Saddam
Hussein - R.I.P.
By David Caputo
30 December, 2006
Opednews.com
So the Grand Poobah of all-that-was-evil
has finally been executed after what must have seemed like interminable
delays to the eager Bush administration.
Of course the big question
is, "What to do now?"
Bringing back memories of
Nicolae Ceausescu's sudden execution as the coup-de-gras of the Warsaw
Pact's implosion, Saddam was turned over to Iraqi "authorities"
after a US judge denied a stay of execution appeal and was summarily
strung up high without much further ado.
Now what?
The Bush Administration is
undoubtedly breathing a sigh of relief right now, but not for the reasons
most might expect. Saddam is dead, and ostensibly someone else did the
dirty deed.
Wash your hands Mr. Pilate.
Like most successful Mafias,
the extended criminal network surrounding the Bush Administration does
its job best when people don't talk much. Especially people who, "know
too much." Everyone's seen the Godfather movies where people get
"rubbed out" before they can "talk."
Rings so "familiar"
right now.
Not only that, but now they
had him marked as a super-bad brutal bastard, evil prince of darkness,
swarthy mustachioed caricature of Public Enemy Number One, ready for
deployment when necessary.
And soon to deploy him they
were...
In 1989, Michael Gorbachev
declined to support the suppression of demonstrators in East Germany
by refusing to send Russian forces to help quell growing unrest. The
head of the East German Secret Police then refused the President's order
to shoot people demonstrating to open the Brandenburg Gate.
Then suddenly (on my 25th
birthday no less) the Gates swung open wide and the Cold War was officially
over as the newly freed multitudes roamed the Berlin streets, looking
for a good discotheque.
It was "The End of History."
The "Peace Dividend" would wash over us all like a warm, gentle,
breeze.
But noooooo....
A few people had other plans
in mind...
During the Iran-Iraq War,
the Kuwaitis had occupied some extremely oil-rich land that Iraq claimed
vigorously was its own.
Soon the Kuwaitis started
aggressively expanding on their practice of "slant drilling"
even further into Iraq oilfields from platforms based on Kuwaiti soil.
Saddam emphatically protested
this to the Kuwaitis, OPEC, and the US State Department, but to no avail.
April Glaspie, US Ambassador
to Iraq, visited Saddam in August of 1989 and said that the US considered
the border dispute an "internal matter" between the two countries,
one in which the US would not intervene or choose a side.
Ha Ha... Fooled Ya!!!
Hussein took the bait and
invaded Kuwait, and to have heard George Bush 41's outcry, you'd have
thought he'd converted the entire population under age 12 into party-sized
sausage links.
The massive propaganda machine
sprung into action and before you could say "Open Sesame"
we'd mustered half a million troops and a coalition of the fellow faux-indignant
and the term "Peace Dividend" was officially dropped from
polite conversation.
We HAD to invade, right?
They were "killing babies", weren't they?
Well... maybe not.
Don't forget, fellow Americans,
that you live in a country where Public Relations, Advertising, and
Spin is the one thing that we do, and will probably always do, so far
much better than the rest of the world that it's not even funny. That
gun is actually pointed though, most of the time, at you. You're sold
a fraudulent bill of goods so often that it's truly almost impossible
to make clear sense of anything.
But try we must, so onward
through this meandering eulogy we slog...
Compared to most rulers in
the Middle East, Saddam Hussein was kind of a liberal.
Don't misunderstand what
I mean. It's pretty clear that he was a paid CIA asset, much like Noriega
of Panama, and a bloodthirsty and ruthless sonovabitch of the first
order for pretty much all of his adult life. This clearly makes him
someone you don't want sitting on your local school board. I also most
assuredly wouldn't have wanted to be an administration-ripping sarcastic
political journalist in Baghdad circa 1987 (or 1998), because I'm rather
attached to my fingernails, and I only like my private parts touched
with love, not electrodes.
But women in Baghdad could
wear skirts. And pants. And walk around without headscarves. Women assumed
prominent roles throughout layers of society that were unthinkable in
most "conservative" Muslim countries. They also made up a
significant percentage of university students on all levels and had
successful careers in almost every profession.
Sunnis and Shiites and Christians
and even Jews lived in relative peace and harmony, more or less worshipped
as they chose, and largely minded their own business. Saddam was an
avowed Secularist and Modernist, a relative rarity in the region. Oil
revenues bought him a lot of friends and the Baath party was a very
effective control mechanism that didn't resort to actual torture to
enforce its will nearly as often as the popular imagination would have
it. Certainly not the fifty plus bodies riddled with power drill holes
that turn up on the streets each morning in today's sado-state.
Cross Saddam, and you were
screwed. Otherwise, it wasn't so bad for a third-world Arab country,
at least for most people.
I live in a relativist world,
it's true. But I can hardly imagine that most Iraqis prefer the unholy
carnage, social disintegration, environmental devastation and infrastructural
paralysis that is today's grand orgy of violence in their country to
the relative peace and tranquility of the Hussein Administration.
It's twisted when you think
of it. We've gone in and FUBAR'ed the place so bad that Saddam Freakin'
Hussein looks like a Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning. Between false
flag covert ops and kick-in-the-door raids and the strafing and bombing
of civilian targets and the raiding of hospitals we've completely destroyed
any possible credibility we might have had in prosecuting Saddam for
the many crimes of unspeakable cruelty he undoubtedly committed.
But I can count.
The Lancet estimated earlier
this year that as many as six hundred and fifty thousand "surplus
deaths" were caused by the effects of the war since the US invasion.
This causal relationship is reinforced by the fact that the overwhelming
majority of these surplus deaths were caused by gunshot wounds or other
effects of combat or munitions. Even if the report is hugely overblown
by a factor of five hundred percent, that still means that US actions
in Iraq have directly caused the deaths of a hundred and thirty THOUSAND
people, minimum.
People who didn't have to
die so soon. People who wanted to live in their homes, raise their children,
and pursue their dreams, no matter how hard that must have been in Saddam
Hussein's Iraq.
They didn't pick him. It
was the CIA that picked Saddam to run Iraq for them. They're the ones
who gave him the extra help he needed to hold that famous convocation
of the Baath Party where he read off a list of names and those who were
named were lead outside to holding cells. The party members who remained
were told that the ones who had been escorted out were traitors, and
the people remaining were the ones he knew were loyal to him. Then he
said that those who were certified for the Saddam inner circle would
get a chance to show their loyalty the next morning when they made up
the firing squad for the guys now waiting outside the hall in cells.
Trust me, the CIA loved this
guy. The more ruthless and brutal, the better. Especially in a country
where the ground below contained the sweetest and easiest-to-get-at
black gold on the planet.
So they waited, and helped,
and worked with him, and made sure he had plenty of weapons, especially
when he'd swap them for some Soviet models he'd managed to buy from
the Russians. Saddam was their boy, and he served many useful functions
for American empire, not all of them witting.
But sometimes you just outlive
your usefulness. Saddam's role as cooperative thug morphed beautifully
into his slayer-of-the-peace-dividend costume and then ultimately into
schemer-to-nuke-us-all (or at least Israel) which ultimately was held
up as the raison-de-etre for the current disaster we're quick-sanding
down to the absolute nub.
Now what do we do?
Saddam Hussein is dead, along
with another sixty six other Iraqis, six American GIs, and a Brit from
the Duke of Lancaster's Regiment. And that's just today.
What do we do tomorrow?
I've got a suggestion...
Leave.
David Caputo
Editor and Publisher
Totally Fixed and Rigged Magazine
www.TotallyFixed.com
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