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Tariq Ali: What's Good for Saddam May Be Good for Mubarak or the Saudi Royals
It was symbolic that 2006 ended with a colonial hanging--- most of it (bar the last moments) shown on state television in occupied Iraq. It has been that sort of year in the Arab world. After a trial so blatantly rigged that even Human Rights Watch---the largest single unit of the US Human Rights industry--- had to condemn it as a total travesty. Judges were changed on Washington's orders; defense lawyers were killed and the whole procedure resembled a well-orchestrated lynch mob. Where Nuremberg was a more dignified application of victor's justice, Saddam's trial has, till now, been the crudest and most grotesque. The Great Thinker President's reference to it 'as a milestone on the road to Iraqi democracy' as clear an indication as any that Washington pressed the trigger.
The contemptible leaders of the European Union, supposedly hostile to capital punishment, were silent, as usual. And while some Shia factions celebrated in Baghdad, the figures published by a fairly independent establishment outfit, the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies (its self-description: "which attempts to spread the conscious necessity of realizing basic freedoms, consolidating democratic values and foundations of civil society") reveal that just under 90 per cent of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better before it was occupied.
The ICRSC research is based on detailed house-to-house interviewing carried out during the third week of November 2006.
Only five per cent of those questioned said Iraq is better today than in 2003; 89 per cent of the people said the political situation had deteriorated; 79 per cent saw a decline in the economic situation; 12 per cent felt things had improved and 9 per cent said there was no change. Unsurprisingly, 95 per cent felt the security situation was worse than before. Interestingly, about 50 per cent of those questioned identified themselves only as "Muslims"; 34 per cent as Shiites and 14 per cent as Sunnis. Add to this the figures supplied by the UNHCR: 1.6 million Iraqis (7 per cent of the population) have fled the country since March 2003 and 100,000 Iraqis leave every month, Christians, doctors, engineers, women, etc. There are one million in Syria, 750,000 in Jordan, 150,000 in Cairo. These are refugees that do not excite the sympathy of Western public opinion, since the US (and EU backed) occupation is the cause. These are not compared (as was the case in Kosovo) to the atrocities of the Third Reich. Perhaps it was these statistics (and the estimates of a million Iraqi dead) that necessitated the execution of Saddam Hussein?
That Saddam was a tyrant is beyond dispute, but what is conveniently forgotten is that most of his crimes were committed when he was a staunch ally of those who now occupy the country. It was, as he admitted in one of his trial outbursts, the approval of Washington (and the poison gas supplied by West Germany) that gave him the confidence to douse Halabja with chemicals in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war. He deserved a proper trial and punishment in an independent Iraq. Not this. The double standards applied by the West never cease to astonish. Indonesia's Suharto who presided over a mountain of corpses (At least a million to accept the lowest figure) was protected by Washington. He never annoyed them as much as Saddam.
More
http://counterpunch.org/tariq12302006.html
The ICRSC research is based on detailed house-to-house interviewing carried out during the third week of November 2006.
Only five per cent of those questioned said Iraq is better today than in 2003; 89 per cent of the people said the political situation had deteriorated; 79 per cent saw a decline in the economic situation; 12 per cent felt things had improved and 9 per cent said there was no change. Unsurprisingly, 95 per cent felt the security situation was worse than before. Interestingly, about 50 per cent of those questioned identified themselves only as "Muslims"; 34 per cent as Shiites and 14 per cent as Sunnis. Add to this the figures supplied by the UNHCR: 1.6 million Iraqis (7 per cent of the population) have fled the country since March 2003 and 100,000 Iraqis leave every month, Christians, doctors, engineers, women, etc. There are one million in Syria, 750,000 in Jordan, 150,000 in Cairo. These are refugees that do not excite the sympathy of Western public opinion, since the US (and EU backed) occupation is the cause. These are not compared (as was the case in Kosovo) to the atrocities of the Third Reich. Perhaps it was these statistics (and the estimates of a million Iraqi dead) that necessitated the execution of Saddam Hussein?
That Saddam was a tyrant is beyond dispute, but what is conveniently forgotten is that most of his crimes were committed when he was a staunch ally of those who now occupy the country. It was, as he admitted in one of his trial outbursts, the approval of Washington (and the poison gas supplied by West Germany) that gave him the confidence to douse Halabja with chemicals in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war. He deserved a proper trial and punishment in an independent Iraq. Not this. The double standards applied by the West never cease to astonish. Indonesia's Suharto who presided over a mountain of corpses (At least a million to accept the lowest figure) was protected by Washington. He never annoyed them as much as Saddam.
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http://counterpunch.org/tariq12302006.html
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The execution of Saddam Hussein
By the Editorial Board
http://www.wsws.org
30 December 2006
The execution of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein serves not justice, but the political purposes of the Bush administration and its Iraqi stooges. The manner in which the execution was carried out—hurriedly, secretively, in the dark of night, in a mockery of any semblance of legal process—only underscores the lawless and reactionary character of the entire American enterprise in Iraq.
There were conflicting statements throughout Friday about how and under what circumstances the death sentence against Hussein, confirmed by an Iraqi government tribunal December 26, would be carried out. There were continual communications back and forth between the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which nominally controlled the judicial proceedings, and the American military authorities who had physical control of the prisoner and delivered him to the execution site in the US-controlled Green Zone.
The decision to send Hussein to the gallows was not a judicial but a political one. It was signaled by al-Maliki himself after the death sentence was pronounced by a special tribunal on November 5, when the Iraqi prime minister declared that Hussein would be executed before the New Year. In the rush to impose the penalty on that timeline, Iraqi officials ignored both elementary principles of judicial fairness and even their own constitution, which requires confirmation of a death sentence by the current Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani.
As Richard Dicker, international justice director of Human Rights Watch, explained in a column Friday in the Guardian, the legal procedure was a travesty.
“The trial judgment,” he wrote, “was not finished when the verdict and sentence were announced on November 5. The record only became available to defense lawyers on November 22. According to the tribunal’s statute, the defense attorneys had to file their appeals on December 5, which gave them less than two weeks to respond to the 300-page trial decision. The appeals chamber never held a hearing to consider the legal arguments presented as allowed by Iraqi law. It defies belief that the appeals chamber could fairly review a 300-page decision together with written submissions by the defense and consider all the relevant issues in less than three weeks.”
Rather than a tribunal modeled on Nuremberg, where the surviving Nazi leaders received far more extensive due process rights than were accorded Hussein, the proceedings in Baghdad resembled a Stalinist or Nazi show trial, with a puppet judge, a predetermined verdict and a sentence carried out in the dead of night.
The political motives
The most fundamental political motive of the Bush administration is its desire to kill a major opponent, openly, before the eyes of the world, simply to demonstrate its ability and will to do so. In the view of the White House, Saddam is an object lesson to any future opponent of American imperialism: defy the will of Washington, and his bloody fate could be yours.
The execution also provides the Bush administration with an event it can claim as proof of US “success” in Iraq, a diversion from the grisly daily toll of Iraqi and American deaths. The media coverage of the execution has largely overshadowed reports on the death toll among US soldiers, which hit 100 in December and will likely top the 3,000 mark for the war as a whole before the month is out.
The state killing is intended to give at least a short-term political boost to the beleaguered regime of al-Maliki, which is increasingly unpopular and unstable. The Bush administration has been pressing al-Maliki to break with the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, one of his principal political allies, and endorse a US-led military crackdown on the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia loyal to al-Sadr.
Executing Hussein provides a means for Maliki to burnish his credentials with the Shiite majority, who suffered most from Hussein’s rule, while going ahead with plans for intensified violence against the predominantly working class eastern suburbs of Baghdad (Sadr City), a center of Shiite opposition to the US occupation.
Another important political consideration is that the execution of Hussein brings the legal proceedings against the former Iraqi leader to an end before any detailed examination of those crimes in which successive US governments played a major role. The case of the execution of 148 Shiite men at Dujail in 1982 was selected to be tried first because the victims were linked to Dawa, the party of Maliki and the preceding US-backed prime minister, Ibrahim Jafari, and because there was no direct US involvement.
This was not the case for most of the other, far bloodier, episodes in the career of Saddam Hussein. The second case, the so-called Anfal campaign of mass killing of Kurds in 1987-88, towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war, was scheduled to resume January 8. Any serious investigation of those atrocities, culminating in the gassing of Kurds at Halabja, would shed light on the role of successive US administrations.
Hussein launched the war on Iran in September 1980 with the tacit backing of the Carter administration, which was then locked in a confrontation with Iran over the student seizure of the US embassy in Tehran and the taking of US officials as hostages. The Reagan administration subsequently provided significant aid to Hussein throughout the eight years of war, supplying tactical military intelligence used to target Iranian forces for chemical weapons attacks, and backing arms sales to Iraq by European allies of the United States such as Britain, France and Germany. On two occasions, in 1983 and 1984, Donald Rumsfeld was sent to Iraq as a special US envoy to reassure Hussein that despite occasional noises about human rights violations, the US would maintain its allegiance to Baghdad in the war.
The other major case against Hussein, over the bloody suppression of revolts by Kurds and Shiites in 1991, threatened to be even more problematic for the Bush administration, since Bush’s own father, the first president Bush, first encouraged the uprisings at the end of the Persian Gulf War, then came to the cold-blooded decision that the continuance of Hussein’s dictatorship was preferable to a collapse of the Iraqi state, which might benefit Iran, the principal concern of US war planners.
Opposition to Saddam Hussein’s show trial and condemnation of his execution in no way imply political support for the former ruler or his policies. Hussein was a typical representative of the national bourgeoisie in a backward and oppressed country—occasionally coming into conflict with imperialism, but implacably committed to the defense of the privileges and property of the Iraqi bourgeoisie against the Iraqi working class.
Hussein’s first major act of mass repression came at the culmination of his rise to power in the late 1970s, when the Baath Party massacred the leadership of the Iraqi Communist Party and suppressed the large and militant working class movement centered in Baghdad and the oil fields. The present disintegration of Iraq along religious/sectarian lines is one of the long-term consequences of this savage repression of the working class, applauded at the time by the United States.
The Iraqi leader was not, however, tried and sentenced under the auspices of a working class tribunal. He was the subject of a kangaroo court established by an occupation regime after the invasion and conquest of Iraq by the United States. In other words, his crimes were judged and the penalty imposed by those guilty of even greater crimes than his own.
An editorial Friday in the Washington Post perfectly captures the hypocrisy with which the Bush administration, the congressional Democrats and Republicans, and the American media approached the case against Saddam Hussein. The Post sententiously declared its general opposition to the death penalty, before declaring that if it was appropriate for anyone it should be applied to “Saddam Hussein—a man who, with the possible exception of Kim Jong Il, has more blood on his hands than anyone else alive.”
We beg to differ. George W. Bush has already caused the deaths of more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein—some 655,000 since the US invasion in March 2003, according to a study by the Johns Hopkins school of public health—and his term in office still has two years to run. This is to say nothing of the still living US accomplices of Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, and the successive US presidents—Bush’s father, Clinton, Bush himself—who backed the US-led embargo on Iraq that caused the death of an estimated 1.5 million Iraqis from 1991 to 2003.
True justice for the tortured and oppressed people of Iraq, as well as the American, British and other victims of the US-led war, will come only when those responsible for the invasion and occupation—Bush, Cheney and their acolytes—face their own trials for waging an illegal war of aggression.
By the Editorial Board
http://www.wsws.org
30 December 2006
The execution of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein serves not justice, but the political purposes of the Bush administration and its Iraqi stooges. The manner in which the execution was carried out—hurriedly, secretively, in the dark of night, in a mockery of any semblance of legal process—only underscores the lawless and reactionary character of the entire American enterprise in Iraq.
There were conflicting statements throughout Friday about how and under what circumstances the death sentence against Hussein, confirmed by an Iraqi government tribunal December 26, would be carried out. There were continual communications back and forth between the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which nominally controlled the judicial proceedings, and the American military authorities who had physical control of the prisoner and delivered him to the execution site in the US-controlled Green Zone.
The decision to send Hussein to the gallows was not a judicial but a political one. It was signaled by al-Maliki himself after the death sentence was pronounced by a special tribunal on November 5, when the Iraqi prime minister declared that Hussein would be executed before the New Year. In the rush to impose the penalty on that timeline, Iraqi officials ignored both elementary principles of judicial fairness and even their own constitution, which requires confirmation of a death sentence by the current Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani.
As Richard Dicker, international justice director of Human Rights Watch, explained in a column Friday in the Guardian, the legal procedure was a travesty.
“The trial judgment,” he wrote, “was not finished when the verdict and sentence were announced on November 5. The record only became available to defense lawyers on November 22. According to the tribunal’s statute, the defense attorneys had to file their appeals on December 5, which gave them less than two weeks to respond to the 300-page trial decision. The appeals chamber never held a hearing to consider the legal arguments presented as allowed by Iraqi law. It defies belief that the appeals chamber could fairly review a 300-page decision together with written submissions by the defense and consider all the relevant issues in less than three weeks.”
Rather than a tribunal modeled on Nuremberg, where the surviving Nazi leaders received far more extensive due process rights than were accorded Hussein, the proceedings in Baghdad resembled a Stalinist or Nazi show trial, with a puppet judge, a predetermined verdict and a sentence carried out in the dead of night.
The political motives
The most fundamental political motive of the Bush administration is its desire to kill a major opponent, openly, before the eyes of the world, simply to demonstrate its ability and will to do so. In the view of the White House, Saddam is an object lesson to any future opponent of American imperialism: defy the will of Washington, and his bloody fate could be yours.
The execution also provides the Bush administration with an event it can claim as proof of US “success” in Iraq, a diversion from the grisly daily toll of Iraqi and American deaths. The media coverage of the execution has largely overshadowed reports on the death toll among US soldiers, which hit 100 in December and will likely top the 3,000 mark for the war as a whole before the month is out.
The state killing is intended to give at least a short-term political boost to the beleaguered regime of al-Maliki, which is increasingly unpopular and unstable. The Bush administration has been pressing al-Maliki to break with the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, one of his principal political allies, and endorse a US-led military crackdown on the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia loyal to al-Sadr.
Executing Hussein provides a means for Maliki to burnish his credentials with the Shiite majority, who suffered most from Hussein’s rule, while going ahead with plans for intensified violence against the predominantly working class eastern suburbs of Baghdad (Sadr City), a center of Shiite opposition to the US occupation.
Another important political consideration is that the execution of Hussein brings the legal proceedings against the former Iraqi leader to an end before any detailed examination of those crimes in which successive US governments played a major role. The case of the execution of 148 Shiite men at Dujail in 1982 was selected to be tried first because the victims were linked to Dawa, the party of Maliki and the preceding US-backed prime minister, Ibrahim Jafari, and because there was no direct US involvement.
This was not the case for most of the other, far bloodier, episodes in the career of Saddam Hussein. The second case, the so-called Anfal campaign of mass killing of Kurds in 1987-88, towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war, was scheduled to resume January 8. Any serious investigation of those atrocities, culminating in the gassing of Kurds at Halabja, would shed light on the role of successive US administrations.
Hussein launched the war on Iran in September 1980 with the tacit backing of the Carter administration, which was then locked in a confrontation with Iran over the student seizure of the US embassy in Tehran and the taking of US officials as hostages. The Reagan administration subsequently provided significant aid to Hussein throughout the eight years of war, supplying tactical military intelligence used to target Iranian forces for chemical weapons attacks, and backing arms sales to Iraq by European allies of the United States such as Britain, France and Germany. On two occasions, in 1983 and 1984, Donald Rumsfeld was sent to Iraq as a special US envoy to reassure Hussein that despite occasional noises about human rights violations, the US would maintain its allegiance to Baghdad in the war.
The other major case against Hussein, over the bloody suppression of revolts by Kurds and Shiites in 1991, threatened to be even more problematic for the Bush administration, since Bush’s own father, the first president Bush, first encouraged the uprisings at the end of the Persian Gulf War, then came to the cold-blooded decision that the continuance of Hussein’s dictatorship was preferable to a collapse of the Iraqi state, which might benefit Iran, the principal concern of US war planners.
Opposition to Saddam Hussein’s show trial and condemnation of his execution in no way imply political support for the former ruler or his policies. Hussein was a typical representative of the national bourgeoisie in a backward and oppressed country—occasionally coming into conflict with imperialism, but implacably committed to the defense of the privileges and property of the Iraqi bourgeoisie against the Iraqi working class.
Hussein’s first major act of mass repression came at the culmination of his rise to power in the late 1970s, when the Baath Party massacred the leadership of the Iraqi Communist Party and suppressed the large and militant working class movement centered in Baghdad and the oil fields. The present disintegration of Iraq along religious/sectarian lines is one of the long-term consequences of this savage repression of the working class, applauded at the time by the United States.
The Iraqi leader was not, however, tried and sentenced under the auspices of a working class tribunal. He was the subject of a kangaroo court established by an occupation regime after the invasion and conquest of Iraq by the United States. In other words, his crimes were judged and the penalty imposed by those guilty of even greater crimes than his own.
An editorial Friday in the Washington Post perfectly captures the hypocrisy with which the Bush administration, the congressional Democrats and Republicans, and the American media approached the case against Saddam Hussein. The Post sententiously declared its general opposition to the death penalty, before declaring that if it was appropriate for anyone it should be applied to “Saddam Hussein—a man who, with the possible exception of Kim Jong Il, has more blood on his hands than anyone else alive.”
We beg to differ. George W. Bush has already caused the deaths of more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein—some 655,000 since the US invasion in March 2003, according to a study by the Johns Hopkins school of public health—and his term in office still has two years to run. This is to say nothing of the still living US accomplices of Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, and the successive US presidents—Bush’s father, Clinton, Bush himself—who backed the US-led embargo on Iraq that caused the death of an estimated 1.5 million Iraqis from 1991 to 2003.
True justice for the tortured and oppressed people of Iraq, as well as the American, British and other victims of the US-led war, will come only when those responsible for the invasion and occupation—Bush, Cheney and their acolytes—face their own trials for waging an illegal war of aggression.
For more information:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/...
Tariq Ali is still party to the lie that 'West' ALSO has the 'Human Rights watch'. The 'response' to Tariq Ali is equally corrupt, plugging the Guardian and the Washington Post as if those were neutral, news sources.
Tariq Ali has been a propagandiast for the murderous racists for the best part of the pat 40 years. On every single occasion, he has hung on to his ideological masters and controllers.
The answer to Saddam's hanging by Bush and Blair is not going to be found in the West.
Free the minds and recognise the thoughts that have arisen in Asia and Africa. And in other non-European parts of the world.
Tariq Ali shows his pathetic mental slavery and stupidity by braying that the Saudi Royal family and Mubarak should be executed too!
He cannot see that executing people ends all debate, discourse and reason.
And we haven’t even started to discuss the utter immorality of killing as the solution.
With the likes of Tariq Ali admitting to be essentially believes in the aims of the hanging brigade, no wonder the so-called shameful EU were silent.
What would be the point? When self-styled socialist propagandists of the criminal empire are braying for killings the solution, need anyone have any confidence in political arguments?
London
1150
Sunday 31 December 2006
Tariq Ali has been a propagandiast for the murderous racists for the best part of the pat 40 years. On every single occasion, he has hung on to his ideological masters and controllers.
The answer to Saddam's hanging by Bush and Blair is not going to be found in the West.
Free the minds and recognise the thoughts that have arisen in Asia and Africa. And in other non-European parts of the world.
Tariq Ali shows his pathetic mental slavery and stupidity by braying that the Saudi Royal family and Mubarak should be executed too!
He cannot see that executing people ends all debate, discourse and reason.
And we haven’t even started to discuss the utter immorality of killing as the solution.
With the likes of Tariq Ali admitting to be essentially believes in the aims of the hanging brigade, no wonder the so-called shameful EU were silent.
What would be the point? When self-styled socialist propagandists of the criminal empire are braying for killings the solution, need anyone have any confidence in political arguments?
London
1150
Sunday 31 December 2006
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