[Osx-nutters] Saddam's Execution Eliminates the Main Witness against Accomplices

[Kevin Callahan]

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1231-25.htm


Published on Sunday, December 31, 2006 by the Toronto Sun


US Buries the Truth
Saddam's Execution Eliminates the Main Witness against Accomplices
by Eric Margolis

On my first visit to Iraq in 1976, so-called "Israeli spies" were  
being hanged in front of my Baghdad hotel.

While covering Iraq just before the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's  
secret police threatened to hang me as an American/Israeli spy.

I always considered "President Hussein," who was hanged Friday, a  
sadistic bully and a loathsome megalomaniac.

No one can accuse me of sympathy for Saddam or his fellow thugs who  
terrorized Iraq. But I was thoroughly disgusted and ashamed by the  
kangaroo court created and stage-managed by the U.S. that condemned  
Saddam.

It was a disgraceful farrago of Soviet-style show trial and judicial  
circus. Washington, which claimed to be bringing the fruits of  
democracy to the benighted Arab World, put on a sinister legal farce  
worthy of, ironically, Saddam's courts.

Iraq's deposed president, whom Osama bin Laden called "the worst Arab  
despot" should have faced real justice at an international legal  
tribunal like the UN Hague Court. That would have served warning to  
other despots who violated human rights and committed aggression.

The United States did right to hand over Serb tyrant Slobodan  
Milosevic to the Hague. But Saddam had to be silenced before he told  
the world about his long collusion with the United States. Dead men  
tell no tales.

Saddam's biggest crime was not killing rebellious Kurds or Shia. As  
ruler of the unnatural, British-created Frankenstein state Iraq,  
Saddam was forced to keep putting down rebellions.

Saintly Winston Churchill authorized the RAF to bomb Iraq's  
rebellious Kurdish tribesmen with poison gas -- exactly as Saddam  
later did. Saddam's most brutal repression of Kurds and Shia occurred  
when they revolted during Iraq's wars with Iran and the U.S.

Saddam should have faced trial for his unprovoked 1980 aggression  
against Iran that ended up causing one million dead and wounded.

But in this crime, Saddam was covertly backed by his principal  
accomplices, the U.S. and Britain. Donald Rumsfeld even went to  
Baghdad to offer Saddam arms, finance and intelligence. Hanging  
Saddam eliminated the main witness.

Saddam was helped into power by the CIA, which stood by while he  
slaughtered Iraqi communists and Nasserites.

The U.S. and Britain, as I discovered in Baghdad in 1990, supplied  
Saddam with poison gas and germs to make battlefield weapons (these  
were not "weapons of mass destruction." The germs were never  
successfully weaponized).

So long as Saddam was killing and torturing people America and  
Britain did not like, he was "our SOB."

But when Saddam grew too big for his britches and invaded Kuwait, he  
went from being the West's regional bullyboy to devil No. 1.

Once he touched the West's oil in Kuwait, he was marked for death.

Some of the tame U.S. media have been spinning Saddam's execution as  
a justification for the Bush/Cheney administration's unprovoked  
invasion of Iraq, without ever asking why Saddam was an ally in 1988  
yet a devil in 1991 and again in 2003.

Nor has there been much reporting that under Saddam, Iraq became the  
Arab world's most industrialized nation, a leader in women's rights,  
medical care, education, and public projects.

Back in 2003, I predicted that once the U.S. got rid of old pal  
Saddam, it would look for another Saddam-clone to replace him. The  
mutant state of Iraq and its feuding peoples can only be ruled by an  
iron fist. Saddam's greatest error was believing he had frightened  
Iraqis into a national unity that would support invasions of his  
neighbours. He was dead wrong.

There are plenty of other brutal regimes that rival Saddam's Iraq for  
nastiness. Most are close U.S. allies. As Henry Kissinger once  
quipped, being America's ally is far more dangerous than being its  
enemy.

After jubilation among Shia and Kurds over Saddam's execution  
subsides, Iraq will return to its daily bloody chaos. Saddam called  
himself a martyr. In years to come, many Arabs will forget his many  
crimes and remember him as a flawed hero and martyr who dared  
challenge the United States and Israel, and paid the price for his  
audacity.

© 2006 Toronto Sun