💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › anarcho-saddam-sentenced-to-death.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:38:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Saddam sentenced to death Author: Anarcho Date: November 10, 2006 Language: en Topics: Saddam Hussein, death penalty, Iraq Source: Retrieved on 28th October 2021 from http://www.anarkismo.net/article/4138
So Saddam has been convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to
death. Few people will be shedding tears for the monster. The result was
as unsurprising as the trial itself being hardly fair. Judges were
replaced if they seemed like they were doing their job and being
impartial. Lawyers and human rights organisations noted that it was
prone to political interference and reduced to farce on occasion.
Equally unsurprisingly, the Shia and Kurds celebrated the news while
Sunnis protested and promised revenge. In Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown,
Sheikh Fawas Hamed al Tikriti, one of the city’s leading figures, said
the verdict was “arbitrary and politicised” and would provoke violence.
“It is all in the interests of the US elections, and this will not pass
without revenge.” The pro-Saddam demonstrators were attacked by the
Iraqi army while the Salahiddin and Zawra TV channels that were showing
the pro-Saddam demonstrations were shut down by order of the government
before Iraqi security forces raided them.
Considering the state of Iraq, is it really the best time to execute
Saddam, particularly after an obviously unfair trial? Does turning
Saddam into a martyr make sense? Well, may be not for Iraqis but for
others it did have its benefits. In early October, the “sovereign” Iraqi
court postponed the delivery of the verdict in Saddam Hussein’s trial
from October 16^(th) to the November 5^(th) , the Sunday before the US
mid-term elections. This meant that the headlines on the day before the
elections were filled by reports about Saddam’s fate. A complete
coincidence, of course (and any Iraqi officials who claim otherwise have
been smoking too much rope).
Significantly, the trial was not about Saddam’s mass killings but rather
for the massacre of 148 men and boys from Dujail, the site of a 1982
assassination attempt against him. The death sentence does have a 30-day
automatic appeal but the verdict does put a damper on Saddam’s genocide
trial for the ethnic cleansing campaign against the Kurds in the late
1980s. Here, again, the current sentence does have advantages — for
some. By effectively short-circuiting the genocide trial, a whole host
of questions about how the Reagan Administration supported and funded
Saddam will not have to be asked and so no awkward answers about why
America (and Britain) supported him while knowing about his atrocities
(and even supplying the means).
Unsurprisingly, during the Dujail trial Saddam was formally forbidden
from discussing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now Bush’s
Secretary of Defence, and about the support he received from the Reagan
and Bush Snr Administrations. According to a 1994 US Senate’s Committee
report, the US government-approved shipments of biological agents by
American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. It also indicated how
the US provided Saddam with “dual use” licensed materials which assisted
in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system
programmes. The UK also exported WMD material during the same time.
So you can understand why Saddam was gagged on this issue. And why the
US-UK may not want him to discuss why the CIA, immediately after the war
crime against Halabja, told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim
that the Iranians had done it. Or why the US-UK were silent during
ethnic cleansing campaigns he is now on trial for. Or how Saddam went
from being our ally to being a war criminal (and the latest “new
Hitler”).
That Saddam Hussein has been found guilty in an Iraqi court is hardly
surprising. He is now officially what we always knew he was: a war
criminal. Yet this was not why the war was started. The Bush Junta and
Blair both said that he could stay in power if he disarmed. Over 650,000
Iraqis, over 100 British people and over 2,800 Americans have not died
to produce this verdict. We went to war over WMD which did not exist and
which, before the invasion, the Bush Junta argued Saddam did not have.
Or was it to contain a rogue state which, months previously, Bush’s own
officials had declared had been fully contained by sanctions?
Or could it be, just possibly, because the Bush Junta knew all this and
thought it would create a US-client state at the heart of the Middle
East’s oil fields? That the UK and USA were using Saddam’s tyranny as a
(belated) rationale for the invasion (once WDM were dismissed as obvious
nonsense) should not fool anyone for a moment. The last thing the US
wanted was a genuine popular revolt against the regime (as their
non-activity in 1991 proved beyond doubt).
One thing is sure. The US-UK invasion has made life even worse than
under Saddam. At best, it may be argued that Saddam was more evil and
immoral than the occupying forces but that is hardly a strong defence.
The US only sexually abused, tortured and killed a fraction of the
prisoners compared to Saddam’s regime.
We did, however, illegally invade a country that cost hundreds of
thousands of lives. Putting this in context, the numbers killed by
Saddam during in 23 year regime range from 150,000 to 300,000. Taking
the upper figure, that is about 13,000 a year. According to the recent
Lancet study, the invasion has resulted in over 650,000 Iraqi civilian
casualties since 2002. This over ten times as much. Even if we take the
flawed Iraq Body Count of over 51,000 civilian casualties, that is
12,750 a year. So, at best, Bush and Blair can say their policies have
resulted in 250 fewer deaths a year.
All of which hardly gives them the moral high ground. If there were any
justice, Bush, Blair and their cronies would have been in the dock with
Saddam. Not that anarchists support the death plenty. Allowing the state
to kill is not something to be welcomed, even for scum like Saddam. The
fate of Mussolini would be much more preferable for him as, at least,
his victims would have taken their revenge and the state
institutionalisation of murder would not arise.
So this is not a turning point, any more than all the others (with all
those turning points, no wonder Iraq is spiralling out of control!). The
deaths of Saddam’s psychotic sons, his own capture, the “recapturing”
(i.e. flattening) of Fallujah, the elections and referendum and all the
rest have not affected the ongoing conflict. Neither will Saddam’s
death, particularly as no one in Iraq thought he was the leader of the
insurgency. The same can be said of the many killings of “Al-Qaeda”
leaders as the insurgency is a home grown resistance movement to foreign
occupation (a recent poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org, showed that 71%
Iraqis want the withdrawal of US-led forces within a year, while 92% of
Sunni and 62% of Shia approve of attacks on US-led forces). The only way
to start to end the violence is to end the occupation.