Saddam’s show trial will have it’s preordained outcome, upheld upon its meaningless appeal:
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – An Iraqi appeals court on Tuesday upheld Saddam Hussein’s death sentence for crimes against humanity and said he should hang within 30 days.
Human rights activists condemned his trial as seriously flawed and called on the government not to carry out the sentence, which comes amid raging violence between Saddam’s fellow Sunni Arabs and majority Shi’ites.
Sunni Arab leaders reacted angrily to the ruling, saying it was politically motivated by Saddam’s former enemies now in power in a U.S.-backed Shi’ite-led national unity government.
“The appeal court has approved the death sentence. They (the government) have the right to choose the date starting from tomorrow up to 30 days. After 30 days it will be an obligation to implement the sentence,” the head of the Iraqi High Tribunal, Aref Abdul-Razzaq al-Shahin, told a news conference.
Thirty days … I wonder what event is coming up within the next thirty days?
Bush, in his State of the Union address last January, declared the U.S. “addicted” to oil and set a goal of cutting Middle Eastern imports by 75 percent by 2025. House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, has pledged to make rolling back subsidies for oil companies one of her top priorities when Democrats take over Congress in January.
[…]
Hubbard wouldn’t provide details of future White House proposals, saying specifics will come when Bush makes his State of the Union speech to Congress and the nation on Jan. 23. While acknowledging that raising taxes on gasoline would cut demand, he dismissed suggestions that Bush would propose any increases.
They wouldn’t be connected, would they? A “victory” symbolized by our former pet dictator’s corpse, in the Middle East, no doubt as a sign of “progress” and “victory”, another show outcome from a show trial, another manufactured event to score political points.
I mean, there couldn’t be a connection between a puppet government affirming the killing of their former overlord only twenty-eight days before their NEW overlord gets up before the Kremlin on the Potomac to lie anew, could there? The “compassionate conservative” would NEVER use the death of another human being for political gain, would he? His handlers insist that he wouldn’t, that the President holds human life to be sacred:
Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died since the invasion in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein, which Bush said was an integral part of the “war on terror” following September 11.
In Washington, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said:
“The president believes that every life is precious and he grieves for each one that is lost. The hardest decision the president has ever made has been to send our young men and women in uniform into harm’s way.”
NOTHING says reverence like carpet bombing, white phosphorus, shredded veterans benefits, multiple tours and the hangman’s noose.
Saddam was, after all, a bad man, right? Everyone MUST agree that overthrowing him was a GOOD thing, so how could it be bad to finish him off with a good, old-fashioned public hanging?
When Saddam is hanged, the Shiites 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 Shiites 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 Shiites. This battle has far-reaching consequences for the Middle East as a region and for the U.S. itself.
None of that matters to the sociopath/”leader of the free world” who will undoubtedly hold up Saddam’s head (verbally, anyway) aloft on the podium before the next joint session of Congress in four weeks, as conquerors have held aloft the heads of their vanguished enemies from time immemorial. If he could get away with it, Bush would probably love to display the trophy on a spike at the White House gate.
