opinion

Also in this section:
Gandásegui, Watch out for the Free Trade Agreement
E. Jackson, Another "national debate" with undisclosed details?
Sirias, Infernal buses
Bond, Uncle Sam's favorite terrorist
Birns & Kellberg, Shannon inherits a foreign policy mess
Silié, Social exclusion radicalizes voters
Avnery, What makes Sammy run?
Baker, Yet more scandals in the pharmaceutical industry

N. Jackson, "Silent Majorities"

Gutman, Iraqis get revenge and Bush gets silence

Iraq executes Saddam; United States buries truth

by W. E. Gutman

The face of evil is not always hideous to behold. Sometimes it puts on a wretched countenance and assumes an expression so warped by discomfiture and fear that it hides in the craggy features and deep, gloomy eyes of a dispirited man. For an instant, against all odds, it manages to inspire pity.

So it was when I glimpsed the disheveled creature that crawled out from his underground hideout in 2003. And so it was again three years later when the executioner slipped a rope around his neck. Premeditation cheapens justice, I thought. Staged, death devalues life. For an instant or so, I was struck with horror. Worse, I felt diminished for watching an obscenity.

As he stood on the gallows clad in a heavy coat against the chill of winter, a mixture of defiance and submission etched on his face, I recognized a man who knew no compassion, a heartless tyrant who drenched his nation in blood and martyred people into submnission. And as I witnessed his final moments, transfixed, I remembered the corpses, hundreds of them --- villagers, men, women, infants twisted like disembodied marionettes, frozen in place by death’s grotesque choreography.

I was there, covering a war I was supposed to cheer but soon scorned and condemned. The spectacle still haunts me. VX (nerve) gas is mercifully swift. Mustard gas is slow and agonizing. It blisters the skin, blinds, scorches the trachea, bronchia and lungs. It then turns vital organs to pulp.

Ill at ease over the impending death of a fellow human being, I remembered the Scuds raining on Tel Aviv, where my younger son was living at the time. He was nearly killed when an adjacent building collapsed as he ran for shelter. I remembered the battlefields and torture chambers where thousands of Kuwaitis, Jordanians, Kurds and Shiite Iraqis lost their lives.

In my column of December 21, 2003, I predicted that he [would] “be tried for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.” I was only half-right. He was indicted for the lesser of his crimes in a farcical show trial orchestrated by the United States. He should have been surrendered to an international court and tried for his unprovoked 1980 assault against Iran that claimed one million dead and wounded.

In the same column, I asked, “Should his overseers and handlers be indicted for siring, then failing to abort, this horrific miscreation? Will they ever face justice?” The answer, like the question, is the stuff of conjecture.

Saddam was a monstrously cruel man. Early in his "career" he was a Mafia-style enforcer who personally murdered dozens of people. A fan of Stalin, he conducted purges in which innocent men were summarily executed. He gassed his own people in a massacre that claimed 200,000 lives. More recently, he ordered the assassination of 148 Shiites, during which women and children were raped and tortured and 400 others were arrested without charge following a failed assassination atempt against him. In a chilling display of paranoia, he also ordered the execution of his daughters' husbands who had defected then sheepishly recanted.

The geopolitics of hegemonic interest has since shifted.

Saddam was "our man in Baghdad," an all-too-willing pawn who did America's bidding while it suited him and who profited greatly from a documentable close association with the CIA, which stood by while he slaughtered Iraqi leftists and Nasserites. The United States covertly underwrote Iraq's war against Iran, America's sworn enemy in the Middled East. Donald Rumsfeld personally offered Saddam weapons, including poison gas, money and intelligence. The United States conveniently looked the other way while Saddam's thugs conducted wholesale murder.

I oppose capital punishment --- not always for humanitarian reasons. Avenging a murder with another murder may be expedient and cathartic but it is profoundly immoral and symptomatic of a society that has not learned how to cope with the root causes of human dysfunction. Saddam’s execution, while pleasing many around the world, was engineered to placate the majority Shiites in Iraq and elsewhere --- the very people now at war against the United States.

I would have kept him alive (but incarcerated for life) in an effort to extract information; psychoanalyze him and learn what made him who he was; and fully document the role the United States played when Saddam was still America's top agent in Iraq. His execution, I am convinced, was a ploy to prevent him from divulging incriminating and embarrassing details about America's involvement in Iraq's war. Saddam had to be muzzled before he sang like a canary about his lengthy and extensive collusion with the United States. Saddam was not executed. He was silenced.

Brutal regimes that rival Saddam's Iraq for savagery abound. Most are close US allies. Most of the people who head them will never face a judge, let alone a firing squad or the hangman’s noose.

To paraphrase Nietzsche, evil is “human, all-too-human.” Like the phoenix, it is reborn of its own ashes. It will endure long after the man from Tikrit is forgotten.

Gandásegui, Watch out for the Free Trade Agreement
E. Jackson, Another "national debate" with undisclosed details?
Sirias, Infernal buses
Bond, Uncle Sam's favorite terrorist
Birns & Kellberg, Shannon inherits a foreign policy mess
Silié, Social exclusion radicalizes voters
Avnery, What makes Sammy run?
Baker, Yet more scandals in the pharmaceutical industry

N. Jackson, "Silent Majorities"

Gutman, Iraqis get revenge and Bush gets silence