The hanging of Saddam Hussein (pictured above with his good friend, Don Rumsfeld,) perhaps in days or weeks, or maybe to coincide with a certain State of the Union address... will accomplish three things:
1. It will satiate some of the Iraqi Kurdish and Shiite thirst for revenge ...
2, It will harden the Sunni insurgency and further divide Iraqis from one another ...
3. It will make a martyr of Saddam among his Ba'athist and other Sunni supporters ... and that includes al-Qaida types, who like Saddam, are Sunnis.
Already Ba'athists are threatening to retaliate. Iraqis are lining up to apply for the job of hangman, and Saddam is filling out his martyrdom papers and writing a letter, telling Iraqis to unite, but not to hate the infidels, for they know not what their leaders do. He must have had a P.R. coach...
Meanwhile, remembering what the dictator was convicted of, courtesy of the BBC:
The American journalist Bob Woodward, in his third book about the Bush administration at war, State of Denial, relates a story told by Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, who was the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States.
Prince Bandar recalls a conversation that Saddam Hussein had with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia after a group of extremists took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979.
The rebels had been caught and thrown into jail, and this was the Iraqi leader's advice: "In my mind, there is no question that you are going to kill all 500, that's a given.
"Listen to me carefully, Fahd. Every man who in this group who has a brother or father - kill them. If they have a cousin who you think is man enough to go for revenge, kill them.
"Those 500 people are a given. But you must spread the fear of God in everything that belongs to them, and that's the only way you can sleep at night."
That seems to have been the tactic that Saddam Hussein used at Dujail in 1982, when - after an attempt to assassinate him - 148 people were killed. It is the crime for which he has been sentenced to hang.
Perhaps Saddam Hussein will accept his fate on the gallows as an occupational hazard of being a despot. Or maybe he never intended his own rules to apply to himself. Indeed.Labels: Iraq, Saddam, Saddam Hussein, war |
