The
Consequences Of Killing Saddam
By Robert Dreyfuss
04 January, 2007
The
Nation
Since the US invasion of Iraq,
by one widely reported estimate, as many as 655,000 Iraqis have been
killed, in air strikes, by bombs, in death-squad executions and generalized
civil strife. Now, add one by hanging: the kangaroo-court trial and
execution of Saddam Hussein. In life, even in prison, he inspired many
loyalists to fight for his legacy; but his death is certain to spark
even fiercer violence, not just from his remaining lieutenants and senior
Baath party officials but throughout the broader Sunni Arab community
in Iraq. It pushes any hope of Sunni-Shiite reconciliation farther away,
inflames passions on both sides and solidifies the image of the United
States in Iraq as a bloodthirsty occupier.
Convicted of war crimes by
a puppet Iraqi regime that dispensed with niceties such as evidence
and rebuttal, Saddam Hussein was blamed by his fiercest critics--such
as Kanan Makiya, author of Republic of Fear, and others with strong
motive to inflate the scale of Saddam's crimes--of killing 300,000 Iraqis
during his thirty-five-year rule (1968-2003). In less than four years,
George W. Bush has more than doubled that, with no end in sight. As
war criminals go, Bush wins hands down.
The 655,000 US victims in
Iraq do not include the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, mostly children,
who died during a twelve-year era of US-imposed sanctions on Iraq from
1991 to 2003, but those deaths, at least, were obscured by a fig leaf
of legality, since the sanctions had been approved by the UN Security
Council. Bush's Iraq War had no such cover: It was deemed "illegal"
by Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general.
In a statement written in
advance of Saddam's hanging, Bush warned that his death "will not
end the violence in Iraq"--truer words have not been spoken. No
longer Iraq's ruler, since his capture Saddam had become a symbol of
the power struggle between the Shiite Arab religious parties that have
come to rule parts of Baghdad and southern Iraq and the growing, Sunni-led
resistance army that controls most of several provinces to the north
and west of the capital, along with significant swaths of western Baghdad.
His death will, of course,
inspire the religious Shiites into intensifying their jihad, cementing
their belief in the righteousness of their cause. Far more important,
however, it will spark a burning desire for revenge among the Sunni
Arabs, and not just among Baath party veterans. The commanders and organizers
of the insurgency are primarily drawn from those veterans and from the
former Iraqi army officer corps, who were mostly Sunni. But their base
is among the tribes and clans of western, Sunni Iraq--and since the
US invasion, the sons of those tribes have been increasingly enlisting
in the resistance army, often to the dismay of some of the more conservative
tribal elders.
An overwhelming majority
of the Sunni Arab population of Iraq now supports the resistance, and
its intensity is likely to grow significantly in the wake of Saddam's
death. Earlier this year, 300 Sunni tribal leaders met in Anbar to issue
a demand that Saddam Hussein be released from prison, just one indication
that support for the former president of Iraq was widespread. "The
execution of Saddam means that the flame of vengeance will be ignited
and it will hurt the body of Iraq with unrecoverable wound," a
Sunni tribal leader told the New York Times.
Indeed, despite the talk
of a surge of US forces to pacify the Iraqi capital, the fiercest fighting
in Iraq is north and west of Baghdad, in the heart of Sunni Iraq. On
December 24, the US military command announced the deaths of three more
Marines and two more soldiers there, bringing the total for December
to 108 Americans dead and making the month the bloodiest of 2006. At
least a year ago, the US military determined that the war in Sunni Iraq
was lost militarily, and that it could only be resolved through a political
deal between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds. Now, the United States faces
a stark choice: Either abandon Anbar altogether, or face a years-long
counterinsurgency campaign there that will mean Fallujah-style, house-to-house
fighting in dozens of cities and towns.
A political accord for national
reconciliation, always an iffy proposition, is now even more difficult
to achieve, in the wake of Saddam's execution. The Shiite religious
bloc, were it not intent on an all-out victory that humiliates the Sunni
community, might have held out a life sentence for Saddam as part of
a deal that included amnesty for insurgents, the cancellation of the
draconian de-Baathification laws, the reconstitution of the army and
a power-sharing formula that includes Iraq's oil wealth. Now that bargaining
chip--and it is a major one--is lost.
And something else is lost.
Since his capture in 2003, Saddam has been interrogated by US officials,
including CIA officers. According to sources close to the resistance,
US officials--including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former
Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld--met with Saddam Hussein earlier
this year, to ask if he would cooperate in some way to urge the resistance
to lay down its arms. (He refused.) But whatever transpired between
US officials and Saddam since he was captured, none of it is public.
Not a single journalist interviewed Saddam. As far as we know, he wrote
no memoir in prison. The countless secrets that he had, about thirty-five
years of his leadership, he has taken to the grave. Decades of history
have been lost, irrecoverably. Perhaps one of the reasons for the hurried
rush to the gallows, even before a series of other staged, show trials
could be arranged, was to make guarantee that Saddam's secrets never
see the light of day.
Copyright © 2007 The
Nation
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