Saddam: Hanged for the Wrong Reason
By Gwynne Dyer
It was not the Iraqi government but its American masters that chose
to execute Saddam Hussein in a great rush as soon as the first sentence was
confirmed, thus cancelling all the other trials on far graver charges that
awaited him. The current Iraqi government had nothing to hide if those
trials went ahead; the United States government did.
Cast your mind back to the US invasion of Iraq in March, 2003.
Washington's pretext for war then was Iraq's alleged weapons of mass
destruction, with barely a word about bringing democracy to the downtrodden
Iraqi people. But in order to persuade us that Saddam's WMD were a threat
to the whole world, we were told a lot about how wicked he was, how he had
even "gassed his own people."
Well, there weren't any weapons of mass destruction, so now the
script has been changed to say that the war was about bringing democracy to
Iraq. But that still requires Saddam Hussein to be a monstrous villain
(which he certainly was), and it needs some dramatic supporting stories
about how he abused his own people, like his poison gas attacks on rebel
Kurds in 1988. So let's try him for the slaughter of the Kurds in 1988, and
then we'll hang him.
Fair enough, and the trial for the gassing of the Kurds actually
got started a couple of months ago. Other trials, for his savage repression
of the Kurdish revolt in 1988 and the Shia revolt in 1991, were already
scheduled to happen in the New Year. But none of that came to pass. All
the other trials have been cancelled, and they actually hanged Saddam for
the judicial murder of 144 villagers in the town of Dujail who were
allegedly involved in a plot to kill him in 1982.
Dujail? Here is a man who began his career in power in the late 60s
by exterminating the entire (mostly Shia) leadership of the Communist party
in Iraq, went on to launch an invasion of Iran in 1980 that cost up to half
a million lives, massacred his own Kurdish population in 1987-88 when some
of their leaders sided with the Iranians, invaded Kuwait in 1990, and
massacred Iraqi Shias in 1991 when they rebelled against his rule at the
end of that war. And they hanged him for Dujail?
It's as if they had taken Adolf Hitler alive in 1945, but ignored
his responsibility for starting the Second World War and his murder of six
million Jews and just put him on trial for executing people suspected of
involvement in the July 1944 bomb plot. With all of Saddam's other crimes
to choose from, why on earth would you hang him for executing the people
suspected of involvement in the Dujail plot?
Because the United States was not involved in that one. It was
involved in the massacre of the Iraqi Communists (the US Central
Intelligence Agency gave Saddam their membership lists). It was implicated
up to its ears in Saddam's war against Iran -- to the point of arranging
for Iraq to be supplied with the chemicals to make poison gas, providing
Baghdad with satellite and AWACS intelligence data on Iranian targets, and
seconding US Air Force photo interpreters to Baghdad to draw Saddam the
detailed maps of Iranian trenches that let him drench them in poison gas.
The Reagan administration stopped Congress from condemning Saddam's
use of poison gas, and the US State Department tried to protect Saddam when
he gassed his own Kurdish citizens in Halabja in 1988, spreading stories
(which it knew to be false) that Iranian planes had dropped the gas. It was
the US that finally saved Saddam's regime by providing naval escorts for
tankers carrying oil from Arab Gulf states while Iraqi planes were left
free to attack tankers coming from Iranian ports. Even when one of Saddam's
planes mistakenly attacked an American destroyer in 1987, killing 37
crew-members, Washington forgave him.
And it was George W. Bush's father who urged Iraq's Shias and Kurds
to rebel after Saddam was driven out of Kuwait in 1991, and then failed to
use US air power to protect the Shias from massacre when they answered his
call. The US was deeply involved in all of Saddam's major crimes, one way
or another, so no trial that delved into the details of those crimes could
be allowed.
Instead, the spin-doctors in the current Bush administration put
the Dujail trial first and scheduled the trials for Saddam's bigger crimes
for later, knowing that they would all be cancelled once the death penalty
for the Dujail incident was confirmed. The dirty laundry will never have to
be displayed in public. But it does mean that the man who was hanged last
Saturday morning not only had a farce of a trial before a kangaroo court;
he was executed for the wrong crime.
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