This
Was A Guilty Verdict On
America As Well
By Robert Fisk
07 November, 2006
The
Independent
So
America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war crimes he
committed when he was Washington's best friend in the Arab world. America
knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with
the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday declaring it to
be, in the White House's words, another "great day for Iraq".
That's what Tony Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled from
his hole in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we're going to string
him up, and it's another great day.
Of course, it couldn't happen
to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn't be a more just verdict - nor
a more hypocritical one. It's difficult to think of a more suitable
monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched by his executioner, the
equally monstrous hangman of Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Widad, who would
strike his victims on the head with an axe if they dared to condemn
the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party before he hanged them.
But Abu Widad was himself hanged at Abu Ghraib in 1985 after accepting
a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned
man. But we can't mention Abu Ghraib these days because we have followed
Saddam's trail of shame into the very same institution. And so by hanging
this awful man, we hope - don't we? - to look better than him, to remind
Iraqis that life is better now than it was under Saddam.
Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster
that we have inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life
is now worse. Or rather, death is now visited upon even more Iraqis
than Saddam was able to inflict on his Shias and Kurds and - yes, in
Fallujah of all places - his Sunnis, too. So we cannot even claim moral
superiority. For if Saddam's immorality and wickedness are to be the
yardstick against which all our iniquities are judged, what does that
say about us? We only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of
them and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes and illegally
invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere 600,000 lives ("more or
less", as George Bush Jnr said when he claimed the figure to be
only 30,000). Saddam was much worse. We can't be put on trial. We can't
be hanged.
"Allahu Akbar,"
the awful man shouted - God is greater. No surprise there. He it was
who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag, the
same flag which now hangs over the palace of the government that has
condemned him after a trial at which the former Iraqi mass murderer
was formally forbidden from describing his relationship with Donald
Rumsfeld, now George Bush's Secretary of Defence. Remember that handshake?
Nor, of course, was he permitted to talk about the support he received
from George Bush Snr, the current US President's father. Little wonder,
then, that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans had been
urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-term US elections.
Anyone who said the verdict
was designed to help the Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman,
blurted out yesterday, must be "smoking rope". Well, Tony,
that rather depends on what kind of rope it might be. Snow, after all,
claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict - not the trial itself, please
note - was "scrupulous and fair". The judges will publish
"everything they used to come to their verdict."
No doubt. Because here are
a few of the things that Saddam was not allowed to comment upon: sales
of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant - so appalling - that
he has been sentenced to hang on a localised massacre of Shias rather
than the wholesale gassing of Kurds over which George W Bush and Lord
Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when they decided to depose
Saddam in 2003 - or was it in 2002? Or 2001? Some of Saddam's pesticides
came from Germany (of course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate's Committee
on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled "United
States Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq
and their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian
Gulf War".
This was the 1991 war which
prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and the report informed Congress
about US government-approved shipments of biological agents sent by
American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included Bacillus
anthracis, which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma
capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia
coli. The same report stated that the US provided Saddam with "dual
use" licensed materials which assisted in the development of chemical,
biological and missile-system programmes, including chemical warfare
agent production facility plant and technical drawings (provided as
pesticide production facility plans).
Yes, well I can well see
why Saddam wasn't permitted to talk about this. John Reid, the British
Home Secretary, said that Saddam's hanging "was a sovereign decision
by a sovereign nation". Thank heavens he didn't mention the £200,000
worth of thiodiglycol, one of two components of mustard gas we exported
to Baghdad in 1988, and another £50,000 worth of the same vile
substances the following year.
We also sent thionyl chloride
to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only £26,000. Yes, I know these
could be used to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But this was the
same country - Britain - that would, eight years later, prohibit the
sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on the grounds that it
could be used for - you guessed it - "weapons of mass destruction".
Now in theory, I know, the
Kurds have a chance for their own trial of Saddam, to hang him high
for the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would certainly keep
him alive beyond the 30-day death sentence review period. But would
the Americans and British dare touch a trial in which we would have
not only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why the CIA -
in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war crimes against Halabja -
told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim that the gas used on the
Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam still
being at the time our favourite ally rather than our favourite war criminal).
Just as we in the West were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds
during the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988.
And - dare we go so deep
into this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded their
country? - then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering countless
thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds after they staged an uprising
against the Baathist regime at our specific request - thousands whom
webetrayed by leaving them to fight off Saddam's brutal hordes on their
own. "Rioting," is how Lord Blair's meretricious "dodgy
dossier" described these atrocities in 2002 - because, of course,
to call them an "uprising" (which they were) would invite
us to ask ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath. Answer:
us.
I and my colleagues watched
this tragedy. I travelled on the hospital trains that brought the Iranians
back from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds bubbling in giant
blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth to smaller blisters that
wobbled on top of their wounds. The British and Americans didn't want
to know. I talked to the victims of Halabja. The Americans didn't want
to know. My Associated Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian
dead lying gassed in their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra.
The Americans and the British didn't care.
But now we are to give the
Iraqi people bread and circuses, the final hanging of Saddam, twisting,
twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have inflicted justice
upon the man whose country we invaded and eviscerated and caused to
break apart. No, there is no sympathy for this man. "President
Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed," Bouchra Khalil,
a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few days ago. "He
will not come out of prison to count his days and years in exile in
Qatar or any other place. He will come out of prison to go to the presidency
or to his grave." It looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu
went there. Milosevic escaped sentence.
The odd thing is that Iraq
is now swamped with mass murderers, guilty of rape and massacre and
throat-slitting and torture in the years since our "liberation"
of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi government we are currently
supporting, democratically elected, of course. And these war criminals,
in some cases, are paid by us, through the ministries we set up under
this democratic government. And they will not be tried. Or hanged. That
is the extent of our cynicism. And our shame. Have ever justice and
hypocrisy been so obscenely joined?
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
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