Silencing Saddam

Call it what you like, but don't pretend for a moment that the hanging of Saddam Hussein was the end result of a fair and open judicial process. The trial of the former dictator made a complete mockery of the concept of justice. It was nothing short of a kangaroo court. Lawyers for the defence were intimidated and murdered. Witnesses were threatened. Judges who did not tow the official line were unceremoniously removed and replaced with compliant puppets. The trial was anything but open and apart from a few short sessions, it took place behind firmly closed doors.

The hurried manner in which Saddam Hussein was executed only serves to raise suspicions that there was something that the so-called "coalition of the willing" wanted to hide. It is quite possible that, not unlike the suspicious demise of Slobodan Milošević, the war criminals decided that they risked having their own crimes exposed to the world if they allowed him to remain alive. The lack of footage from the trial, the non-existent coverage of Saddam's own defence and the general aura of secrecy surrounding the trial all point to this being more than a passing possibility. Perhaps if he had lived, Saddam would have spilled the beans on who it was who provided him with his weaponry and who it was who gave him the go-ahead to carry out the mass-murders. Perhaps he would have shed further light on the unsavoury nature of United States / British involvement in the region.

The execution - in effect a lynching - took place on the Muslim feast of Eid ul-Adha, which celebrates the deliverance of Ismael (Ishmael) from sacrifice by Ibrahim (Abraham). The significance of this choice of date should not go unnoticed. During this feast it is customary to pardon and release prisoners, not execute them. The date was deliberately chosen to be seen as an affront to the entire Islamic world. The filming and subsequent release of the jerky mobile phone footage of the execution including the juvenile taunts of those present is also anything but a mistake. It was a deliberate act calculated to further fuel already highly volatile sectarian divisions in Iraq. It is nothing more than the latest application of the classic strategy of "divide et impera" - divide and conquer.

Saddam was executed for signing 148 death warrants for acts of high treason for people in Dujail who had apparently been tried and sentenced to death by a legal Iraqi court for their parts in an alleged attempt to assassinate him. It is worth noting that George Bush signed 152 warrants as Governor of Texas - many for far lesser crimes. I also can not help but wonder if the response of the Bush administration to an assassination attempt would have been any less severe than that of the Ba'athist regime.

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein had blood on his hands. He was, after all, a creation of colonialists ruling a country whose borders were determined by colonialists. However, the British have had their hands far more deeply soaked in the blood of the entire region for centuries and have been responsible not only for creating the modern borders of Iraq - complete with potentially explosive rival religious and ethnic factions - but also for countless acts of barbarism in the pursuit of maintaining their empire.

The United States, a late entrant into the empire game, has made up for lost time and it too is wading chest deep in the blood of the Arab world. First and foremost, it is responsible for putting Saddam into power. Originally a CIA asset, Saddam was recruited to assassinate the then Iraqi president Abdel-Karim Qassem, who had the gall to start imposing taxes on British and US oil companies as a first step in the nationalisation of Iraq's oil resources. Saddam failed in this attempt and made his escape to Egypt. When the CIA successfully brought down the Qassam presidency, Saddam returned to Iraq to act as Head of National Security. Later he became president for life - with the full support of the United States and was supposed to return the favour by blocking any attempts to nationalise the Iraqi oil industry.

If Saddam was a monster, the "monster" was created by the United States. The United States continued to support and feed the "monster" until he decided to stop taking his orders from Washington. It is only when he refused to provide western multinationals with unfettered access to Iraqi oil reserves (and other assets) and when he subsequently took the decision to denominate Iraq's oil in Euros instead of Dollars that he suddenly became a "monster" instead of a "usefull ally".

The United States inspired and directed sanctions against Iraq after Gulf War 1 are estimated to have resulted in the deaths of up to 800 thousand innocent civilians. The illegal invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by the United States, Britain and various other hangers-on has resulted in at least a further 700 thousand casualties, most of whom were civilian.

Iraq was a progressive secular muslim state (albeit where political opposition was repressed) where it was safe to walk the streets, primary education was compulsory for all, higher education was free, everyone was provided with housing and women had far greater rights than in other muslim nations. As a direct result of the actions of the so-called "coalition of the willing" Iraq has become a hellish quagmire of religious bigotry, spiralling violence and insecurity. Compared to attrocities committed during the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the alleged crimes of Saddam pale into insignificance.

In the face of international condemnation of the hanging, spokespersons for the occupying powers resolutely supported the execution and the new U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon simultaneously demonstrated the farcical nature of the United Nations and signalled a new direction for the General Secretariat when he announced that capital punishment should be a decision of individual countries. His failure to reiterate UN opposition to the death penalty on his first day in the post is shameful, shocking and disgusting.

Winston Churchill is reputed to have said that "grass may grow on the battlefield but never under the gallows". Nowhere in the world will this prove to more true than in Iraq.