Monday, January 01, 2007

By Reason Wafawarova

IT’S more than three years since Saddam Hussein was captured on December 13, 2003 and many will remember an ecstatic George W. Bush taking a long pause on the microphone — for effect — before exclaiming, "We got him!"

His euphoric statement marked the climax of a long vindictive battle pitting Washington against one of its most illustrious and ruthless poodles, who had turned himself into a worrisome obstacle to US interests in the Middle East.

The last 13 years of Saddam’s rule were marked by general rivalry with the US administrations of George H. Bush, Bill Clinton and lately George, junior Bush.

Saddam seemed to enjoy his fight with Bush senior at political level and it seems it never occurred to him that Bush’s son would one day become president of the US and would revisit the rivalry at a personal level than mere bombs, marines and sanctions.

Bush junior has publicly said that Saddam was behind the alleged assassination attempt on his father in Kuwait in the 1990s.

One could sense the anger in Dubya’s (Bush’s nickname) voice when he was captured saying, "This man wanted to kill my dad."

Now it is mission accomplished for Bush junior who seems to be succumbing to the power of conscience after killing his enemy by refusing to comment further apart from issuing a written response claiming that Saddam met the justice he denied to his victims.

Well, if what Saddam went through before the US appointed tribunal is what he denied Iraqis then he certainly did them a great favour.

It means he saved them from a system filled with the victor’s justice, where a judge can be dismissed for not being hard on the accused, defence lawyers are not only murdered in numbers but are also denied the chance to cross-examine witnesses, some judges resign in protest at wanton government interference, special gallows are built ahead of the verdict, and a special court with special laws is set up to pursue a pre-determined verdict.

Such was the travesty of justice the world witnessed during the so-called Saddam trial that about every independent group that observed the process has run out of superlatives to describe how flawed the whole process was.

This is probably what weighed on George W. Bush’s conscience that he had to ensure that he was asleep when his 2003 proclaimed "ultimate penalty" was carried out on his nemesis.

This is not to say Saddam was a saint for he attempted to assassinate a sitting Iraqi leader in 1959, fled to Egypt and enjoyed Washington’s support, returned and involved himself in another coup in 1968 that brought his Baath Party to power, swung himself to power via another coup in 1979, after which —at the instigation of his handlers in Washington — he declared a meaningless war on Iran.

He crushed everything that appeared in his way with the full support of his bosses in Washington until 1989 when he clearly mistook the strength of his master for his own inviting the wrath of Bush senior in the process.

Saddam’s greatest crime, it appears, was his interference with America’s foreign policy in the Middle East in general.

He used his newly found power to forge an alliance with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and made himself the champion of the Intifada. He publicly denounced both Israel and the US for atrocities committed against Palestinians, and also threatened "another war in the Middle East" unless the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was settled.

Saddam became the most extreme of the anti-Israeli leaders in the Middle East and maintained the campaign until his invasion of Kuwait on August 2 1990 and he maintained that position until the 2003 invasion of Iraq and his subsequent hanging on December 30 2006.

Saddam’s hanging was akin to a Mafia drug lord turning in his junior accomplice for justice when he himself taught the novice the art of the ropes.

The fate that befell Saddam exposes the double standards of the US.

A few historical facts may suffice here.

The illegal invasion of Iraq breached the UN Charter, and was rightly condemned as such. But less than a year before the US had invaded Panama, kidnapped its leader and installed a regime of their choice, the US was able to use its veto power in the UN Security Council to prevent any move to condemn it for its act of aggression.

That way no attempt was made to order it to withdraw its troops or to impose sanctions on Washington.

It has been argued that the removal of General Noriega of Panama was justified because he was a dictator with a bad human rights record.

This may well be true since for many years Noriega was a valued CIA agent.

Nevertheless, his US-led deposition was no lesser breach of the UN Charter than the removal by Iraqi forces of the Emir of Kuwait.

In the six-day war of 1967 Israeli forces occupied the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The UN Security Council ordered Israel to pull out and it blatantly ignored the directive and the US used its veto to block the imposition of sanctions or any penalties on Tel Aviv by the Council. In 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon all the way to Beirut and repeated the attacks in 2006 and there have been no repercussions.

Israel explains its aggression saying Palestinians in Lebanon were constantly giving it problems, the same argument Saddam used against Kuwait.

The offences committed by Iraq and Israel were identical but the UN Security Council chose to impose the most extensive sanctions ever on Iraq.

This is the skewed geo-political process that has swallowed Saddam and it does not seem like similar delinquents like Bush, Israel’s Ehud Omert and the US’ poodles in the illegal Iraqi adventure will ever face the same fate.

The lessons to be learnt from what has happened to Saddam are many and they range from ethical and honest leadership to the folly of allowing oneself to be a front for western imperialist aspirations.

Saddam was a man whose punishment was meted by the architects of his alleged ruthlessness and the way the justice system was abused exposes the charade that Uncle Sam is the epitome of all that is good.