Finally, a serviceable conservative argument linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11
This is about as good as it's gonna get, righties, and interestingly enough, it comes closest to the explanation proferred during this week's GOP debate in South Carolina, by one Ron Paul... From the Hutchinson News, courtesy of an enterprising FReeper:
Many Americans don't understand why the Saudis flew airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
During Desert Storm, the first President Bush decided to use a containment strategy against Saddam Hussein instead of attempting to remove him from office. This strategy required stationing American troops in Saudi Arabia.
Osama bin Laden and his supporters believed that our troops, which al-Qaida considered to be "infidels," were not only occupying their holy land but desecrating it. They hated us because of the occupation and decided to try to force our troops out.
First they attacked our troops. When that didn't work, they attacked our embassies and the U.S.S. Cole. Bin Laden then decided to declare war on the U.S. by attacking the U.S. directly in what became the 9/11 attack.
The 9/11 attack was the price we paid for allowing Hussein to stay in office instead of attempting to remove him during Desert Storm.
We are now at war with al-Qaida. They are fighting us in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The author is arguing, after this pretty decent start, that we have to stay in Iraq and "fight them over there" so we can protect ourselves from further attacks. That's where the argument begins to fall apart, but let's examine the above part of the argument:
In fact, during and after Desert Shield/Desert Storm under the first President Bush, American troops were in fact staged in Saudi Arabia, at various air bases, most of which were little more than open fields. In the final two years of the Bush I administration, construction began on a massive air base called Al Kharj. According to GlobalSecurity.org:
During Desert Shield, coalition forces found it necessary to build what was then called Al Kharj from scratch. From October 1990 to March 1991, a combined 435-person RED HORSE squadron was involved in more than 25 major projects, valued at more than $14.6 million. These included bedding down the largest air base in theater (in terms of number of aircraft -- capable of bedding down five fighter squadrons) at Al Kharj Air Base. Erecting 17 K-Span facilities and carving out roads, they created a theater munitions storage depot. RED HORSE, augmented by the 4th CES from Seymour Johnson AFB, NC, and contract personnel, hauled 200,000 cubic yards of clay to build a foot-thick clay foundation for tent city. Eventually, they erected a tent city, set up four kitchens, an air transportable hospital, six K-span structures, and support facilities. They built munitions storage areas and bladder berms, completed utility distribution systems, and installed mobile aircraft arresting systems. In less than two months in 1990, Al Kharj changed from a base without buildings and only a ramp and runways, to one with tents to support dining halls, hangars, a hospital, electric power generators, and services for an expanded population of Air Force personnel. Al Kharj was ready for aircraft early in January 1991, and by the beginning of the war was home to 4,900 Air Force personnel.
That massive building effort cannot have gone unnoticed by the recalcitrant Saudi named Osama Bin Laden, who was already smarting from the kingdom of his birth, that his family had devoted its working life to, had turned to the infidels to defend Saudi and Kuwaiti soil, rather than turning to the Jihadis who had expelled the mighty Soviet army from Afghanistan.
When the Clinton administration came into power, and with the tense cease fire remaining with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the building inside the Saudi kingdom only expanded. by 1995, al-Qaida, or other militant groups being labeled al-Qaida by the U.S. government for housekeeping (and easy messaging) purposes, decided to attack. More from GlobalSecurity:
Attacks on the Office of the Program Manager/Saudi Arabia National Guard (OPM/SANG) in November 1995 and on the Khobar Towers living compound in June 1996 forever changed the way in which the Armed Forces will regard terrorism in the Persian Gulf. Both bombings also served to prove that regional security dynamics can have an impact on US forces deployed in the area. To deter and prevent hostile acts, air activities were moved from King Abd Al-Aziz air base in Dhahran and Riyadh air base to a compound inside a much larger tightly secured, 80-square-mile Royal Saudi Air Force Prince Sultan Air Base adjacent to the city of Al Kharj, south of Riyadh. The rationale for this shift was to move forces from populated areas, where perpetrators of terrorist acts could easily disappear, to locales where space and terrain could be used to advantage.
The expansion of the U.S. and British presence in Saudi Arabia accelerated after that, and the expansion of Prince Sultan Air Base ramped up, such that:
Living conditions for troops at Prince Sultan Air Base took a step forward in late 1998 with the acceptance of the new Friendly Forces Housing Complex, roughly two miles from Prince Sultan Air Base. The new 4,257-bed facility took nearly two years to build and became home in early 1999 to more than 4,000 US, British and French coalition forces involved with Operation Southern Watch. The new housing facility is similar to a college dormitory complex featuring permanent structures and some comforts of home such as shared television and living areas in each apartment. It also has three community dining halls, a gymnasium, recreation center, library, pool and probably the most important feature to the troops -- a lot more privacy. Built at a cost of approximately $112 million by the host government, the housing complex remains the property of the Saudi government but is primarily run and maintained by US forces. Security of the complex is also the responsibility of coalition security forces. The first forces to move in was the 363rd Air Expeditionary Wing already at Prince Sultan.
On 22 June 1999 Prince Sultan Ibn Abdul Aziz, Second Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Defense and Aviation and Inspector-General, laid the foundation stone for the Prince Sultan Health Center in Al-Kharj. Prince Sultan had donated a total of SR 22 million (U.S. $ 5.87 million) to this project. Prince Sultan also unveiled plaques commemorating the opening of the Prince Sultan Air Base, and marking the completion of the residential complexes and educational facilities, for which Prince Sultan laid the foundation stones a little under two years previously. The project of the Air Base was first conceived in the late 1980s, and had involved ten contractors and total funding of over SR 4 billion (U.S. $ 1.07 billion).
With all that contract money changing hands, and the thousands of U.S. and British troops now living quite well inside the Kingdom, where 30 percent unemployment among the non-royal is a day-to-day fact of life, Bin Laden is said to have made the decision to escalate the war against America. The countdown to 9/11 had begun.
Now all of that assumes that you believe the official timeline and story regarding Bin Laden's designs on the World Trade Center. If you do, then it follows that al-Qaida -- or a loosely defined groups of al-Qaida affiliated entities -- continually ratcheted up the war, attacking the World Trade Center in 1993, two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and the World Trade Center again in 2001. Also during that time, a group called Saudi Hizbollah attacked the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, which at the time was housing military personnel near the headquarters of the Saudi state oil company Aramco (coincidentally, I'm sure). [that the commonality with the other Hizbollah isn't really meaningful, since the name Hizbollah or "Hezbollah" simply translates to "part of God."]
So are we at war in Iraq because of all this? Well, yes and no. Iraq's government had no ties to al-Qaida, which the writer of the Hutchinson essay inherently acknowledges: the al-Qaida beef had nothing to do with America's war against Saddam -- the Saudis, and al-Qaida, both hated Saddam. It had to do with American troops "defiling" Saudi soil to defend Saudi interests aganst Saddam. So it makes no sense to argue that we're fighting an al-Qaida that is on the same side as the Ba'athist apostate Saddam Hussein.
However, there are some al-Qaida elements in Iraq. They represent the smallest, but among the most lethal, components of the insurgency. And what are they fighting for? They're fighting to destabilize the Shiite government and majority, which we unleashed after deposing Saddam. But they appear to want to upend the Ba'athist insurgents, too, setting both sides against one another in a bloody civil war, the result of which, I suppose from al-Qaida's point of view, will be an ungovernable country that cannot be permanently occupied, wait for it, by the infidel Americans and British. So the al-Qaida portion of the war in Iraq is much more about us than it is about Saddam.
So what keeps al-Qaida fighting? Well, it could be that one thing is the fact that their bloody, decade-plus long struggle against the United States has yielded at least one success: On April 29, 2003, the Bush administration announced that it would yield to one of Osama Bin Laden's central demands, by pulling American forces out of the sprawling, hydra-like complex built in the aftermath of his father's aborted war against Saddam: Prince Sultan Air Base.
Two more hangings in Baghdad ... including one with a severed head. Here are the gory details:
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq hanged two aides to Saddam Hussein before dawn on Monday but government efforts to avoid a repeat of uproar over the ousted leader's rowdy execution were thwarted when his half-brother's head was severed by the noose.
Many of the government's Shi'ite Muslim supporters rejoiced at the death of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's once feared intelligence chief who was accused of sending people to death in a meat grinder. But voices in Iraq's Sunni Arab minority saw the decapitation as a deliberate sectarian act of revenge.
Government spokesmen said the severing of Barzan's head was a rare hangman's blunder. Critics said it may have been partly a result of Barzan's illness with cancer.
Officials showed journalists film of Barzan and former judge Awad Hamed al-Bander standing side by side in orange jumpsuits on the scaffold, appearing pale and trembling with fear as the hangmen placed black hoods over their heads.
As the two trap doors swung open, the force of the rope jerked Bander's head off. The head fell to the floor next to his body in a pool of blood as Bander's corpse swung above it.
The officials said they had decided not to distribute any part of the film to the public -- unlike footage shown of Saddam standing on the gallows.
The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, told reporters the hanging of the two men was "an Iraqi decision, an Iraqi execution." But some countries in the European Union, to which Iraq is looking for economic aid, expressed disgust. The United Nations had appealed for mercy.
The government film was silent but officials said there was no disturbance in the execution chamber like the taunting that occurred at Saddam's hanging. The chamber was apparently the same one where Saddam was hanged on December 30.
Apparently, Iraqi officials had made all of the witnesses sign documents pledging to behave with a sense of decorum. How nice.
Meanwhile, Jawa has new details ... and new pics ... on the new video of Saddam's lynch-like hanging. By the way, this is what the aftermath of a hanging looks like, when the head doesn't pop off:
Also courtesy of Jawa (long time, no link...) is a link to ye old Saddam fellow travelers hanging coverage. It oughta make you proud to be an American... where we make the world safe for sectarian lynching.
More on the continued Iraqi parade of carnage and indignity from the BBC
Saddam Hussein was summarily executed on the day before New Year's Eve, and now he not only will escape trial for the killing of 180,000 Kurds during the notorious Anfal campaign (he was offed by the Shiite Dawa Party for killing 148 of their own during the 1980s) ... he actually had those charges dropped. Seriously. Read on:
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein and his cousin ``Chemical Ali'' discussed how chemical weapons would exterminate thousands before unleashing them on Kurds in 1988, according to tapes played on Monday in a trial of former Iraqi officials.
``I will strike them with chemical weapons and kill them all,'' a voice identified by prosecutors as ``Chemical Ali'' Hassan al-Majeed is heard saying.
``Who is going to say anything? The international community? Curse the international community,'' the voice continued.
``Yes, it's effective, especially on those who don't wear a mask immediately, as we understand,'' a voice identified as Saddam is heard saying on another tape.
``Sir, does it exterminate thousands?'' a voice asks back.
``Yes, it exterminates thousands and forces them not to eat or drink and they will have to evacuate their homes without taking anything with them, until we can finally purge them,'' the voice identified as Saddam answers.
With Saddam's chair empty, nine days after he was hanged, Majeed and five other Baath party officials were being tried for their roles in the 1988 Anfal (Spoils of War) military campaign in northern Kurdistan.
MANY KURDS GASSED
Prosecutors said 180,000 people were killed, many of them gassed. Many Kurds regret the chief suspect can no longer face justice for his role in the campaign against them, but they hope others share his fate on the gallows.
Saddam was hanged on December 30 after being convicted in an earlier trial for his role in killing 148 Shi'ites in the 1980s.
Majeed, who faces charges of genocide, is considered the main enforcer of the Anfal campaign.
Defendants have said Anfal was a legitimate military operation targeting Kurdish guerrillas who had sided with Shi'ite Iran during the last stages of the Iraq-Iran war.
Chief Prosecutor Munqith al-Faroon also played on Monday video showing women and children lying dead on village streets and mountain slopes after what he said was a chemical attack ordered by Saddam.
``These are the honorable battles they claimed to have launched against the enemy,'' he told the court.
Judge Mohammed al-Ureybi, in his first order of business, formally dropped charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against Saddam. He cut off the microphones when Majeed stood up and started to read the Koran in tribute to his former chief.
``In virtue of the confirmation of the death of defendant Saddam Hussein, the court decided to finally stop legal procedures against defendant Saddam Hussein according to the Iraqi Penal Procedures Law,'' Ureybi told the court.
So Saddam gets a free pass for killing Kurds, but he gets offed quick-fast for killing Shiites. Yep, Iraq is moving forward.
The Nouri al-Maliki government is promising to investigate the taunting and jeering of Saddam Hussein by what appeared to be Shiite militants loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr during his hanging. The incident, which was captured on a cellphone cam, has ambarassed the Shiite-led Iraqi government, as well as moderate Shia and Kurds across that country, who now have about a snowball's chance in hell of pacifying Sunni insurgents and winning them into the coalition government. And while the investigation gets underway, and the Maliki government scrambles, watch as the Americans seek to take one giant step away from the hanging of the former Public Enemy Number One:
Officials said a three-man Interior Ministry committee would look into the scenes that have caused outrage and public demonstrations among Mr. Hussein’s Sunni Arab loyalists in Iraq, and widespread dismay elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. In an unofficial cellphone video recording that was broadcast around the world and posted on countless Web sites, Mr. Hussein is shown standing on the gallows platform with the noose around his neck at dawn on Saturday, facing a barrage of mockery and derision from unseen tormentors below the gallows.
As the shock of those scenes reached a new crescendo in Iraq, American officials said that they had worked until the last hours of Mr. Hussein’s life to persuade Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki to delay the execution. The officials, who spoke on condition that they not be identified, said they appealed to Mr. Maliki not to execute Mr. Hussein at dawn on Saturday because of the onset of a major Islamic festival, and because of constitutional and legal questions that the Americans believed threw the legitimacy of the execution into doubt.
But when Mr. Maliki decided to go ahead with the hanging, the Americans said they made no further attempts to stop it, having concluded that they could advise the Iraqis against the execution, but not prevent it if the Iraqis persisted, out of respect for Iraqi sovereignty.
When asked if that decision had been made in the White House, the Americans refused to say, noting only that it came some time before the final exchanges on Friday night. Mr. Hussein was hanged at 6:10 a.m. on Saturday, about seven hours after what the officials said was their final attempt to postpone the hanging.
“We told the prime minister that going forward on the first day of Id would have a negative reaction in the Islamic world, and among the Iraqi people,” a senior American official said, recounting a telephone conversation with Mr. Maliki that began at 10:30 p.m. Baghdad time on Friday. The reference was to the Id al-Adha holiday, which began for Sunnis on Saturday, marking the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. “Therefore,” the official said, “we said we thought it would be better if they delayed until after Id, and use the delay to resolve the legal issues.”
The American official said that Mr. Maliki had never fully explained his urgency in carrying out the death sentence, which was upheld last Tuesday in an appeals court ruling that set off a 30-day countdown for executions to be carried out after a final appeal has been turned down. But the prime minister gave one explanation that appeared to weigh heavily on his mind, the American said, and that was his fear that Mr. Hussein might be the subject of an insurgent attempt to free him if the procedural wrangling over the execution were protracted.
Meanwhile:
With some Iraqi politicians raising fresh demands for Mr. Maliki’s dismissal, the Americans, in offering to have a senior official discuss the matter in a telephone interview with The New York Times, appeared eager to protect the Bush administration from a fresh surge of criticism for its handling of events in Iraq.
The official said that among American officials in Iraq who had tried to stop Mr. Maliki from rushing Mr. Hussein to the gallows, the reaction to the scenes of abuse had been one of dismay.
“Well, yes, when I think of the behavior of the people who were there, I’m disappointed and distressed, that’s true,” the official who spoke in the telephone interview said. He said he had been one of the Americans who intervened with Mr. Maliki on Friday night and earlier last week to try to delay the hanging.
Mr. Maliki seemed equally eager to ward off the opprobrium stirred by the execution. His aides announced that the events at the hanging would be the subject of an inquiry. A prosecutor who attended the execution, Munkith al-Faroun, said he thought one of the invited witnesses had recorded the session on a cellphone, but he could not recall his name.
The government inquiry was ordered as a groundswell of protest grew at Sunni population centers across Iraq. The protests, sporadic in the first 72 hours after the hanging, appeared to be building in intensity as Iraqi and American troops relaxed security cordons that had been thrown around centers of diehard support for Mr. Hussein, including his hometown, Tikrit, 100 miles north of Baghdad, and Awja, the village where he was born, a few miles away. The protesters carried portraits of Mr. Hussein, chanted his name, and fired weapons in the air.
Thousands of mourners flocked to Awja, where Mr. Hussein’s body has lain in a reception hall. The body, in a plain wood coffin draped in an Iraqi flag, has become a point of pilgrimage for loyalists. Many of those reaching Awja have wept as they filed past the coffin, shouting slogans of fealty of the kind that were universal in Iraq when Mr. Hussein was the country’s dictator.
“Maliki, you coward, you are an American agent,” cried one demonstrator in Tikrit, referring to the prime minister. “Iran, out, out!” another man shouted, echoing anger among Sunnis at the rise to power in Baghdad of Shiite religious groups backed by Iran, including Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party.
Next comes news that the hanging nearly was halted by the prosecutor who can be heard on the cellphone camera calling for onlookers to behave in something like a dignified manner, and we're getting some hints as to who took the video, which TPM and others are calling a snuff film...
Prosecutor Munkith al-Faroon, who is heard appealing for order on explicit Internet video of Saturday's hanging that has inflamed sectarian passions, said on Tuesday he threatened to leave if the jeering did not stop --
and that would have halted the execution as a prosecution observer must be present by law.
"I threatened to leave," Faroon told Reuters. "They knew that if I left, the execution could not go ahead."
Many in Saddam's Sunni minority, and moderate Shi'ites and Kurds, have been angered and embarrassed by the video. In it, observers chant "Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!" for Shi'ite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr. Saddam by contrast looks dignified on the gallows and replies: "Is this what you call manhood?"
As the Iraqi government mounted an investigation into how officials smuggled in mobile phone cameras, he also challenged the accounts of the justice minister and an adviser to the prime minister who said the film was shot by a guard -- Faroon said one of two people taking video was a senior government official.
"Two officials were holding mobile phone cameras," said Faroon, who was a deputy prosecutor in the case for which Saddam was hanged and is the chief prosecutor in a second trial that will continue against his aides for genocide against the Kurds.
"One of them I know. He's a high-ranking government official," Faroon said, declining to name the man. "The other I also know by sight, though not his name. He is also senior.
"I don't know how they got their mobiles in because the Americans took all our phones, even mine which has no camera."
Faroon said he was the only prosecutor from Saddam's trial for crimes against humanity against the people of the Shi'ite town of Dujail who was present in Baghdad. The Penal Code stipulates that one prosecutor must be present at any execution.
Update: There has been an arrest in the videotaping and taunting show:
The Iraqi government has reportedly made an arrest in connection with the unauthorized cell-phone video of Saddam Hussein's execution.
An adviser to Iraq's prime minister says the person believed to have shot that video is under arrest. And he describes the man as "an official who supervised the execution."
Iraqi state T-V today aired an official video of Saddam's hanging, with no audio and no images of Saddam's actual death.
The inflammatory cell-phone video -- with taunts from witnesses -- appeared on Arab T-V and the Internet. And it touched off worldwide protests and demonstrations by Iraq's minority Sunnis.
An Iraqi prosecutor who was also at the execution has denied another report implicating Iraq's national security adviser in the leaked video.
On Wednesday, an Iraqi prosecutor who was also present at the execution denied a report that he had accused National Security Adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie of possible responsibility for the leaked video.
"I am not accusing Mowaffak al-Rubaie, and I did not see him taking pictures," Munqith al-Faroon, a prosecutor in the case that sent Saddam to the gallows, told The Associated Press.
"But I saw two of the government officials who were ... present during the execution taking all the video of the execution, using the lights that were there for the official taping of the execution. They used mobile phone cameras. I do not know their names, but I would remember their faces," al-Faroon said in a telephone interview.
The prosecutor said the two officials were openly taking video pictures, which are believed to be those which appeared on Al-Jazeera satellite and a Web site within hours of Saddam's execution.
The New York Times on Wednesday reported that al-Faroon told the newspaper "one of two men he had seen holding a cell phone camera aloft to make a video of Mr. Hussein's last moments up to and past the point where he fell through the trapdoor was Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Mr. Maliki's national security adviser."
The Times said it had been unable to reach al-Rubaie for comment. AP also could not reach him Wednesday. His secretary said the security adviser, a close aide to al-Maliki, was in Najaf and would not return until later.
Al-Faroon said there were 14 Iraqi officials, including himself and another prosecutor, as well as three hangmen present for the execution. All the officials, he said, were flown by U.S. helicopter to the former military intelligence facility where Saddam was put to death in an execution chamber used by his own security men for years.
So whodunit? The Times of London says it's a prison guard.
Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein, by behaving in a more dignified manner than his executioners, has secured his place as a Sunni martyr, and a rallying point around which radical Sunnis (like, al-Qaida, for instance) can converge.
Update: Here's a phrase you're going to hear a lot: Saddam's hanging and taunting likened to a sectarian lynching... a pertinent question people are asking around the Arab and Muslim world: what were members of the Mahdi Army -- perhaps the most pernicious militia group in the country -- doing as part of an official delegation of witnesses to the execution of that country's former leader?
So it's little wonder, the Sunnis, after a slight break for the festival of Eid, are taking it to the streets.
Meanwhile, the new U.N. secretary general has gotten himself into a bit of hot water over the issue of the death penalty, and one European nation is pushing for a worldwide ban.
The saga of Saddam's end—his capture, trial and execution—is a sad metaphor for America's occupation of Iraq. What might have gone right went so wrong. It is worth remembering that Saddam Hussein was not your run-of-the-mill dictator. He created one of the most brutal, corrupt and violent regimes in modern history, something akin to Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China or Kim Jong Il's North Korea. Whatever the strategic wisdom for the United States, deposing him began as something unquestionably good for Iraq.
But soon the Bush administration dismissed the idea of trying Saddam under international law, or in a court with any broader legitimacy. This is the administration, after all, that could see little advantage to a United Nations mandate for its own invasion and occupation. It put Saddam's fate in the hands of the new Iraqi government, dominated by Shiite and Kurdish politicians who had been victims of his reign. As a result, Saddam's trial, which should have been the judgment of civilized society against a tyrant, is now seen by Iraq's Sunnis and much of the Arab world as a farce, reflecting only the victors' vengeance. ...
As if to make that point, the entire Saddam death video has now made the Internet, complete with the taunts and jeers of Shiite onlookers as Saddam is led to the gallows. The former dictator faces his final moments amid very telling cries, not of "long live Iraq!" ... but of "Moqtada al-Sadr!" ... the real power behind the Shiite Maliki government (despite its Sunni window dressing.) It's in Arabic, but according to translations (via CNN, mostly, but also here) the mostly Shia onlookers tell him to go to hell, he tells them to go to hell. They curse him, he recites verses from the Koran. Then they drop him and his neck snaps on impact. Watch for yourself:
The brutality of the video is unsettling, but I think must see viewing for all Americans who wish to understand the ways of war, and of vengeance. Saddam Hussein deserved to be put on trial for his crimes, deserved to have justice meted out upon him. But as with everything else we've done in Iraq, this version of "justice" will not stand up in the eyes of the wider Arab and Muslim world. It will look to them like a good ole' Texas lynching.
And that doesn't help keep our troops alive in Iraq.
Related: Amnesty International has issued a statement deploring the execution of Saddam Hussein. It reads in part:
"We oppose the death penalty in all cases as a violation of the right to life and the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, but it is especially abhorrent when this most extreme penalty is imposed after an unfair trial," said Malcolm Smart, Director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa Programme. "It is even more worrying that in this case, the execution appeared a foregone conclusion, once the original verdict was pronounced, with the Appeals Court providing little more than a veneer of legitimacy for what was, in fact, a fundamentally flawed process."
Amnesty International said it had greatly welcomed the decision to hold Saddam Hussein to account for the crimes committed under his rule but this should have been done through a fair process. "His trial should have been a major contribution towards establishing justice and ensuring truth and accountability for the massive human rights violations perpetrated when he was in power, but his trial was a deeply flawed affair" said Malcolm Smart. "It will be seen by many as nothing more than 'victor's justice' and, sadly, will do nothing to stem the unrelenting tide of political killings." ...
...At the time of his execution, Saddam Hussein was also standing trial before the SICT, together with six others, on separate charges arising from the so-called Anfal campaign, when thousands of people belonging to Iraq's Kurdish minority were subject to mass killings, torture and other gross abuses in 1988. It is expected that this trial will now continue against the other accused. The execution of Saddam Hussein is a major blow to the process of establishing the truth of what happened under his rule. and as such another squandered opportunity for Iraqis to find out about and come to terms with the crimes of the past.
Question: is any major event not fodder for the online left's complaints about the Administration of George W. Bush? They are, to be sure, by and large obsessive cultists in form and effect; but surely reason may kick in at points. One gets the impression of a class of people who wake up, drink their coffee, go to shave, cut themselves, and promptly curse the war in Iraq. The monomania simply does not end -- and the execution of Saddam Hussein is no different. I have already expressed my dislike for executions: but I also retain the bare capacity for rationality that allows me to understand the end of the dictator as a fundamental good.
The leftist "netroots"? Not so much.
Well I'm not sure if I qualify as a member of the left "netroots" -- but I will say that even as a staunch opponent of the death penalty, which I consider distasteful, draconian and uncivilized (not to mention a constant opponent of this awful, pathetically incompetent president,) I knew from the moment that U.S. troops pulled Saddam Hussein out of that spider hole that his execution was the only possible outcome (well, that or his being dragged by armed Shiite or Kurdish gunmen out of his American holding cell and murdered like a dog in the street... and even that would have probably ended with a hanging...)
For Shia and Kurdish Iraqis, who were so brutally victimized under a man who was for some, the only leader they have known, Saddam's death was perhaps a necessary catharsis. But I would caution Hugh and other Bush fans that catharsis for Iraqis was never, and still is not, the primary concern for Americans. Especially since catharsis for Iraqis has so far, not translated into good will for American troops, cooperation with the U.S. "mission" in Iraq, or an end to the violent civil war that is tearing that country apart while our guys are stuck in the middle.
What is of primary concern is American foreign policy, and whether those policies, undertaken by our elected leadership, are in the best interests of the United States. I would argue that Saddam's hanging advances U.S. interests not one whit, and it wasn't even a stated goal in the war (Bush, after all, on March 18, 2003 offered to allow him to leave Iraq alive with his sons and surrender the country, and its oil wealth, to us, which supposedly would have avoided war altogether...)
Iraqi catharsis isn't even likely to reduce the rampant and seemingly bottomless violence and sectarian bloodletting that is of primary concern to American troops and taxpayers, who are paying, in very different ways, for a policy that has already proven to be bereft of benefit for America. (December is now officially the deadliest month for U.S. troops this year.) Iraq posed no military threat to us, so toppling Saddam and taking over his country didn't protect us from attack (I won't even mention the nuclear piece, which has long since been rendered ridiculous.) He had no ties to terrorists, except possibly the Mujeheddin e-Kalq, an anti-Iranian terror group that members of Congress favor, so deposing Saddam and having him summarily executed doesn't protect us from terrorism.
The only possible benefit to the U.S. of Saddam's death will be the fact that members of the U.S. military will no longer have to guard him inside Iraq, something that posed a constant security threat to American troops, given the number of Iraqis who likely wanted to find and kill him. Of course, much the same thing could have been accomplished by exiling the man. And perhaps the hanging will strengthen the unelected fourth prime minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, a Shiite who even Washington doubts can control the country. But since the U.S. has been sending signals that it may be shopping for replacement, strengthening Maliki -- and by extension, his backers, like Moqtada al-Sadr, whose father was executed by Saddam -- may be counterproductive for us... emphasis on for us... (recall that the U.S. had been cuddling up to a possible Maliki replacement, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of something called SCIRI -- the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq , until of course, we went and grabbed a couple of Iranian diplomats and accused them of planning terror attacks ... needless to say, we've since let them go...)
To sum it up, I don't believe that Saddam's death advances U.S. interests, and therefore I see no reason to except my general opposition to the death penalty in this case. At the same time, I understand that for Iraqis, if not for us, this was something that was probably inevitable, and in many ways, very much understandable, from their point of view. How that helps our cause in Iraq -- whatever in Gods name that cause is, at this point -- I sure as hell don't know.
So is Saddam's death a "fundamental good" as Hewitt (who also appears to oppose the death penalty) asserts? I don't think that you can credibly argue that it is. It's fundamentally cathartic for many Iraqis, Iranians and Kuwaitis, it puts the coda on a brutal and terrifying chapter of Iraqi history, and in that it probably won't abate, and could worsen, sectarian violence in Iraq, it is either a net irrelevancy, or a net negative, from a policy standpoint, to the American people.
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.
<%
dim done
done = request.form("done")
if done = "" then
done = "No"
%>
Tell a friend
<%
Else
if request.form("done") = "Yes" then
'sets variables
dim email, sendmail
email = request.form("email")
Set sendmail = Server.CreateObject("CDONTS.NewMail")
'put the webmaster address here
sendmail.From = "webmaster@aspbasics.com"
'The mail is sent to the address entered in the previous page.
sendmail.To = email
'Enter the subject of your mail here
sendmail.Subject = "Check out this website"
'send a specific page or send a site url
dim url
'url = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
url = "http://www.aspbasics.net"
'This is the content of the message.
sendmail.Body = "Site recommendation from a friend!" & _
vbCrlf & vbCrlf & "A friend has sent you this email and thought you would should check out this site." & _
vbCrlf & url & vbCrlf
'this sets mail priority.... 0=low 1=normal 2=high
sendmail.Importance = 1
sendmail.Send 'Send the email!
response.redirect Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_REFERER")
'Response.write ("Sent to ") & email
End if
End if
%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
