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A DICTATOR CREATED THEN DESTROYED BY By Robert Fisk The Independent December 30, 2006 http://news.independent. Saddam to the
gallows.
It was
an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to
the
scaffold -- that crack of the neck at the end of a rope -- than the Beast
of
Baghdad, the Hitler of the murdered untold
hundreds of thousands
of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over
his
enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great
day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death
sentence
was signed -- by the Iraqi "government" on behalf of the
Americans --
on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the
moment of
greatest forgiveness in the Arab world. But history will record
that
the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West,
will ask
another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed
in other
Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for
us by
our presidents and prime ministers -- what about the other guilty
men? No, Tony Blair is not
Saddam.
We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't
invade of thousands of Iraqi
civilians
are dead -- and thousands of Western troops are dead -- because
Messrs Bush
and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime
Minister and
the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of
lies and
mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality. In the aftermath of the
international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have
murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent -- we have even added
our shame
at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib -- and yet we
are
supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging
corpse of
the dictator we created. Who encouraged Saddam
to invade 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 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. And the mass killings
we
perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our "bunker
buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of
Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi
population in the aftermath of our "victory" -- our "mission
accomplished" -- who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will
come,
no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in
comfortable and wealthy retirement. Hours before Saddam's
death
sentence, his family -- his first wife, Sajida, and Saddam's daughter
and their
other relatives -- had given up hope. "Whatever could be done
has been done -- we can only wait for time to take its course," one of
them
said last night. But Saddam knew, and had already announced his own
"martyrdom": he was still the president of would die for grovelling plea for
mercy or to
die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in
their last
hours on earth. His last trial appearance -- that wan smile that
spread over
the mass-murderer' path Saddam intended to
walk to
the noose. I have catalogued his
monstrous
crimes over the years. I have talked to the Kurdish survivors of
Halabja
and the Shia who rose up against the dictator at our request in 1991
and who
were betrayed by us -- and whose comrades, in their tens of
thousands, along
with their wives, were hanged like thrushes by Saddam's
executioners. I have walked round the
execution chamber of Abu Ghraib -- only months, it later transpired, after
we had
been using the same prison for a few tortures and killings of our own
-- and
I have watched Iraqis pull thousands of their dead relatives from the
mass
graves of Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted
artificial hip
and a medical identification number on his arm. He had been
taken
directly
from hospital to his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I
have
even shaken the dictator's soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal
finished
his days in power writing romantic novels. It was my colleague,
Tom
Friedman -- now a messianic columnist for The New invasion: Saddam was,
he wrote,
"part Don Corleone, part Donald Duck". And, in this unique
definition,
Friedman caught the horror of all dictators; their sadistic
attraction and
the grotesque, unbelievable nature of their barbarity. But that is not how the
Arab
world will see him. At first, those who suffered from Saddam's
cruelty
will welcome his execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the hangman's
lever. So
will many other Kurds and Shia outside welcome his end.
But
they --
and millions of other Muslims -- will remember how he was informed of
his
death sentence at the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls
the
would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which
even the
ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners
from his
jails. "Handed over to the Iraqi authorities, he may have been before
his
death. But his execution will go down -- correctly -- as an
American
affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this --
that the
West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from will be the terrible
get-out
for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a
"martyr" to the will of the new "Crusaders". When he was captured in
November of 2003, the insurgency against American troops increased in
ferocity.
After his death, it will redouble in intensity again. Freed from the
remotest
possibility of Saddam's return by his execution, the West's
enemies
in his Baathist
regime.
Osama bin
Laden will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And
there's
a
thought. So many crimes avenged. But we will have got
away with
it.
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