Pouring Fire On the Gasoline
Saddam Hussein is dead. Good riddance.
I find it interesting that there are certain similarities between Saddam’s termination and some conducted by another tyrant in another time.
Erwin von Witzleben was arrested on 20 July 1944 for participating in Count Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempt on Hitler’s life at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia. He was cast out of the Wehrmacht by the so-called Ehrenhof der Wehrmacht (”The Regular Army’s Court of Honour”), a conclave of officers set up after the attempted assassination to remove officers from the Wehrmacht who had been involved in the plot, mainly so that they could be tried at the Volksgerichtshof rather than at a court-martial.
It was as if he was declared an enemy alien
so he could be tried outside of his nation’s laws.
Erwin von Witzleben was put to death the same day he was tried at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. He was hanged with piano wire, with the execution filmed for Hitler’s viewing in the privacy of his personal theater
I wonder if Bush has a video of the execution of Karla Faye Tucker? He must get off on executions, because of the 232 people who have been executed in Texas since 1973, (fifth in the world in executions as of October 25, 2000), the Chicago Tribune reported that 131 Texas executions were performed while Bush was Texas’ Governor - more than half.
We don’t have to question, however, whether Bush has videos of the execution of Saddam. You ghouls out there can see the noose being put around Saddam’s neck by clicking on the link so thoughtfully provided by CNN in their report of the execution. [Find it yourself!]
You know that the execution was carried live to Crawford.
After all, how could one miss the party celebrating a “success” in Iraq? There was a party going on inside Saddam’s death chamber, as CNN reported that “some witnesses and the executioner could not resist celebrating by dancing around the body after the hanging.” I’m sure there was a jig or two performed, in concert with the live feed, in Crawford as well.
International reaction varied, but no one attempted to claim that Saddam was innocent. I personally happen to agree with this statement from Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja, whose country currently holds the rotating European Union presidency:
“The European Union has a very consistent stand … on opposing the death penalty and it should not have been applied in this case either, even though there is no doubt about Saddam Hussein’s guilt over serious violations against human rights,” Tuomioja said in Helsinki.
There were other expressions of concern that executing Saddam will have dire repercussions. Russia is concerned that this death could trigger a new spiral of violence in Iraq. Brazilian Foreign Ministry issued a statement which declared, “(Brazil) does not believe carrying out this sentence will contribute to bringing peace to Iraq.”
Dismiss these statements if you wish, despite the evidence that they might be true, for they really don’t mean much to a nation at war for control of oil reserves.
This statement, however, from one of the Arab pilgrims at the annual hajj gathering in Mecca, does mean a whole lot:
“His execution on the day of Eid … is an insult to all Muslims,”
Jordanian pilgrim Nidal Mohammad Salah told Reuters.
Consider Al Qaeda’s recruiting offices to be very busy soon, unlike those of the US Army, which has to resort to inducting foreigners to meet its recruiting targets.
The anger expressed in the words of Nidal Mohammad Salah brings to mind some of the last words spoken by Erwin von Witzleben, who on 7 August 1944, addressed the “court” through the person of presiding “judge” Roland Freisler, who had sentenced von Witzleben to death for his part in the plot: “You can hand us over to the hangman. In three months, the disgusted and harried people will bring you to book and drag you alive through the dirt in the streets!”
While Freisler actually died six months later during an Allied air raid on Berlin on February 3, 1945, this prediction was realized most notably by Benito Mussolini, who was shot by anti-fascist “insurgents” and hung by his feet in the marketplace. It is reminiscent of current events in Iraq.
But what was the Bush administration’s need for rushing Saddam to judgment? What’s George got to hide? John Nichols wrote in The Nation that it was all “A Show Trial and a Show Execution“. As author Tony Hendra writes in Yahoo News’ Huffington Post Opinion: Former American Puppet Executed By Current American Puppets.
The Chicago Tribune raises the $64 trillion dollar issue: Hussein’s death does not alter Bush’s problems, especially the lack of a clear plan for victory in Iraq to be presented to an American people who no longer support the Crude Crusade. The late Jerry Ford, who knew a little something about invading foreign countries for flimsy and ill-considered reasons, was reported by the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward to disagree with Bush about invading Iraq. And just what was gained? Even Bush admits that Saddam’s execution will not halt the sectarian violence in Iraq.
One wonders if, as Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith wrote for The Nation, the forces of accountability are assembling, and Saddam’s execution was intended to deflect that movement. As blogger jurassicpork wrote:
Between the impending execution of Saddam Hussein and the death by natural causes of Augusto Pinochet, the Bush clan is going to be breathing a lot more easily in 2007. No doubt, Bush’s only regret in this matter is not that he squandered 3000 military lives to kill one tin pot dictator but that the execution couldn’t be carried out before election day.
Bush and PNAC have been wanting to remove Saddam and make him dance at the end of a rope. Maybe [Saddam] was going to kill his Daddy politically by making known all those dirty little secrets about Bush, Sr., Rumsfeld and Reagan, [as to] exactly how he was able to commit the crimes against humanity that he did while officially our ally.
Osama bin Laden, our ultimate blow back, was somewhat useful in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan during their own Iraq/Vietnam. Just like the Shah of Iran was quite useful, just like Noriega was useful, just as Pinochet was useful, just as… Well, I’m sure you get the message by now.
It won’t bother me that Saddam Hussein will be put to death… What does bother me is the fact that we did squander nearly 3000 lives to depose, capture, try, convict and sentence a single man who was found guilty of killing less than 5% of that number.
The reason for which Saddam will be executed, his ordering the massacre of 148 Shi’ites in 1982, was never, to my knowledge, mentioned in the run-up to war. Perhaps the reason why it was never mentioned was because Saddam carried out these executions with a wink and a nod from Reagan and Poppy, his two bestest buddies. Rummy would soon join the club in December 1983 bearing gifts such as poison gas and satellite photos of the Iranian army’s position.
And for some reason, it still, nearly 25 years later, completely and utterly eludes the media that Saddam wouldn’t have been so empowered if Reagan had done his job and leaned on Saddam any way he could to get him to play nice. But Saddam was too useful in helping us rid the world of Iranians (Iranians that, wink, wink, had released our hostages on Reagan’s inauguration day in exchange for arms but that’s a story for another day) so we wouldn’t incur the wrath of the Muslim world.
[T]he only things that are propping up George W. Bush [are] the eroding majesty of the presidency and the fact that, unlike certain other nations, it will be a long [time] before the United States will ever be universally condemned as a rogue state. But the fact remains that our government will gladly do business with any tyrant who has interests complimentary to ours and/or has a common enemy.
[T]he faith and trust of our allies is eroding as quickly as the credibility of the presidency. And, if the Saddam verdict is any indication of the world’s rejection of evil, then perhaps we will see in our lifetime George, Dick and Donald standing in shackles in a witness box in the Hague.
I will stipulate here that normally the opinion of a blogger doesn’t carry much weight in the world. But what of that of a veteran reporter - one who has both an advanced education and years of experience on the ground covering international events? He calls Saddam “A dictator created then destroyed by America“. But even he can see that executing Saddam doesn’t end that chapter in the history of the Bush family:
Saddam to the gallows. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold … on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world. It was an easy equation.
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 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.
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?
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?
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.
[H]undreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair, and the Spanish Prime Minister [Jose Maria Aznar] and the Italian Prime Minister [Silvio Berlesconi] and the Australian Prime Minister [John Howard] went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.
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.
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”.
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.
[T]he 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.
Or not. You know it’s bad for Bush when one of his major media mouthpieces is willing to present evidence that Saddam was America’s made man.
There are signs that the dollar is being abandoned by the nations of the world that once hoarded it. The United Arab Emirates has announced that it will sell dollars to buy euros. Iran, Venezuela and Indonesia are considering pricing their oil in euros. It might not affect Bush much, but Blair isn’t that rich.
This will prove to be a wise move once it becomes more widely known that oil priced in euros was less costly than oil priced in dollars - over 10% less. In fact, there are signs that this has already come about. Even the normally sedate Financial Times says so!
It’s all been for nothing, this Machiavellian manipulation by the West of the oil-rich nations of Southwest Asia. No amount of Israeli-friendly propaganda designed to turn Americans into Iranian haters so as to make it easier for George W. Bush to attack or invade Iran can be covered by the fact that even the Israelis see more of a future in euros than in American dollars.
With the crash of the Saudi stock markets recently, and the proclamation by Saudi King Abdullah that his government will subsidize stable gasoline costs for Saudi citizens, they are going to want to recoup their losses - and there is only one place they can get that quickly.
What better way to inflame OPEC nations such as Indonesia to agree to cut production and raise prices than to allow the outrage over Saddam’s execution by the anti-Muslim west to be exploited by extremists? It would replace the hole in the Saudi’s $71 billion budget surplus very quickly.
Right from your pocket. It’s enough to make you angry enough to burst into flame!