Andrei Kuznetsov
16th December 2003, 22:03
15 December 2003. A World to Win News Service:
Nothing good can come of Saddam Hussein’s capture at the hands of the US occupation forces.
People everywhere have been sickened by the gloating being vomited onto the
world from Washington and London in the service of justifying and
continuing the occupation of Iraq. Here’s an attempt to clear some of it off
of people’s glasses.
The Crimes
Most of Saddam’s crimes were committed at the instigation of the US or
with its complicity (not to mention France, Germany and Great Britain).
His trial will most likely be a cover up of that.
Mass graves of prisoners: Saddam’s Baath Party seized power in Iraq in
a 1963 coup publicly praised by the US and probably organized by the
CIA. The old regime had pulled out of the US’s anti-Soviet Baghdad pact
and threatened to nationalize the foreign-run oil consortium. The CIA
supplied the Baathists with a list of names of suspected communists and
radicals. Ten thousand were arrested. Many were tortured. About 4-5,000
were executed. The head of the CIA in the Middle East at the time,
James Critchfield, said “We regarded it as a great victory.” (Out of the
Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, by Andrew and Patrick
Cockburn, 2000.)
Saddam himself seized the reins of power in 1979. For the next dozen
years, he was a darling of Western intelligence services from the US to
France. No Western government complained that he was too brutal in
defending their interests.
Prosecutors beholden to the US are unlikely to bring this up at his
trial.
Invading other countries: In 1980, Iraq attacked Iran. Speaking of the
difficulties the US might face if Saddam has anything like a real
trial, Middle East expert Robert Fisk pointed out, “This is the man who
knows more about Baathist relations with the CIA than anyone else.” Many
people have suggested that Saddam be asked about exactly what the US did
to encourage Iraq to start a war with a regime the Americans then
considered a serious problem.
That the US did encourage it diplomatically, financially and militarily
is uncontested. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could
testify to that. He visited Iraq as President Reagan’s special envoy in
1983. As a sign of support, the US embassy in Baghdad reopened a few months
after. A million people were killed in the eight-year reactionary war
in which the US aided both sides at various times in order to prolong
the killing as much as possible.
As for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Iraq has an historical claim to it.
A few key witnesses could clear up quite a lot. US Ambassador April
Glaspie might explain why, when Saddam asked her if the US would object to
his annexing that country, she replied, “We have no opinion… Secretary
Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction… that Kuwait is not
associated with America.” Her boss, James Baker, then George Bush the
father’s Secretary of State and now George Bush the son’s special envoy,
could answer a question that has troubled many people: did the US
deliberately set up Saddam so it could have a pretext for an invasion of its
own?
Massacres of the Shia: As the first Gulf War closed, Bush senior’s
government issued a call for the oppressed Shia Arabs concentrated in
southern Iraq to rise up against Saddam’s regime. Even after the fighting
stopped, American warplanes continued slaughtering Iraqi troops as they
fled on the motorways back to Baghdad. But while the US sought to use
the Shia as pawns against Saddam, it considered the greatest danger not
Saddam’s regime but a power vacuum in which mass uprisings might
threaten regional stability. The present Bush could have his father testify
about that.
Using internationally-banned chemical weapons: Saddam’s aircraft spewed
poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, killing more than
5,000 people within a matter of hours. This was not the first such
atrocity. In March 1984, on the day the UN released a report condemning
Iraq’s use of poison gas against Iranian troops, Rumsfeld was having a
friendly meeting with Iraq’s Foreign Minister. The US helped build up
Saddam’s air force for the next two years. When the aerial bombing of Halabja
provoked a worldwide outcry, the US labelled the evidence against
Saddam “inconclusive” and implied Iran was behind it. Ironically, according
to the media this is the same defence Saddam is now using in captivity.
In 1988, Bush senior’s government prevented the UN Security Council
from condemning Iraq for the Halabja massacre.
Further, the US started sending Iraq anthrax stock in the late 1970s
and continued to do so for another decade even as Iraq was using chemical
weapons against Iran and the Iraqi Kurds.
If there were what any sane person could call a real trial for Saddam
Hussein, there would be a big crowd in the accused dock, even if the
charges were restricted to crimes committed in Iraq during his years in
power.
Replacing Saddam’s regime with what?
“This event brings further assurance that the torture chambers and the
secret police are gone forever,” Bush declared. This is another lie.
The US occupiers have reopened Abu Ghraib prison, Saddam’s infamous
hellhole west of Baghdad. Western media say that as of September 10,000
men were shut in there, about half of them opponents of the occupation
classified as “security detainees” with none of the rights of either
common law prisoners (such as a trial) or prisoners of war. American troops
shot a Palestinian journalist dead just outside Abu Ghraib’s walls as
he tried to film it.
The occupation authorities have also been rebuilding the Mukhabarat,
Saddam’s secret police. They made public job offers to former officers of
the Mukhabarat’s foreign services (spying against Syria and Iran)
months ago. Lately press reports quote unidentified US officials as saying
that the US is now concentrating on regrouping the domestic services as
well. This means bringing back both the archives on Iraqi citizens and
the men who used them to punish dissent.
After first planning to preserve the Iraqi army and then dissolving it,
the US is now bringing back whole large-scale units and their officers.
Of the first battalion of the new US-run Iraqi army, three-quarters of
the men formerly served in the old army. But almost half of them
resigned in protest against occupation policies recently, highlighting the
contradictoriness of the situation that provoked US vacillation. The same
situation seems to prevail among the police (rehired wholesale).
Given this situation, the Bush regime has made it clear that it will
keep substantial numbers of occupation forces in Iraq for the foreseeable
future, despite claims about returning “sovereignty” to the Iraqi
people by July 1, 2004.
This kind of “sovereignty” is what any objective person would call
national slavery. The plan is for a handful of officials hand picked by the
US (which has been frantically weeding out those it considers
unreliable lately) to stage various gatherings where they would hand pick some
other people to hand pick some kind of government, which would operate
with American advisors looking over their shoulders and the American
armed forces as their only real support.
In short, the US policy is to replace Saddam’s reactionary, repressive
regime with a US-puppet reactionary, repressive regime, using some of
the same tried and true oppressors of the old guard along with American
“boots” to trod on the people should Saddam’s former henchmen and
fresher faces prove too soft. In essence, Bush’s “new” plan to “turn Iraq
over to Iraqis” by mid-2004 is no different than the US’s efforts to
“Vietnamize” the Vietnam war by building up a puppet government and army,
or the Nazi puppet government in France during World War 2. It’s what
imperialist powers have always done.
Even now, while there are some so-called Iraqi judges in Iraq, they do
not have the authority to have anyone arrested or released. All they
can do is rubber stamp what the real power does.
If the US-installed Interim Governing Council that is supposed to
provide an “Iraqi” trial for Saddam were subjected to DNA tests to prove
their identity as he was, it would reveal that they are American clones.
Incidentally, while not much has come out about American-run torture
chambers (aside from Amnesty International protests about the few men
known to have died suddenly in detention), US officials have all but
openly admitted this practice lead to Saddam’s capture. A recently beefed-up
US Special Operations team of CIA agents and Defence Department
operatives focused on capturing Saddam’s close and distant relatives. As
described in the Washington Post, “The US government had offered a reward of
up to $25 million for information leading to the capture of Saddam
Hussein. But because the breakthrough came as the result of interrogations,
not a voluntary tip, one senior official said, ‘We saved the taxpayer
$25 million.’”
Who gives big criminals the right to try little ones?
As former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark reportedly pointed out, the
US has no legal basis to try Saddam because the American-led occupation
itself is illegal. Yet from the minute the invasion of Iraq was openly
proposed and probably a long time before, occupying Iraq was the US aim
in this war. Bush and Blair were both proven liars with their stories
about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. The invasion was part of a
grand plan to bring the whole Middle East more directly under US control
as a pillar of a militarily-enforced truly global empire on a level the
world has never seen before.
The capture of Saddam was meant to send a “message” of American
imperial determination, ruthlessness and invincibility to Iraqis and the
world’s people, as well as to other American stooges in the region who have
turned out to be unsatisfactory. Early in the war the US complained
about illegal humiliation of prisoners when Arab media showed US troops in
Iraqi custody. But it could not resist making a television spectacle of
Saddam’s public degradation (forced to open his mouth like an animal or
a slave on auction, getting his beard and head shorn, etc.) because the
American ruling class obeys a “higher” law – their political and
economic interests.
The US imperialists are the biggest criminals on today’s planet and the
most hated. Since the end of World War 2 alone the list of their crimes
runs from the bombing of Hiroshima (followed by the bombing of Nagasaki
three days later just to show it wasn’t a mistake) to their coups in
Guatemala, Iran and the Congo, and from the Vietnam War that left several
million people in Indochina dead through the invasions of Grenada,
Panama, Somalia, Yugoslavia and other countries. The 12 years of sanctions
after the first Gulf war killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. In the
second war, Rumsfeld is said to have personally authorized at least 50
airstrikes in which more than 30 civilians were considered at risk.
More than a thousand civilians were killed by illegal US and British
cluster bombs alone. (See the 12 December report by Human Rights Watch.)
Bush blustered about Saddam, “Good riddance. The world is a better off
without you.” Actually, the world isn’t better off at all with Saddam
in American hands. The real truth is that all the world’s people will be
much better off without the US ruling class and all the imperialists
who with Saddam’s capture once again have compulsively displayed their
reactionary and ridiculous essence.
The future without Saddam
The Iraqi people have not been resisting because of Saddam. They have
raised their voices, demonstrated in the streets and attacked the
occupiers in most of the country. In the days after the capture, hundreds of
people in Falluja violently seized the office of the US-appointed
mayor. Mass protests also broke out in Ramadi and Tikrit, called a “Saddam
stronghold” by the Americans, and among students in the northern town of
Mosul, until recently held up as a model of US armed forces efforts to
win Iraqi “hearts and minds”. US troops were ambushed in a major
firefight in Samarra, a town considered hostile to Saddam.
No matter what the immediate result of Saddam’s capture may be, that
resistance will continue until its cause is removed. The Iraqi people
want their country back.
- end item –
A World To Win Magazine: http://www.awtw.org/
Nothing good can come of Saddam Hussein’s capture at the hands of the US occupation forces.
People everywhere have been sickened by the gloating being vomited onto the
world from Washington and London in the service of justifying and
continuing the occupation of Iraq. Here’s an attempt to clear some of it off
of people’s glasses.
The Crimes
Most of Saddam’s crimes were committed at the instigation of the US or
with its complicity (not to mention France, Germany and Great Britain).
His trial will most likely be a cover up of that.
Mass graves of prisoners: Saddam’s Baath Party seized power in Iraq in
a 1963 coup publicly praised by the US and probably organized by the
CIA. The old regime had pulled out of the US’s anti-Soviet Baghdad pact
and threatened to nationalize the foreign-run oil consortium. The CIA
supplied the Baathists with a list of names of suspected communists and
radicals. Ten thousand were arrested. Many were tortured. About 4-5,000
were executed. The head of the CIA in the Middle East at the time,
James Critchfield, said “We regarded it as a great victory.” (Out of the
Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, by Andrew and Patrick
Cockburn, 2000.)
Saddam himself seized the reins of power in 1979. For the next dozen
years, he was a darling of Western intelligence services from the US to
France. No Western government complained that he was too brutal in
defending their interests.
Prosecutors beholden to the US are unlikely to bring this up at his
trial.
Invading other countries: In 1980, Iraq attacked Iran. Speaking of the
difficulties the US might face if Saddam has anything like a real
trial, Middle East expert Robert Fisk pointed out, “This is the man who
knows more about Baathist relations with the CIA than anyone else.” Many
people have suggested that Saddam be asked about exactly what the US did
to encourage Iraq to start a war with a regime the Americans then
considered a serious problem.
That the US did encourage it diplomatically, financially and militarily
is uncontested. Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld could
testify to that. He visited Iraq as President Reagan’s special envoy in
1983. As a sign of support, the US embassy in Baghdad reopened a few months
after. A million people were killed in the eight-year reactionary war
in which the US aided both sides at various times in order to prolong
the killing as much as possible.
As for Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, Iraq has an historical claim to it.
A few key witnesses could clear up quite a lot. US Ambassador April
Glaspie might explain why, when Saddam asked her if the US would object to
his annexing that country, she replied, “We have no opinion… Secretary
Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction… that Kuwait is not
associated with America.” Her boss, James Baker, then George Bush the
father’s Secretary of State and now George Bush the son’s special envoy,
could answer a question that has troubled many people: did the US
deliberately set up Saddam so it could have a pretext for an invasion of its
own?
Massacres of the Shia: As the first Gulf War closed, Bush senior’s
government issued a call for the oppressed Shia Arabs concentrated in
southern Iraq to rise up against Saddam’s regime. Even after the fighting
stopped, American warplanes continued slaughtering Iraqi troops as they
fled on the motorways back to Baghdad. But while the US sought to use
the Shia as pawns against Saddam, it considered the greatest danger not
Saddam’s regime but a power vacuum in which mass uprisings might
threaten regional stability. The present Bush could have his father testify
about that.
Using internationally-banned chemical weapons: Saddam’s aircraft spewed
poison gas on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988, killing more than
5,000 people within a matter of hours. This was not the first such
atrocity. In March 1984, on the day the UN released a report condemning
Iraq’s use of poison gas against Iranian troops, Rumsfeld was having a
friendly meeting with Iraq’s Foreign Minister. The US helped build up
Saddam’s air force for the next two years. When the aerial bombing of Halabja
provoked a worldwide outcry, the US labelled the evidence against
Saddam “inconclusive” and implied Iran was behind it. Ironically, according
to the media this is the same defence Saddam is now using in captivity.
In 1988, Bush senior’s government prevented the UN Security Council
from condemning Iraq for the Halabja massacre.
Further, the US started sending Iraq anthrax stock in the late 1970s
and continued to do so for another decade even as Iraq was using chemical
weapons against Iran and the Iraqi Kurds.
If there were what any sane person could call a real trial for Saddam
Hussein, there would be a big crowd in the accused dock, even if the
charges were restricted to crimes committed in Iraq during his years in
power.
Replacing Saddam’s regime with what?
“This event brings further assurance that the torture chambers and the
secret police are gone forever,” Bush declared. This is another lie.
The US occupiers have reopened Abu Ghraib prison, Saddam’s infamous
hellhole west of Baghdad. Western media say that as of September 10,000
men were shut in there, about half of them opponents of the occupation
classified as “security detainees” with none of the rights of either
common law prisoners (such as a trial) or prisoners of war. American troops
shot a Palestinian journalist dead just outside Abu Ghraib’s walls as
he tried to film it.
The occupation authorities have also been rebuilding the Mukhabarat,
Saddam’s secret police. They made public job offers to former officers of
the Mukhabarat’s foreign services (spying against Syria and Iran)
months ago. Lately press reports quote unidentified US officials as saying
that the US is now concentrating on regrouping the domestic services as
well. This means bringing back both the archives on Iraqi citizens and
the men who used them to punish dissent.
After first planning to preserve the Iraqi army and then dissolving it,
the US is now bringing back whole large-scale units and their officers.
Of the first battalion of the new US-run Iraqi army, three-quarters of
the men formerly served in the old army. But almost half of them
resigned in protest against occupation policies recently, highlighting the
contradictoriness of the situation that provoked US vacillation. The same
situation seems to prevail among the police (rehired wholesale).
Given this situation, the Bush regime has made it clear that it will
keep substantial numbers of occupation forces in Iraq for the foreseeable
future, despite claims about returning “sovereignty” to the Iraqi
people by July 1, 2004.
This kind of “sovereignty” is what any objective person would call
national slavery. The plan is for a handful of officials hand picked by the
US (which has been frantically weeding out those it considers
unreliable lately) to stage various gatherings where they would hand pick some
other people to hand pick some kind of government, which would operate
with American advisors looking over their shoulders and the American
armed forces as their only real support.
In short, the US policy is to replace Saddam’s reactionary, repressive
regime with a US-puppet reactionary, repressive regime, using some of
the same tried and true oppressors of the old guard along with American
“boots” to trod on the people should Saddam’s former henchmen and
fresher faces prove too soft. In essence, Bush’s “new” plan to “turn Iraq
over to Iraqis” by mid-2004 is no different than the US’s efforts to
“Vietnamize” the Vietnam war by building up a puppet government and army,
or the Nazi puppet government in France during World War 2. It’s what
imperialist powers have always done.
Even now, while there are some so-called Iraqi judges in Iraq, they do
not have the authority to have anyone arrested or released. All they
can do is rubber stamp what the real power does.
If the US-installed Interim Governing Council that is supposed to
provide an “Iraqi” trial for Saddam were subjected to DNA tests to prove
their identity as he was, it would reveal that they are American clones.
Incidentally, while not much has come out about American-run torture
chambers (aside from Amnesty International protests about the few men
known to have died suddenly in detention), US officials have all but
openly admitted this practice lead to Saddam’s capture. A recently beefed-up
US Special Operations team of CIA agents and Defence Department
operatives focused on capturing Saddam’s close and distant relatives. As
described in the Washington Post, “The US government had offered a reward of
up to $25 million for information leading to the capture of Saddam
Hussein. But because the breakthrough came as the result of interrogations,
not a voluntary tip, one senior official said, ‘We saved the taxpayer
$25 million.’”
Who gives big criminals the right to try little ones?
As former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark reportedly pointed out, the
US has no legal basis to try Saddam because the American-led occupation
itself is illegal. Yet from the minute the invasion of Iraq was openly
proposed and probably a long time before, occupying Iraq was the US aim
in this war. Bush and Blair were both proven liars with their stories
about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. The invasion was part of a
grand plan to bring the whole Middle East more directly under US control
as a pillar of a militarily-enforced truly global empire on a level the
world has never seen before.
The capture of Saddam was meant to send a “message” of American
imperial determination, ruthlessness and invincibility to Iraqis and the
world’s people, as well as to other American stooges in the region who have
turned out to be unsatisfactory. Early in the war the US complained
about illegal humiliation of prisoners when Arab media showed US troops in
Iraqi custody. But it could not resist making a television spectacle of
Saddam’s public degradation (forced to open his mouth like an animal or
a slave on auction, getting his beard and head shorn, etc.) because the
American ruling class obeys a “higher” law – their political and
economic interests.
The US imperialists are the biggest criminals on today’s planet and the
most hated. Since the end of World War 2 alone the list of their crimes
runs from the bombing of Hiroshima (followed by the bombing of Nagasaki
three days later just to show it wasn’t a mistake) to their coups in
Guatemala, Iran and the Congo, and from the Vietnam War that left several
million people in Indochina dead through the invasions of Grenada,
Panama, Somalia, Yugoslavia and other countries. The 12 years of sanctions
after the first Gulf war killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. In the
second war, Rumsfeld is said to have personally authorized at least 50
airstrikes in which more than 30 civilians were considered at risk.
More than a thousand civilians were killed by illegal US and British
cluster bombs alone. (See the 12 December report by Human Rights Watch.)
Bush blustered about Saddam, “Good riddance. The world is a better off
without you.” Actually, the world isn’t better off at all with Saddam
in American hands. The real truth is that all the world’s people will be
much better off without the US ruling class and all the imperialists
who with Saddam’s capture once again have compulsively displayed their
reactionary and ridiculous essence.
The future without Saddam
The Iraqi people have not been resisting because of Saddam. They have
raised their voices, demonstrated in the streets and attacked the
occupiers in most of the country. In the days after the capture, hundreds of
people in Falluja violently seized the office of the US-appointed
mayor. Mass protests also broke out in Ramadi and Tikrit, called a “Saddam
stronghold” by the Americans, and among students in the northern town of
Mosul, until recently held up as a model of US armed forces efforts to
win Iraqi “hearts and minds”. US troops were ambushed in a major
firefight in Samarra, a town considered hostile to Saddam.
No matter what the immediate result of Saddam’s capture may be, that
resistance will continue until its cause is removed. The Iraqi people
want their country back.
- end item –
A World To Win Magazine: http://www.awtw.org/