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Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could
be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that
crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of
Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered
untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while
spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will
tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis
and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his
death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi "government" , but
on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha,
the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest
forgiveness in the Arab world.
But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims
and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another
question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in
other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative
laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers -
what about the other guilty men?
No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies.
George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or
Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of
Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops
are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish
Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the
Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of
lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with
great brutality.
In the aftermath of the international crimes against
humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have
brutalized and killed the innocent - we have even added our
shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and
yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we
applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.
Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the
greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths
of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the
components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched
Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who
controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this,
his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him.
Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for
sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not.
Because that would also expose our culpability. And the mass
killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium
shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous,
the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf,
the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi
population in the aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission
accomplished" - who will be found guilty of this? Such
expiation as we might expect will come, no doubt, in the
self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in
comfortable and wealthy retirement.
Hours before Saddam's death sentence, his family - his first
wife, Sajida, and Saddam's daughter and their other
relatives - had given up hope. "Whatever could be done has
been done - we can only wait for time to take its course,"
one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and had
already announced his own "martyrdom": he was still the
president of Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All condemned
men face a decision: to die with a last, groveling plea for
mercy or to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around
themselves in their last hours on earth. His last trial
appearance - that wan smile that spread over the
mass-murderer' s face - showed us which path Saddam intended
to walk to the noose.
I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I
have talked to the Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia
who rose up against the dictator at our request in 1991 and
who were betrayed by us - and whose comrades, in their tens
of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like
thrushes by Saddam's executioners. I have walked round the
execution chamber of Abu Ghraib - only months, it later
transpired, after we had been using the same prison for a
few tortures and killings of our own - and I have watched
Iraqis pull thousands of their dead relatives from the mass
graves of Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted artificial
hip and a medical identification number on his arm. He had
been taken directly from hospital to his place of execution.
Like Donald Rumsfeld, I have even shaken the dictator's
soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal finished his days
in power writing romantic novels.
It was my colleague, Tom Friedman - now a messianic
columnist for The New York Times - who perfectly caught
Saddam's character just before the 2003 invasion: Saddam
was, he wrote, "part Don Corleone, part Donald Duck". And,
in this unique definition, Friedman caught the horror of all
dictators; their sadistic attraction and the grotesque,
unbelievable nature of their barbarity.
But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At first,
those who suffered from Saddam's cruelty will welcome his
execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the hangman's lever. So
will many other Kurds and Shia outside Iraq welcome his end.
But they - and millions of other Muslims - will remember how
he was informed of his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid
al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be sacrifice by
Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the ghastly
Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners
from his jails.
"Handed over to the Iraqi authorities, " he may have been
before his death. But his execution will go down - correctly
- as an American affair and time will add its false but
lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab
leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington,
that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible
get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his
crimes) Saddam died a "martyr" to the will of the new
"Crusaders".
When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency
against American troops increased in ferocity. After his
death, it will redouble in intensity again. Freed from the
remotest possibility of Saddam's return by his execution,
the West's enemies in Iraq have no reason to fear the return
of his Baathist regime. Osama bin Laden will certainly
rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there's a thought.
So many crimes avenged. But we will have got away with it.
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