So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war
crimes he committed when he was Washington's best friend in the Arab
world. America knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas
- along with the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday
declaring it to be, in the White House's words, another "great day for
Iraq". That's what Tony Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled
from his hole in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we're going to
string him up, and it's another great day.
Of course, it
couldn't happen to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn't be a more
just verdict - nor a more hypocritical one. It's difficult to think of
a more suitable monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched by his
executioner, the equally monstrous hangman of Abu Ghraib prison, Abu
Widad, who would strike his victims on the head with an axe if they
dared to condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party before
he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged at Abu Ghraib in 1985
after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of
the condemned man. But we can't mention Abu Ghraib these days because
we have followed Saddam's trail of shame into the very same
institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we hope - don't we? - to
look better than him, to remind Iraqis that life is better now than it
was under Saddam.
Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have inflicted upon
Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life is now worse. Or rather, death
is now visited upon even more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on
his Shias and Kurds and - yes, in Fallujah of all places - his Sunnis,
too. So we cannot even claim moral superiority. For if Saddam's
immorality and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our
iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually
abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects
and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which cost
Iraq a mere 600,000 lives ("more or less", as George Bush Jnr said when
he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam was much worse. We
can't be put on trial. We can't be hanged.
"Allahu Akbar," the awful man shouted - God is greater. No surprise
there. He it was who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the
Iraqi flag, the same flag which now hangs over the palace of the
government that has condemned him after a trial at which the former
Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from describing his
relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now George Bush's Secretary of
Defence. Remember that handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to
talk about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the current US
President's father. Little wonder, then, that Iraqi officials claimed
last week the Americans had been urging them to sentence Saddam before
the mid-term US elections.
Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the Republicans,
Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, blurted out yesterday, must be
"smoking rope". Well, Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it
might be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict -
not the trial itself, please note - was "scrupulous and fair". The
judges will publish "everything they used to come to their verdict."
No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that Saddam was not
allowed to comment upon: sales of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so
blatant - so appalling - that he has been sentenced to hang on a
localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale gassing of Kurds
over which George W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara were so
exercised when they decided to depose Saddam in 2003 - or was it in
2002? Or 2001? Some of Saddam's pesticides came from Germany (of
course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate's Committee on Banking,
Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled "United States
Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and
their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian
Gulf War".
This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and
the report informed Congress about US government-approved shipments of
biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or
earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax;
Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis;
Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli. The same report stated
that the US provided Saddam with "dual use" licensed materials which
assisted in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system
programmes, including chemical warfare agent production facility plant
and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility
plans).
Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn't permitted to talk about
this. John Reid, the British Home Secretary, said that Saddam's hanging
"was a sovereign decision by a sovereign nation". Thank heavens he
didn't mention the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two
components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in 1988, and another
£50,000 worth of the same vile substances the following year.
We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only
£26,000. Yes, I know these could be used to make ballpoint ink and
fabric dyes. But this was the same country - Britain - that would,
eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi
children on the grounds that it could be used for - you guessed it -
"weapons of mass destruction".
Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for their own trial
of Saddam, to hang him high for the thousands of Kurds gassed at
Halabja. This would certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death
sentence review period. But would the Americans and British dare touch
a trial in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his
filthy gas but why the CIA - in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi
war crimes against Halabja - told US diplomats in the Middle East to
claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather
than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time our favourite ally
rather than our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West were
silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during the great ethnic
cleansing of 1987 and 1988.
And - dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved
so much that we invaded their country? - then we would have to convict
Saddam of murdering countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as
Kurds after they staged an uprising against the Baathist regime at our
specific request - thousands whom webetrayed by leaving them to fight
off Saddam's brutal hordes on their own. "Rioting," is how Lord Blair's
meretricious "dodgy dossier" described these atrocities in 2002 -
because, of course, to call them an "uprising" (which they were) would
invite us to ask ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath.
Answer: us.
I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled on the
hospital trains that brought the Iranians back from the 1980-88 war
front, their gas wounds bubbling in giant blisters on their arms and
faces, giving birth to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their
wounds. The British and Americans didn't want to know. I talked to the
victims of Halabja. The Americans didn't want to know. My Associated
Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in
their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The Americans and
the British didn't care.
But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and circuses, the
final hanging of Saddam, twisting, twisting slowly in the wind. We have
won. We have inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded
and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is no sympathy for
this man. "President Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed,"
Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few
days ago. "He will not come out of prison to count his days and years
in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out of prison to go
to the presidency or to his grave." It looks like the grave. Keitel
went there. Ceausescu went there. Milosevic escaped sentence.
The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass murderers,
guilty of rape and massacre and throat-slitting and torture in the
years since our "liberation" of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi
government we are currently supporting, democratically elected, of
course. And these war criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through
the ministries we set up under this democratic government. And they
will not be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism. And
our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so obscenely joined?
So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death for war
crimes he committed when he was Washington's best friend in the Arab
world. America knew all about his atrocities and even supplied the gas
- along with the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday
declaring it to be, in the White House's words, another "great day for
Iraq". That's what Tony Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled
from his hole in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we're going to
string him up, and it's another great day.
Of course, it
couldn't happen to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn't be a more
just verdict - nor a more hypocritical one. It's difficult to think of
a more suitable monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched by his
executioner, the equally monstrous hangman of Abu Ghraib prison, Abu
Widad, who would strike his victims on the head with an axe if they
dared to condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party before
he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged at Abu Ghraib in 1985
after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death instead of
the condemned man. But we can't mention Abu Ghraib these days because
we have followed Saddam's trail of shame into the very same
institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we hope - don't we? - to
look better than him, to remind Iraqis that life is better now than it
was under Saddam.
Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have inflicted upon
Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life is now worse. Or rather, death
is now visited upon even more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on
his Shias and Kurds and - yes, in Fallujah of all places - his Sunnis,
too. So we cannot even claim moral superiority. For if Saddam's
immorality and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our
iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually
abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects
and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which cost
Iraq a mere 600,000 lives ("more or less", as George Bush Jnr said when
he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam was much worse. We
can't be put on trial. We can't be hanged.
"Allahu Akbar," the awful man shouted - God is greater. No surprise
there. He it was who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the
Iraqi flag, the same flag which now hangs over the palace of the
government that has condemned him after a trial at which the former
Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from describing his
relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now George Bush's Secretary of
Defence. Remember that handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to
talk about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the current US
President's father. Little wonder, then, that Iraqi officials claimed
last week the Americans had been urging them to sentence Saddam before
the mid-term US elections.
Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the Republicans,
Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, blurted out yesterday, must be
"smoking rope". Well, Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it
might be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict -
not the trial itself, please note - was "scrupulous and fair". The
judges will publish "everything they used to come to their verdict."
No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that Saddam was not
allowed to comment upon: sales of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so
blatant - so appalling - that he has been sentenced to hang on a
localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale gassing of Kurds
over which George W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara were so
exercised when they decided to depose Saddam in 2003 - or was it in
2002? Or 2001? Some of Saddam's pesticides came from Germany (of
course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate's Committee on Banking,
Housing and Urban Affairs produced a report entitled "United States
Chemical and Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and
their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian
Gulf War".
This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and
the report informed Congress about US government-approved shipments of
biological agents sent by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or
earlier. These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax;
Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis;
Clostridium perfringens and Escherichia coli. The same report stated
that the US provided Saddam with "dual use" licensed materials which
assisted in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system
programmes, including chemical warfare agent production facility plant
and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production facility
plans).
Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn't permitted to talk about
this. John Reid, the British Home Secretary, said that Saddam's hanging
"was a sovereign decision by a sovereign nation". Thank heavens he
didn't mention the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two
components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in 1988, and another
£50,000 worth of the same vile substances the following year.
We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only
£26,000. Yes, I know these could be used to make ballpoint ink and
fabric dyes. But this was the same country - Britain - that would,
eight years later, prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi
children on the grounds that it could be used for - you guessed it -
"weapons of mass destruction".
Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for their own trial
of Saddam, to hang him high for the thousands of Kurds gassed at
Halabja. This would certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death
sentence review period. But would the Americans and British dare touch
a trial in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his
filthy gas but why the CIA - in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi
war crimes against Halabja - told US diplomats in the Middle East to
claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather
than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time our favourite ally
rather than our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West were
silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during the great ethnic
cleansing of 1987 and 1988.
And - dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved
so much that we invaded their country? - then we would have to convict
Saddam of murdering countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as
Kurds after they staged an uprising against the Baathist regime at our
specific request - thousands whom webetrayed by leaving them to fight
off Saddam's brutal hordes on their own. "Rioting," is how Lord Blair's
meretricious "dodgy dossier" described these atrocities in 2002 -
because, of course, to call them an "uprising" (which they were) would
invite us to ask ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath.
Answer: us.
I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled on the
hospital trains that brought the Iranians back from the 1980-88 war
front, their gas wounds bubbling in giant blisters on their arms and
faces, giving birth to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their
wounds. The British and Americans didn't want to know. I talked to the
victims of Halabja. The Americans didn't want to know. My Associated
Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in
their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The Americans and
the British didn't care.
But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and circuses, the
final hanging of Saddam, twisting, twisting slowly in the wind. We have
won. We have inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded
and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is no sympathy for
this man. "President Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed,"
Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few
days ago. "He will not come out of prison to count his days and years
in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out of prison to go
to the presidency or to his grave." It looks like the grave. Keitel
went there. Ceausescu went there. Milosevic escaped sentence.
The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass murderers,
guilty of rape and massacre and throat-slitting and torture in the
years since our "liberation" of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi
government we are currently supporting, democratically elected, of
course. And these war criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through
the ministries we set up under this democratic government. And they
will not be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism. And
our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so obscenely joined?
