The Steel Magnolia

Robert Fisk opines that the death of Saddam means that the Neocons’ secrets are safe:

He takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him

We’ve shut him up. The moment Saddam’s hooded executioner pulled the lever of the trapdoor in Baghdad yesterday morning, Washington’s secrets were safe. The shameless, outrageous, covert military support which the United States - and Britain - gave to Saddam for more than a decade remains the one terrible story which our presidents and prime ministers do not want the world to remember. And now Saddam, who knew the full extent of that Western support - given to him while he was perpetrating some of the worst atrocities since the Second World War - is dead.

[…]

The whole truth died with Saddam Hussein in the Baghdad execution chamber yesterday. Many in Washington and London must have sighed with relief that the old man had been silenced for ever.

Read the whole thing; it’s a damning indictment. But there’s more. Rupert Cornwell tells us:

How Washington and London helped to create the monster they went to war to destroy

When they hanged him, he was America’s vanquished foe, likened to Hitler and Stalin for the murderous evil of his ways. What is forgotten is that once, for more than a decade, Saddam Hussein was staunchly supported by the US.

Indeed, it was Washington that supplied him with many of the weapons of mass destruction the dictator used against his foes - weapons that one day would serve as a pretext for the US-led invasion that toppled him.

The dealings between the US and Saddam’s Iraq over the quarter of a century before 2003 are a story of deceit, miscalculation and strategic blunders by both sides. And they began, as they would end, in the shadow of a common enemy: Iran.

[…]

Almost from the moment he came to office, the second President Bush had his eye on finishing his father’s business. After a three-week ground war [Saddam] was duly overthrown. But in doing so, the US has achieved exactly what it sought to prevent when it backed him in the 1980s.

It is a matter of debate whether Iraqis are now worse off than under Saddam’s dictatorship. The chaos in their country, however, has produced one undisputed winner: an unchecked Iran, more menacing today than in Ayatollah Khomeini’s time.

And that’s the big problem. Sometimes it seems like the Ziocons don’t have any firing neurons. Everything they have done, from day one after 9/11 (and long before, actually), has been designed to increase the violence on this planet and destabilize human civilization. But then, since the Zio-cons were behind 9/11, it seems that this is what they wanted. They are like virulent bacteria that do not realize that the body they are destroying will be cast into the fire at the end, destroying them as well.

A dictator dies - but tyranny of violence goes on and on

A divided country marked the death of its former dictator with a mixture of carnage and celebration. Around the world, condemnation of the hastily carried-out execution grows. Andrew Malone reports. […]

While America hailed the “act of justice” and exiled Iraqis danced in the streets, celebrating from Sydney to San Francisco, the first bombs of the post-Saddam world exploded on a minibus south of Baghdad, killing 25 people and injuring 62. The morgue was hastily filled with bodies, and the suspected bomber was cornered in the street and murdered by a mob.

While the Vatican and Islamic leaders condemned the execution, life in Iraq continued much as it had throughout Saddam’s rule and the subsequent US-led occupation: with bloodshed, vengeance and death.

Scores of Iraqis are dying every day. It was revealed yesterday that the death toll for US troops since the invasion is just short of 3,000, with 108 killed in December, and pro-Saddam factions swore yesterday that the violence would continue. By last night, the day’s death toll stood at more than 70.

But in Saddam’s home town of Tikrit, where curfews were in force yesterday, many seethed at the hanging of the ousted president, and claimed Saddam was now a martyr in the fight against the US-backed government.

“Saddam will be a hero in our eyes,” said Um Abdullah, a Sunni teacher and teacher in the town, who pledged to wear black to mourn him. ” I have five kids and I will teach them to take revenge on Americans.”[…]

The UK government hailed the fact he had been “held to account” for his crimes, but was strident in its opposition to the death penalty. ” Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, speaking on behalf of the Government, said: “I welcome the fact that Saddam Hussein has been tried by an Iraqi court for at least some of the appalling crimes he committed against the Iraqi people. He has now been held to account.

“The British government does not support the use of the death penalty in Iraq or anywhere else. We advocate an end to the death penalty worldwide, regardless of the individual or the crime.”

Other world powers protested about the grave repercussions. Russia warned the execution will simply add to Iraq’s woes. “The country is being plunged into violence,” said Mikhail Kamynin, the foreign ministry spokesman. “The execution of Saddam Hussein may lead to the further aggravation of the military-political atmosphere and an increase in ethnic and religious tension.”

Libya announced three days of national mourning, calling the execution ” barbaric”.

There was also condemnation from human rights groups and the Vatican. ” An execution is always tragic news, even in the case of a person who is guilty of grave crimes,” said a spokesman for the Holy See. ” Killing the guilty one is not the way to rebuild justice and reconcile society. On the contrary, there is the risk that the spirit of revenge is fuelled.”

In the impoverished village of Awja, where Saddam was born, the people were refusing to accept he was dead and vowed to intensify their battle against American and British troops.

“If Saddam is executed he will be a martyr and he will enter history,” a young man in his twenties said, sceptical that Saddam had in fact been hanged. A man standing beside him added: “If they execute him, we will rise up. We will all become a bomb.”
[…]

But in many parts of the Muslim world, the news of Saddam’s death was met with fury. In Saudi Arabia, Arab pilgrims in Mecca expressed outrage that Iraqi authorities had chosen to execute the former president on a major religious holiday.

“His execution on the day of Eid is an insult to all Muslims,” said a Jordanian pilgrim, Nidal Mohammad Salah. “As a head of state, he should not be executed.”

A radical group based in Syria, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said in a statement that Saddam’s execution aimed at creating ” more divisions and internal conflicts in Iraq with a view to destroying and partitioning it and controlling its resources”. The death may deepen hatred towards Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia, a bastion of Sunni Islam, whose Islamic orthodoxy, known as Wahhabism, regards Shias as virtual heretics. […]

In India, home to 140 million Muslims, thousands took to the streets in sporadic protests across the country. They shouted anti-American slogans, burned effigies of President Bush and briefly blocked trains at main railway stations. “This was a glaring example of America’s dictatorship over the rest of the world,” said Maulana Khalid Rasheed, an imam.

In Iraq, thousands watched in silence as state television showed footage of guards in ski masks placing a noose around Saddam’s neck. The footage cut off just before the execution. Biladi, a Shia-run channel, then showed Saddam in a white shroud, lying with his neck twisted at an awkward angle, with blood and a bruise on his left cheek.

Haider Hamed, a Shia in Baghdad whose uncle died in a Saddam purge, asked what would change: “He’s gone but our problems continue.”

Considering the fact that George Bush has, to date, murdered more Iraqis and caused the death of mor Americans than Saddam ever did, we should take careful note of this last comment: Saddam is gone, but our problems continue. And that is true for the whole world as long as the Neocons, with George Bush as their puppet, are in power.

And what do George and the Neocons want now?

Why, Saddam’s alleged billions, of course.

Family clues to Iraq’s missing oil billions

The dictator is dead, and now the hunt for his illicit fortune is intensifying. Officials from the FBI and US Treasury are focusing their inquiries on £2.2bn of illegal oil profits […]

State Department and Treasury officials claim that Syria has failed to account properly for more than $500m in Iraqi oil profits. The cash, deposited in Syria’s central bank, was paid to Syrian ‘businessmen’ after Saddam’s fall, sources say. Syrian officials deny the allegations, saying that visits by American officials to Damascus in the autumn of 2003 failed to uncover any evidence of the missing cash apart from $300m that has already been frozen. […]

In a report submitted to the CIA last year Charles Duelfer, a former UN arms inspectors, estimated that Saddam had amassed $10.9bn ‘through illicit means’ between 1990, when sanctions were imposed, and 2003. The dictator is also believed to have hidden cash in accounts in Switzerland, Japan, Germany and other countries and to have invested in precious stones, possibly diamonds purchased in the Far East. […]

Immediately before the war of 2003, $1.7bn in assets in accounts held in the US in the name of the government of Iraq, the central bank of Iraq, the state organisation for marketing oil, the Rafidain bank and the Rasheed bank was seized. The Bank of England froze £400m in British banks. An additional $495m of previously unknown assets were secured in accounts in Lebanon. […]

Raghad, Saddam’s daughter, lives freely in Amman under the condition that she does not engage in political activities or make public statements. King Abdullah of Jordan granted her and her sister, Rana, asylum on humanitarian grounds after the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

Raghad, known as ‘Little Saddam’ because she shares her father’s temper, has been accused by the new Iraqi government of using millions allegedly stolen by Saddam to help finance the insurgency. However it is unclear if Raghdad or Rana have much sympathy for their father, though the latter was involved in his legal defence. Saddam ordered the husbands of both women killed in 1996 after accusing them of giving information about Iraq’s weapons to the West. The brothers had defected to Jordan with their families in 1995 and were killed when they accepted Saddam’s offer to return.

Well, assuming they find the money, who do you suppose is going to get it? In fact, a good question is: who got the money in the accounts they froze or confiscated already? I would say that it should all go back to Iraq, but we already know what happens to any money that is slated for Iraq: it goes into Dick Cheney’s pockets via Halliburton.

One thing seems likely: even if Raghad has not been financing the insurgency up to now, she’ll get pretty busy now with the threat of execution hanging over her head - no pun intended. Nothing like backing people into a corner to see just how ugly things can get.

What strikes me as interesting in this whole thing is the conduct of “Saddam” (was he a double, or not? Some people say the real Saddam is secreted away on some deluxe Russian Dacha) as he was led to his execution.

Saddam: The dead dictator

As they put the rope around his neck, the 69-year-old former dictator muttered to himself, “Do not be afraid.” It was still dark outside. The sun had not yet risen. The call to prayer had not yet sounded in the city that Saddam Hussein al-Majid al-Tikriti once ruled through fear.

Now he stood shackled in a prison in a northern suburb of Baghdad ­ the same prison in which his own secret service, al-Mukhabarat, once tortured and killed. The trapdoor at his feet had opened for countless others, on his orders. His own death would be almost as brutal.

The executioner offered Saddam a hood to cover his face during those final moments, but it was refused. “God is great,” said the condemned man. “The nation will be victorious. Palestine belongs to the Arabs.”

Those were his last words. A lever was pulled, the trapdoor swung and his body dropped, half a metre, no more. It was enough, according to a witness: ” We heard his neck snap instantly.”

Saddam Hussein, the Butcher of Baghdad to some but a martyr to his last remaining followers, was dead. He had been executed for crimes against humanity. […]

The execution had been timed to take place just before dawn, the beginning of the holy festival of Eid al-Adha. But the sun was already up in Afghanistan, where a senior Taliban leader said: “Saddam’s hanging on the day of Eid is a challenge to Muslims … the jihad in Iraq will be intensified and attacks on invader forces will increase.”

It was 5.30am in Baghdad yesterday when the Americans handed Saddam over to Iraqi authorities. A helicopter lifted him out of the American-controlled Green Zone to the prison in Kadhimiya now known as Camp Justice.

He went to his death dressed as he had been throughout his trial: in black shoes and trousers and a white shirt buttoned at the throat. He wore a long black overcoat too, as the early morning was cold, but was ordered to remove a black woolly hat. His hair and beard were trimmed, not long and wild as they were when he was captured three years ago, hiding in a hole in the ground.

Saddam was seated as a judge began to read the details of his death sentence for crimes against humanity, passed by a court in Baghdad in November. But when a video camera entered the room he stood up and began to shout back: ” Long live Islam! Down with the West!” Both hands, cuffed at the wrists, held the Koran to his chest.

The 15 people watching remained silent. Some were members of the government. Others were close relatives of 148 men and boys Saddam ordered to be killed in 1982 after somebody from their village attempted to assassinate him during a motorcade. Those were the deaths for which he was sentenced in November, although there are many more associated with his name.[…]

After the charges had been read out and the paperwork signed, his handcuffs were removed and retied so that his hands were behind his back. His legs were tied at the ankles, and the man who once ordered people to be shot just for challenging his opinions suffered the indignity of being carried slowly up a metal staircase to the gallows chamber.

The ceiling was low, the concrete walls grey and bare. Saddam frowned and appeared confused as he stood surrounded by six large men in balaclavas.

“I couldn’t see any remorse on his face,” said the Iraqi national security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie, who was there. But he added: “He was very broken. He looked really weak.”

There was no Muslim cleric present, but the executioner recited the Muslim statement of witness: “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.”

The execution was efficient, said Mr al-Rubaie. “He went down in no time. It was so quick and totally painless, it was over in a second. There was no movement after that.”

The body was left to hang for 10 minutes or so. Gradually those present shook off their nervous silence and the officials congratulated each other. The rope was slackened, the noose removed and a white shroud pulled over the body.[…]

Someone took a picture which shows Saddam lying on a stretcher, not quite completely covered by the shroud. His face and head are bare, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle.

A friend of his eldest daughter, Raghd, living in Jordan, said that she was ” very proud” to have seen her father “facing his executioners so bravely, standing up”.[…]

Now, how cool was that? No matter what anybody says about the guy, he died like a man, on his feet, with courage and words on his lips that bear repeating over and over and over again: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs.”

Come on, can anybody imagine George or Dick or Don or Condi showing that kind of intestinal fortitude in the moments before they KNOW they are gonna die?

The lessons the West must learn from this tyrant’s death

Someone thought they saw fear in his eyes, but it was hard to be sure. Saddam Hussein went quietly to the gallows. Given the momentous nature of the execution, the event was almost an anticlimax. If the great tyrant and mass murderer seemed diminished in the moment of his death, then so were the first architects of his demise.

Beyond the spectre of his atrocities lies the flawed evangelism of the invaders who sought to remove him. They have succeeded, but few tombstones have been more dearly bought. Many thousands of Iraqi civilians have died since the invasion began and more will perish before the New Year starts. As one more bloody dawn broke over Baghdad, Saddam’s last post and requiem were the echo of bullets and the laments of the bereaved. […]

Saddam should not have hanged. Ending his life with a variant of the inhuman punishment he once meted out so lavishly was just another kick against human rights. But in the end, his death seemed more pointless than cruel. President Bush took an early night as the execution warrant was signed. Tony Blair issued no instant comment from his Miami holiday home. What is there left to say? Saddam’s death is less a righteous judgment on his bloodlust than an epitaph to Western folly. The ghastly final truth is that he taught us much more than we taught him.

Saddam Hussein made his attackers forget the limits of their influence and power. The wish to destroy him erased the fact that Iraq has never been moulded to British will and that enemies cannot easily be vanquished when history and logic are fighting on their side. And now his long shadow hangs over a New Year crowded by much else that the West forgot to remember.

The post-Saddam world splits down many fracture lines, almost all connected to the war on terror. Regions of Africa are facing terrible wars, partly because ancient crises simply slipped out of Western minds. Ethnic cleansing, torture and mayhem in Darfur and Somalia have been airbrushed away by disaster in Iraq, peril in Afghanistan, war in Lebanon and a deepening crisis in Palestine. Of the ‘axis of evil’ states, North Korea has the bomb and Iran races towards a nuclear deterrent.[…]

By bitter irony, it took Saddam to drill home that reciprocity and compromise are far preferable to the delusion that Western military power can conquer all. But the paradox of 2007 is this. The West is contemplating a switch to tea-and-cake diplomacy at the very moment when parts of the world cry out in vain for muscular solutions.

Take Darfur, where rape and slaughter pass for social dialogue: As many as 300,000 people have died in three years and two million are homeless. The conflict has spilled over into Chad, and the world stands impotently by, in the hope that President Bashir might graciously put out the welcome mat for the peacekeeping force mandated by the UN.

Take Somalia. The Islamic grouping that maintained rough law and order has fled before the Ethiopian troops tacitly backed by George W Bush. Warlords are already moving into the vacuum at the heart of one of the most savage and anarchic capitals on earth, and the cornerstone of a new war of Christian versus Muslim has been laid. Mogadishu urgently needs all-party talks and UN peacekeepers. Recent history suggests that Tolkien’s army of Isengard is as likely to ride to its rescue.[…]

The old, great powers are effete and cowed by the dead Saddam. When leaders talk of victory in Iraq, they mean: never again. And so humanitarian intervention, the vital long-stop against genocide, becomes unthinkable.

In Africa, in 2007, such cowardice will not suffice. The sheer scale of bloodshed has anaesthetised sorrow and stopped tears. Who weeps for the Darfurian child whose mother left to pick up firewood and never came home? Not many, when the UN High Commission for Refugees works on a shoestring budget of £550m to care for 21 million people.

War zones need more money, more peacekeepers and less of the military force that is either useless or unusable. That means scaling down Western nuclear weapons and redrafting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Britain, for all the influence it has squandered in Iraq, can help force change in 2007. It can band with Europe and demand concerted action to help Darfur and Somalia. It can lobby for the permanent membership of the UN Security Council to be extended. Its Parliament must stop Trident Two.

These are the lessons of Saddam and of a war that should never have been fought. If the West can reacquaint itself with humanity and history, then some debacles of the past year may yet be laid to rest alongside a dead dictator. As Saddam goes to his grave, it is time to remember who to help, and when to fight, and what to mourn.

As for what will happen next, well, Laura Knight-Jadczyk has some ideas that bear thought. She writes:

It’s a very bad precedent all the way around. George and gang should shy away from doing unto others what they wouldn’t want done to themselves… after all, in the eyes of most of the world, they, too, are War Criminals and are committing genocide. Murdering Saddam Hussein is not going to wash away the blood on the hands of the U.S. Neocons. […]

There are many who think that the real Saddam Hussein, friend of many American Administration officials, was spirited to safety before the fall of Baghdad and a double substituted to play the role for the kangaroo court. The few reports that slipped out suggesting such a ruse were quickly buried and the farce went on - whether with the real Saddam or a double, who knows?

It really doesn’t even matter if it was the real Saddam, a fake Saddam, a real hanging, or a fake hanging. What matters is that this “fact” has been propagated and will now become the mask for a new false flag operation - or even a REAL Muslim Terrorist attack! How about a couple of mini-nukes in the U.S. that will then be blamed on the supporters of Saddam - or Moslems with vengeance in their hearts in general - and used as an excuse to slam the door shut on the U.S., U.K., and wherever else there were members of the “coalition of the bought and paid for”? Whether they are real terrorists or fake terrorists won’t matter.

After all, if Bush and gang know that their pillaging and fleecing of the American people can no longer be covered up, that the economic crash is set to happen like right away, how better to cover that up with some real, dire, national emergencies? Who cares if the stock market crashes, the dollar tanks, or interest rates go up if there are terrorists around every corner?

Heck, the domino effect from this one act could lead us right into a REAL terrorist attack after which martial law would be declared, all elections in the U.S. would be suspended and Bush would become “president for life,” curfews imposed, dissidents arrested and sent to the “Halliburton Holiday Camps”; you just can’t tell, but it could be the spark that ignites the conflagration - the beginning of the end.

I have a really bad feeling about this.

I agree; even if Saddam’s death was “anti-climactic” for some, I predict that we have not yet even begun to feel the repercussions. Bush better watch his backside.