The
Execution Of Saddam Hussein
By World Socialist
Web
30 December 2006
World
Socialist Web
The
execution of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein serves not justice,
but the political purposes of the Bush administration and its Iraqi
stooges. The manner in which the execution was carried out—hurriedly,
secretively, in the dark of night, in a mockery of any semblance of
legal process—only underscores the lawless and reactionary character
of the entire American enterprise in Iraq.
There were conflicting statements
throughout Friday about how and under what circumstances the death sentence
against Hussein, confirmed by an Iraqi government tribunal December
26, would be carried out. There were continual communications back and
forth between the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which
nominally controlled the judicial proceedings, and the American military
authorities who had physical control of the prisoner and delivered him
to the execution site in the US-controlled Green Zone.
The decision to send Hussein
to the gallows was not a judicial but a political one. It was signaled
by al-Maliki himself after the death sentence was pronounced by a special
tribunal on November 5, when the Iraqi prime minister declared that
Hussein would be executed before the New Year. In the rush to impose
the penalty on that timeline, Iraqi officials ignored both elementary
principles of judicial fairness and even their own constitution, which
requires confirmation of a death sentence by the current Iraqi president,
Jalal Talabani.
As Richard Dicker, international
justice director of Human Rights Watch, explained in a column Friday
in the Guardian, the legal procedure was a travesty.
“The trial judgment,”
he wrote, “was not finished when the verdict and sentence were
announced on November 5. The record only became available to defense
lawyers on November 22. According to the tribunal’s statute, the
defense attorneys had to file their appeals on December 5, which gave
them less than two weeks to respond to the 300-page trial decision.
The appeals chamber never held a hearing to consider the legal arguments
presented as allowed by Iraqi law. It defies belief that the appeals
chamber could fairly review a 300-page decision together with written
submissions by the defense and consider all the relevant issues in less
than three weeks.”
Rather than a tribunal modeled
on Nuremberg, where the surviving Nazi leaders received far more extensive
due process rights than were accorded Hussein, the proceedings in Baghdad
resembled a Stalinist or Nazi show trial, with a puppet judge, a predetermined
verdict and a sentence carried out in the dead of night.
The political motives
The most fundamental political
motive of the Bush administration is its desire to kill a major opponent,
openly, before the eyes of the world, simply to demonstrate its ability
and will to do so. In the view of the White House, Saddam is an object
lesson to any future opponent of American imperialism: defy the will
of Washington, and his bloody fate could be yours.
The execution also provides
the Bush administration with an event it can claim as proof of US “success”
in Iraq, a diversion from the grisly daily toll of Iraqi and American
deaths. The media coverage of the execution has largely overshadowed
reports on the death toll among US soldiers, which hit 100 in December
and will likely top the 3,000 mark for the war as a whole before the
month is out.
The state killing is intended
to give at least a short-term political boost to the beleaguered regime
of al-Maliki, which is increasingly unpopular and unstable. The Bush
administration has been pressing al-Maliki to break with the radical
Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, one of his principal political allies,
and endorse a US-led military crackdown on the Mahdi Army, the Shiite
militia loyal to al-Sadr.
Executing Hussein provides
a means for Maliki to burnish his credentials with the Shiite majority,
who suffered most from Hussein’s rule, while going ahead with
plans for intensified violence against the predominantly working class
eastern suburbs of Baghdad (Sadr City), a center of Shiite opposition
to the US occupation.
Another important political
consideration is that the execution of Hussein brings the legal proceedings
against the former Iraqi leader to an end before any detailed examination
of those crimes in which successive US governments played a major role.
The case of the execution of 148 Shiite men at Dujail in 1982 was selected
to be tried first because the victims were linked to Dawa, the party
of Maliki and the preceding US-backed prime minister, Ibrahim Jafari,
and because there was no direct US involvement.
This was not the case for
most of the other, far bloodier, episodes in the career of Saddam Hussein.
The second case, the so-called Anfal campaign of mass killing of Kurds
in 1987-88, towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war, was scheduled to resume
January 8. Any serious investigation of those atrocities, culminating
in the gassing of Kurds at Halabja, would shed light on the role of
successive US administrations.
Hussein launched the war
on Iran in September 1980 with the tacit backing of the Carter administration,
which was then locked in a confrontation with Iran over the student
seizure of the US embassy in Tehran and the taking of US officials as
hostages. The Reagan administration subsequently provided significant
aid to Hussein throughout the eight years of war, supplying tactical
military intelligence used to target Iranian forces for chemical weapons
attacks, and backing arms sales to Iraq by European allies of the United
States such as Britain, France and Germany. On two occasions, in 1983
and 1984, Donald Rumsfeld was sent to Iraq as a special US envoy to
reassure Hussein that despite occasional noises about human rights violations,
the US would maintain its allegiance to Baghdad in the war.
The other major case against
Hussein, over the bloody suppression of revolts by Kurds and Shiites
in 1991, threatened to be even more problematic for the Bush administration,
since Bush’s own father, the first president Bush, first encouraged
the uprisings at the end of the Persian Gulf War, then came to the cold-blooded
decision that the continuance of Hussein’s dictatorship was preferable
to a collapse of the Iraqi state, which might benefit Iran, the principal
concern of US war planners.
Opposition to Saddam Hussein’s
show trial and condemnation of his execution in no way imply political
support for the former ruler or his policies. Hussein was a typical
representative of the national bourgeoisie in a backward and oppressed
country—occasionally coming into conflict with imperialism, but
implacably committed to the defense of the privileges and property of
the Iraqi bourgeoisie against the Iraqi working class.
Hussein’s first major
act of mass repression came at the culmination of his rise to power
in the late 1970s, when the Baath Party massacred the leadership of
the Iraqi Communist Party and suppressed the large and militant working
class movement centered in Baghdad and the oil fields. The present disintegration
of Iraq along religious/sectarian lines is one of the long-term consequences
of this savage repression of the working class, applauded at the time
by the United States.
The Iraqi leader was not,
however, tried and sentenced under the auspices of a working class tribunal.
He was the subject of a kangaroo court established by an occupation
regime after the invasion and conquest of Iraq by the United States.
In other words, his crimes were judged and the penalty imposed by those
guilty of even greater crimes than his own.
An editorial Friday in the
Washington Post perfectly captures the hypocrisy with which the Bush
administration, the congressional Democrats and Republicans, and the
American media approached the case against Saddam Hussein. The Post
sententiously declared its general opposition to the death penalty,
before declaring that if it was appropriate for anyone it should be
applied to “Saddam Hussein—a man who, with the possible
exception of Kim Jong Il, has more blood on his hands than anyone else
alive.”
We beg to differ. George
W. Bush has already caused the deaths of more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein—some
655,000 since the US invasion in March 2003, according to a study by
the Johns Hopkins school of public health—and his term in office
still has two years to run. This is to say nothing of the still living
US accomplices of Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, and the successive US
presidents—Bush’s father, Clinton, Bush himself—who
backed the US-led embargo on Iraq that caused the death of an estimated
1.5 million Iraqis from 1991 to 2003.
True justice for the tortured
and oppressed people of Iraq, as well as the American, British and other
victims of the US-led war, will come only when those responsible for
the invasion and occupation—Bush, Cheney and their acolytes—face
their own trials for waging an illegal war of aggression.
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