Sadaam will be executed soon. So will many others who were part of his government…
There are so many lies about Iraq. There are so many lies about why the United States invaded Iraq. But there are still more, lesser known lies. Lies that still live under the assumption that Sadaam Hussein was, in so many words, simply evil and on par with a Hitler. What if he was not what we all seem to assume, simply evil. What if our assumptions about him as a person of evil, are like the assumptions of WMD, drones, mobile biological labs, simply not true?
A very…too…brief history:
Iraq’s borders and those of Kuwait did not exist prior to World War One. They were part of the Ottoman Empire. The British redrew borders all over the Arab world without regard necessarily to the people who occupied the lands they redrew. After a time, the British decided that Kuwait should be separate from the area now known as Iraq. Sadaam has always disputed that they had a right to do this.
It is generally assumed by people of the United States that Sadaam Hussein invaded Kuwait unjustifiably. Just recently the current Jaafari/Talabani/Chalabi Iraqi government accused Kuwait of stealing it’s oil through horizontal drilling and taking large tracks of Iraqi territory up to a 1/2 mile deep inside the border on which drilling is apparently taken place. In addition, the border between the two countries was redrawn yet again, after the Gulf War and Kuwait gained 11 oil wells and an Iraqi naval base that used to be in Iraq.
These claims of stealing Iraqi oil are the same claims Sadaam made to justify his invasion of Iraq. He also said that Kuwait at the time was violating its OPEC production agreements in order to drive down the price of oil and bankrupt Iraq. Additionally he claimed that Kuwait had been part of Iraq until it was artificially drawn off the map of Iraq by Great Britain after World War I.
Iraq had owed money to Kuwait to finance its war against their mutual enemy, Iran. Sadaam accused Kuwait of economic blackmail and economic warfare. This may not jusify an invasion, but this reasoning is not widely reported in the U.S. These are Sadaam’s reasons for the invasion, not the United States explanation for why there was an invasion.
Americans forget that it was Sadaam Hussein and Tarik Aziz who were telling the truth about Iraq not having weapons of mass destruction. It was George Bush and Colin Powell who were lying that Iraq, and specifically, Saddam Hussein had them. Both Sadaam and Tarik Aziz could be executed.
Not only were there lies about Saddam’s possession of WMD, there were plenty of lies about Saddam Hussein.
All the crimes that the Bush administration have accused Sadaam of committing took place in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. The unnecessary war in Iraq began in 2003. These alleged “crimes” of mass murder and “gassing his own people” were not ongoing at the time of the invasion.
So great was the danger from Saddam as portrayed to the American public that even Bill Richardson today, apparently still believes them.
This month, Bill Richardson, a Democrat was asked by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! if the deaths of 500,000 children were worth the sanctions imposed on Iraq in the 1990’s. Bill Richardson’s answer was unequivocal: “Yes it was worth it”, He said this without qualification. Period. (Richardson is yet another pro-war Democrat “considering” running for president). His position is similar to Biden and Clinton. It’s along the lines of “We need to send more troops in order to win this War”.
So the 500,000 children who died, died not as a result of Saddam Hussein’s actions but are the result of the United States inspired United Nations sanctions placed on Iraq. Bill Richardson supports the killing of innocent children (500,000 of them) in return for the removal of Saddam Hussein and his replacement with a government that is largely supported, funded and ideologically lined up with a fundamentalist Iran. Freedom of movement was greater under Sadaam than it is today for those living under Shiite rule. Just in a legal sense. The rights of women and children are less than they were under Sadaam. And the Shiites ruling the South want to make it even more limiting. Most clerics want a from of Sharia. This is the same kind of adminsitration of law that the Taliban imposed in Afghanistan, but not as severe, they say.
How removed from reality are you allowed to get in the position of being a government official in this country? The war has been over for years. The situation is untenable. The American military is thoroughly corrupt, brutal and incompetent.
Soon there will be a mock trial. Saddam Hussein will be put to death. He has not been allowed proper access to his lawyers. Perhaps the moment of his execution will correspond to a domestic event that reflects badly on the Bush administration.
The first trial involves the 1982 massacre of 143 Shiites from the town of Dujail, which followed an attempt to assassinate Saddam. Saddam faces execution if he is convicted.
Saddam has been accused of gassing his own people but he will not be tried on this charge. He will be executed on one charge and one charge only.
The reason he will not be charged for gassing his own people is because it cannot be proven that he did. Apparently the gas used on the people of Halabja was Iranian gas. There was a war in the 1980’s going on during the gassing between Iran and Iraq. Halabja was in the middle of a battle between Iranian and Iraqi forces. Some insist that Stephen Pelletier, a CIA official assigned to investigate the gassing, accused the Iranians of gassing the Kurds because he did not want Saddam to be blamed as America had given him the poison gas he was using against the Iranians! Then we would have to say that America aided Saddam in gassing his own people.
Another charge against Saddam is that he murdered 400,000 people and put them in mass graves. According to the British Prime ministers office there is no evidence supporting this. It’s a lie, an exaggeration. In any case, that is still less than the 500,000 children who were allowed to die under UN, United States sanctions. Then there are the estimates of 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead since the war began. It takes 250,000 bullets to kill an Iraqi insurgent. It is believed that of the estimated 20.000 insurgents in Iraq, 20,000 have been killed. That’s interesting.
Maj-Gen Rick Lynch, the top US military spokesman in Iraq, said 1,534 insurgents had been seized or killed in a recent operation in the west of Baghdad. Other estimates from military officials suggest that at least 20,000 insurgents have been killed in President George Bush’s “war on terror”.
From CNN
The U.S. military faces between 13,000 and 17,000 insurgents in Iraq, the large majority of them backers of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party, a senior military official said Tuesday.
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It is common for Americans to assume that Sadaam Hussein was a monster. That Saddam was a threat to our nation and a threat to his own. George Bush, in defense of his war in Iraq has repeatedly stated or rhetorically asked, “Ask yourself, is the world better off without Saddam Hussein?”
My answer is no. I prefer Saddam Hussein. I prefer the Sunnis to the Shiites in Iraq. But that’s just my answer and I don’t live in Iraq and it’s not for me to choose. It’s none of my business. But Bush asked the question, for everybody to answer. I believe Saddam Hussein had more humanity in his little finger than George Bush does in his entire body. Saddam Hussein, worked his way from nothing to president of Iraq. I believe he did it ruthlessly. I don’t believe he was generally humane. But he was a person capable of feeling warmth; vulnerability, he had a sense of irony and a sense of humor.
George Bush is cruel, violent, incompetent, without experience, self destructive and vapid. There is no comparison to the character of the two men. Sadaam Hussein is much more substantial. But George Bush has very little substance and is equal to whaterver cruelty Sadaam had. After all, he has done nothing but replace Sadaam’s alleged torture and rape rooms with real torture and rape rooms complete with video, sound and photographic evidence of their existence and the torture and rape that took place there. If you can read between the lines of the account of an Irish reporter you get a sense of this imperial president. He is a man who insists he and his sacred office be respected and the protocol around him is entirely staged, overly prepared and ritualistic. His desires and words are to be made into reality. This is not a good position for a self deluded person who got to his position by virtue of family connections. He is unworthy. And all his appointments and staff are made in his image. They are unworthy too. They are incompetent people of position, rather than ability and skill.But they all have one thing in common…power.
Channel 13 in Rochester New York is the only place I know of in America to have published the following account of Saddam’s capture. It illustrates the way that our government has propagandized the war in Iraq with a pathetic, misguided attempt to use the dramatization and grandeur of Leni Riefenstahl Nazi Propaganda film with the logic of a script from an Ed Wood production… A strange mixture. The reasoning behind the phony made for TV Sadaam capture movie was the intention to make George Bush’s prounouncement that “we will smoke them out of their holes” a prophecy come true. Another KarlyWood movie was the Jessica Lynch story
A former U.S. Marine who participated in capturing ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein said the public version of his capture was fabricated.
Ex-Sgt. Nadim Abou Rabeh, of Lebanese descent, was quoted in the Saudi daily al-Medina Wednesday as saying Saddam was actually captured Friday, Dec. 12, 2003, and not the day after, as announced by the U.S. Army.
“I was among the 20-man unit, including eight of Arab descent, who searched for Saddam for three days in the area of Dour near Tikrit, and we found him in a modest home in a small village and not in a hole as announced,” Abou Rabeh said.
“We captured him after fierce resistance during which a Marine of Sudanese origin was killed,” he said.
He said Saddam himself fired at them with a gun from the window of a room on the second floor. Then they shouted at him in Arabic: “You have to surrender. … There is no point in resisting.”
“Later on, a military production team fabricated the film of Saddam’s capture in a hole, which was in fact a deserted well.”
Just today we have witnessed more staged antics where Bush held an “informal chat” with soldiers in Iraq. It was completely fake.
George Bush claimed that Sadaam Hussien “tried to kill my dad”. It has been alledged that Sadaam plotted to kill former president George Herbert Walker Bush. This was used as yet another reason to view Sadaam as evil and a criminal murderer. [Seymour Hersh reported http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?020930fr_archive02 that there was no evidence that linked Sadaam to an assasination attempt of Bush’s “dad”.]
Iraq was better off with Saddam. Rather than execute him, it would be better and just to free him and let him return to power should he be able to do so. If someone must be punished (and I am against execution) it should not be Saddam Hussein but perhaps the man who made execution in America a national pastime of the press and blood thirsty American public.
The wrong man is about to be executed, again.