Saddam Hussien - Post Mortem

There are a couple of good articles that look at the death and burial of Saddam Hussein today. The first is by Eric Margolis at LewRockwell.com who reminds us that Saddam wasn't buried alone but with many secrets.
US Buries Truth

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.

Saddam could not have a real trial because the fact that the US was actually an accomplice in many of his crimes against humanity would surface. Yes a trial in a kangaroo court and a lynching by the Sadr militia was just what the doctor ordered to keep the skeletons in the closet. All we have left is this grainy picture of Rummy and Saddam.

The second article is by someone I have disagreed with more often than not recently, Christopher Hitchens. He does get this right.


Lynching the Dictator
On Saturday morning, the United States helped to officiate at a human sacrifice.

How could it have come to this? Did U.S. officials know that the designated "executioners" would be the unwashed goons of Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army"—the same sort of thugs who killed Abdul Majid al-Khoei in Najaf just after the liberation and who indulge in extra-judicial murder of Iraqis every night and day? Did our envoys and representatives ask for any sort of assurances before turning over a prisoner who was being held under the Geneva Conventions? According to the New York Times, there do seem to have been a few insipid misgivings about the timing and the haste, but these appear to have been dissolved soon enough and replaced by a fatalistic passivity that amounts, in theory and practice, to acquiescence in a crude Shiite coup d'état. Thus, far from bringing anything like "closure," the hanging ensures that the poison of Saddamism will stay in the Iraqi bloodstream, mingling with other related infections such as confessional fanaticism and the sort of video sadism that has until now been the prerogative of al-Qaida's dehumanized ghouls. We have helped to officiate at a human sacrifice. For shame.

Yes, once again the US is an accomplice - this time in making a martyr which will only make things worse in Iraq and the region for years to come.