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bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
A dictator created then destroyed by America
Robert Fisk
Published: 30 December 2006
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 Tigris,
the man who 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", but 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 Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But
hundreds 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 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.
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
Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All condemned men face a decision: to
die with a last, 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's face - showed us which 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 York Times - who perfectly caught Saddam's character just before the
2003 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 Iraq 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 Washington, that, for all
his wrongdoing (and this 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 Iraq have no reason to
fear the return of 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.
source:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2112555.ece
===
-muslim voice-
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BECAUSE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO KNOW
