security service has produced a more realistic understanding. The boundary between justice, however unpleasant, delivered by a responsible, sovereign government, and sectarian mob violence, was crossed in an explicit form.

The way in which the former Iraqi ruler died may not alter the underlying morality of his execution, an act which Britain should have opposed more firmly than it did and which was not universally supported even inside the Iraqi government, as President Jalal Talabani's objections made clear. But the manner of Saddam's death, ridden with chaos and malice, has made the act much more divisive and dangerous. It was justice delivered in its crudest form, by hooded men taunting Saddam with Shia slogans, the distillation of a fractured and lawless country. The possibility that the pictures were recorded by a senior Iraqi official, as Saddam's prosecutor Munkith al-Faroon suggested yesterday, underlines the decayed state of what passes for central authority in the country.

The British government, like President Bush, still fails to acknowledge this reality, preferring Saddam's trial and sentence to be seen as a clinical, judicial process carried out by forces over which they have no control. Yesterday Mr Prescott appeared to object less to the manner of Saddam's death than its public exposure when he said that "to get this kind of recorded messages coming out is totally unacceptable". He might have preferred the deed to take place behind closed doors, but even without the film the guards would still have jeered and Iraqi constitutional restrictions, such as they are, would have been pushed to the limit. So would Sunni tolerance. Their anger will be added to by Kurdish distress at being cheated of their time in court. The execution was hurried through after a trail for anti-Shia crimes but before the gassing of Kurds had even reached trial.

The pictures are shocking because they serve as a graphic conclusion to the terrible story of the rise and fall of Saddam, a story in which this country has played a part. For all the talk of Iraqi sovereignty, the former leader was tried by a special tribunal shaped by western forces, and was kept by the US until the final hours before his hanging. His body was flown to Tikrit on a US helicopter and US embarrassment over the bungling of his death has put pressure on the Iraqi government to investigate. The mayhem revealed in the new film, like the wider mayhem across most of Iraq, is in part mayhem that we have created. Like the image of Saddam's statue being toppled in 2003, and pictures of torture from Abu Ghraib prison, the illicit pictures of his death will come to define the conflict, evidence of just how disastrous the whole project has proved.