To sum up: a monstrous mass-murderer and brutal dictator is gone and will not be missed. Indeed, witnesses report that after the hanging there were celebrations and “dancing around the body”. He did not recieve a fair trial and his hanging is a travesty of justice (and, like all executions, morally despicable).
It was sadly with no hint of irony that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki declared, “Our respect for human rights requires us to execute him.” In reality, Alexander Cockburn was right when he wrote back in December 2003, upon the capture of Saddam, that:
“All the U.S. wants is for the former Iraqi president to be hauled into some kangaroo court and, after a brisk procedure in which Saddam will not doubt be denied opportunities to interrogate old pals from happier days like Donald Rumsfeld, be dropped through a trap door with a rope tied around his neck, maybe with an Iraqi, or at least a son of the Prophet pulling the lever.”
Apparently, the Iraqi government is going to publish images of the corpse (as with the images of the bodies of Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay, released by the U.S. when they were killed in July 2003 – I didn’t think civilised nations paraded the carcasses of the people they kill around like sick trophies…and I still don’t), which only confirms that the trial was a political affair serving more to satiate the thirst for revenge than to further the interests of justice.
The execution appears to have been rushed – according to the New York Times, one Western official said that American legal advisors working on the case were “stunned” at the “hasty pace” of events leading up to the execution. This is almost definitely in order to prevent Saddam giving embarrassing evidence about U.S. complicity in the gassing of the Kurds, which is a crime against justice in itself, since Western complicity in Saddam’s atrocities may now be erased forever from mainstream public history (we can be sure that the media aren’t going to bring the subject up – see below).
The U.S.’ role in Saddam’s worst crimes, committed throughout the 1980s when Saddam was still America’s best friend, has never been fully explored in the Western mainstream press, and the trial against Saddam for the genocide of the Kurds (which was ongoing at the time of the execution) might have forced some much needed discussion of the issue.
—————————————————–
Neither the New York Times, the Guardian, CNN or the Washington Post mention U.S. complicity in Saddam’s worst crimes in their coverage. That the mass media is so eager to write about the atrocities Saddam committed but continues to fail spectacularly in its most basic obligation to inform the public of the crimes committed in their names tells us a lot about the state of our ‘free’ press.
The only mention of Western complicity in the seven page New York Times obituary was this:
`The fear that an Islamic revolution would spread to an oil producer with estimated reserves second only to Saudi Arabia tipped the United States and its allies toward Baghdad and they provided weapons, technology and, most important, secret satellite images of Iran’s military positions and intercepted communications.’
Notice how the New York Times cannot bring itself to mention that the U.S. gave material support to Saddam without immediately providing a justification for it doing so. That one paragraph, containing no depth or analysis or attempt to link our support for Saddam then to our policies today, was alone amongst seven pages – a shameful display from the supposed bastion of the liberal media.
Of course, FOX News was no better – this article does not discuss Western support for Saddam, and their obituary makes only this small mention:
`After the Iranians counterattacked, Saddam turned to the United States, France and Britain for weapons, which those countries gladly sold him to prevent an outright Iranian victory. They turned a blind eye when Saddam ruthlessly struck against Iraqi Kurds, who lived in the border area and were dealing secretly with the Iranians.’
Again, an immediate justification is provided for our complicity with Saddam’s crimes and there is no real discussion of the history. And we didn’t `turn a blind eye’; we actively aided and facilitated the slaughter.
The Times of London did a little better, managing these three lines,
‘Yet, until he invaded the oil-rich state of Kuwait, he enjoyed the collaboration of many governments abroad – including those in the West – who had given him backing in his unprovoked assault on Iran.’
The obituary also notes that the U.S. ‘covertly supported’ Iraq whilst ‘the Soviet Union and France continued to sell weapons to Baghdad, while Britain doubled Iraq’s export credit guarantees’ and describes how ‘[Western powers] had allowed him to buy chemical weapons technology and had apparently turned a blind eye to his agents buying nuclear triggers and fissile material, often with money borrowed from themselves under such guises as credit for agricultural products’ (in reality, it was not so much ‘allow him to buy’ as it was ‘sold him’). This is better than most mainstream coverage (it at least mentions Western involvement) but this tiny, superficial treatment is not impressive seeing as it, together with a reference to a very brief reference to the U.S, Britain and France as Saddam’s ‘former sponsors’ in Andrew Cockburn’s article, represents the only discussion of Western support for Saddam in the whole of the four-page obituary and two other full-length articles by The Times on the topic. Furthermore, both the obituary and Andrew Cockburn’s piece glide over the decade of murderous sanctions imposed on Iraq, which resulted in what has been called the “Children’s Holocaust”, killing half a million Iraqi children. The sanctions caused two successive UN humanitarian coordinators to Iraq to resign in protest. One of them, Dennis Halliday, described the sanctions as “genocidal”. And yet they are given only a couple of paragraphs, and even then the scale of the suffering caused – and, crucially, those responsible – is left unsaid. One would have thought Western complicity in genocide would warrant a bit more attention.
In The Independent, Robert Fisk once again proved to be the honourable exception with his article, ‘A dictator created then destroyed by America‘. Fisk’s piece is so far the only one I’ve read in the mainstream press that points to the absurdity of a situation where Saddam’s chief partner-in-crime (the U.S.) is responsible for trying Saddam for the crimes they committed together. Fisk continues:
‘Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam’s weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.’
The Independent’s leader was similarly commendable, noting both that Saddam was a ‘creature of the United States’ who was ‘armed and encouraged by Washington in earlier times’ and that the trial that led to his execution was a ‘travesty of justice’.
Sadly, the same cannot be said of the Daily Telegraph, whose editorial not only failed to note the fraudulent trial and failed to mention Western complicity in Saddam’s worst crimes, but went on to use the removal of Saddam to justify the invasion of Iraq:
‘His removal alone justified the 2003 invasion. Now, under Iraqi auspices, justice, inconceivable before that event, has taken its course.’
That the Telegraph has the nerve to even talk about justice after supporting (and continuing to support) an illegal imperialist war that has cost the lives of over 600,000 Iraqis and is well on the way to destroying a country is shocking. That a leading newspaper in a country that has long abolished the death penalty describes the hanging of a man convicted in a show-trial as “justice” is disgusting.
Overall then, notable exceptions aside, the media has kept its long and unblemished record of subservience to power most firmly intact. Western complicity in Saddam’s most terrible crimes has been, for the most part, whitewashed from history by our so called ‘free’ press.
Cross-posted at The Heathlander