Radical media, politics and culture.

Robert Fisk, "Saddam To the Gallows"

A Dictator Created Then Destroyed by America

Robert Fisk, Independent

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving
of that last walk to the scaffold — that crack of the neck at the end of a rope
— than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered
untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons
over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great
day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his
death sentence was signed — by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the
Americans — on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the
moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.


But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many
millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that
will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative
laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers — what about the other
guilty men?


No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not
Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of
thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead — and thousands of Western troops are
dead — because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the
Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a
potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great
brutality.In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have
tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent — we
have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib — and
yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging
corpse of the dictator we created.

Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war
crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And
who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched
Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's
weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the
charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for
sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose
our culpability.


And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells
and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous
post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on
the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" — our "mission
accomplished" — who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect
will come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in
comfortable and wealthy retirement.


Hours before Saddam's death sentence, his family — his first wife, Sajida,
and Saddam's daughter and their other relatives — had given up hope.


"Whatever could be done has been done — we can only wait for time to take its
course," one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and had already
announced his own "martyrdom": he was still the president of Iraq and he would die
for Iraq. All condemned men face a decision: to die with a last, grovelling
plea for mercy or to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in
their last hours on earth. His last trial appearance — that wan smile that
spread over the mass-murderer's face — showed us which path Saddam intended to
walk to the noose.


I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I have talked to the
Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia who rose up against the dictator at
our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us — and whose comrades, in their
tens of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like thrushes by
Saddam's executioners.


I have walked round the execution chamber of Abu Ghraib — only months, it
later transpired, after we had been using the same prison for a few tortures and
killings of our own — and I have watched Iraqis pull thousands of their dead
relatives from the mass graves of Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted
artificial hip and a medical identification number on his arm. He had been taken
directly from hospital to his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I have
even shaken the dictator's soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal finished
his days in power writing romantic novels.


It was my colleague, Tom Friedman — now a messianic columnist for The New
York Times
— who perfectly caught Saddam's character just before the 2003
invasion: Saddam was, he wrote, "part Don Corleone, part Donald Duck". And, in this
unique definition, Friedman caught the horror of all dictators; their sadistic
attraction and the grotesque, unbelievable nature of their barbarity.


But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At first, those who suffered
from Saddam's cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the
hangman's lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia outside Iraq welcome his
end. But they — and millions of other Muslims — will remember how he was
informed of his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls
the would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the
ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners from his
jails. "Handed over to the Iraqi authorities," he may have been before his death.
But his execution will go down — correctly — as an American affair and time
will add its false but lasting gloss to all this — that the West destroyed an
Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his
wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this
shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a "martyr" to the will of the new
"Crusaders".


When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency against American
troops increased in ferocity. After his death, it will redouble in intensity
again. Freed from the remotest possibility of Saddam's return by his execution,
the West's enemies in Iraq have no reason to fear the return of his Baathist
regime. Osama bin Laden will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And
there's a thought. So many crimes avenged.

But we will have got away with it.