A
dictator Created Then
Destroyed By America
By Robert Fisk
30 December 2006
The
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 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.
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited
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