Saddam Hanged

[( R )evolution]

BAGHDAD, Iraq -
Saddam Hussein, the shotgun-waving dictator who ruled
Iraq with a remorseless brutality for a quarter-century and was driven from power by a U.S.-led war that left his country in shambles, was taken to the gallows clutching a Quran and hanged Saturday.
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In Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City, people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate the former dictator's death. The government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew as it did last month when Saddam was convicted to thwart any surge in retaliatory violence.

It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three U.S. presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the new Iraqi leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn insurgency by Saddam loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.

President Bush called Saddam's execution "the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime."

State-run Iraqiya television news reported that Saddam's half-brother Barzan Ibrahim and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, also were hanged. However, three officials said only Saddam was executed.

"We wanted him to be executed on a special day," National Security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie told state-run Iraqiyah.

Al-Rubaie said Saddam "totally surrendered" and did not resist. He said a judge read the sentence to Saddam, who was taken in handcuffs to the execution room. When he stood in the execution room, photographs and video footage were taken, al-Rubaie said.

"He did not ask for anything. He was carrying a Quran and said: 'I want this Quran to be given to this person,' a man he called Bander," he said. Al-Rubaie said he did not know who Bander was.

"Saddam was treated with respect when he was alive and after his death," al-Rubaie said. "Saddam's execution was 100 percent Iraqi and the American side did not interfere."

Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, said: "Saddam was taken by force to the gallows but he was composed when taken to execution."

He said the government had not decided what to do with Saddam's body.

Mariam al-Rayes, a legal expert and a former member of the Shiite bloc in parliament, told Iraqiya television that the execution "was filmed and God willing it will be shown. There was one camera present, and a doctor was also present there."

Al-Rayes, an al-Maliki ally, did not attend the execution. She said Al-Maliki did not attend but was represented by an aide.

The station earlier was airing national songs after the first announcement and had a tag on the screen that read "Saddam's execution marks the end of a dark period of Iraq's history."

The execution was carried out around the start of Eid al-Adha, the Islamic world's largest holiday, which marks the end of the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the hajj. Many Muslims celebrate by sacrificing domestic animals, usually sheep.

Sunnis and Shiites throughout the world began observing the four-day holiday at dawn Saturday, but Iraq's Shiite community — the country's majority — was due to start celebrating on Sunday.

The execution came 56 days after a court convicted Saddam and sentenced him to death for his role in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from a town where assassins tried to kill the dictator in 1982. Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam's appeal Monday and ordered him executed within 30 days.

A U.S. judge on Friday refused to stop Saddam's execution, rejecting a last-minute court challenge.

Al-Maliki had rejected calls that Saddam be spared, telling families of people killed during the dictator's rule that would be an insult to the victims.

"Our respect for human rights requires us to execute him, and there will be no review or delay in carrying out the sentence," al-Maliki's office quoted him as saying during a meeting with relatives before the hanging.

Human Rights Watch criticized the execution, calling Saddam's trial "deeply flawed."

"Saddam Hussein was responsible for massive human rights violations, but that can't justify giving him the death penalty, which is a cruel and inhuman punishment," said Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program.

The hanging of Saddam, who was ruthless in ordering executions of his opponents, will keep other Iraqis from pursuing justice against the ousted leader.

At his death, he was in the midst of a second trial, charged with genocide and other crimes for a 1987-88 military crackdown that killed an estimated 180,000 Kurds in northern Iraq. Experts said the trial of his co-defendants was likely to continue despite his execution.

Many people in Iraq's Shiite majority were eager to see the execution of a man whose Sunni Arab-dominated regime oppressed them and Kurds.

Before the hanging, a mosque preacher in the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Friday called Saddam's execution "God's gift to Iraqis."

"Oh, God, you know what Saddam has done! He killed millions of Iraqis in prisons, in wars with neighboring countries and he is responsible for mass graves. Oh God, we ask you to take revenge on Saddam," said Sheik Sadralddin al-Qubanji, a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

On Thursday, two half brothers visited Saddam in his cell, a member of the former dictator's defense team, Badee Izzat Aref, told The Associated Press by telephone from the United Arab Emirates. He said the former dictator handed them his personal belongings.

A senior official at the Iraqi defense ministry said Saddam gave his will to one of his half brothers. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

In a farewell message to Iraqis posted Wednesday on the Internet, Saddam said he was giving his life for his country as part of the struggle against the U.S. "Here, I offer my soul to God as a sacrifice, and if he wants, he will send it to heaven with the martyrs," he said.

One of Saddam's lawyers, Issam Ghazzawi, said the letter was written by Saddam on Nov. 5, the day he was convicted by an Iraqi tribunal in the Dujail killings.

The message called on Iraqis to put aside the sectarian hatred that has bloodied their nation for a year and voiced support for the Sunni Arab-dominated insurgency against U.S.-led forces, saying: "Long live jihad and the mujahedeen."

Saddam urged Iraqis to rely on God's help in fighting "against the unjust nations" that ousted his regime.

Najeeb al-Nauimi, a member of Saddam's legal team, said U.S. authorities maintained physical custody of Saddam until the execution to prevent him being humiliated publicly or his corpse being mutilated, as has happened to previous Iraqi leaders deposed by force. He said they didn't want anything to happen to further inflame Sunni Arabs.

"This is the end of an era in Iraq," al-Nauimi said from Doha, Qatar. "The Baath regime ruled for 35 years. Saddam was vice president or president of Iraq during those years. For Iraqis, he will be very well remembered. Like a martyr, he died for the sake of his country."

Iraq's death penalty was suspended by the U.S. military after it toppled Saddam in 2003, but the new Iraqi government reinstated it two years later, saying executions would deter criminals.

Saddam's own regime used executions and extrajudicial killings as a tool of political repression, both to eliminate real or suspected political opponents and to maintain a reign of terror.

In the months after he seized power on July 16, 1979, he had hundreds of members of his own party and army officers slain. In 1996, he ordered the slaying of two sons-in-law who had defected to Jordan but returned to Baghdad after receiving guarantees of safety.

Saddam built Iraq into a one of the Arab world's most modern societies, but then plunged the country into an eight-year war with neighboring
Iran that killed hundreds of thousands of people on both sides and wrecked Iraq's economy.

During that war, as part of the wider campaign against Kurds, the Iraqi military used chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja in northern Iraq, killing an estimated 5,000 civilians.

The economic troubles from the Iran war led Saddam to invade Kuwait in the summer of 1990, seeking to grab its oil wealth, but a U.S.-led coalition inflicted a stinging defeat on the Iraq army and freed the Kuwaitis.

U.N. sanctions imposed over the Kuwait invasion remained in place when Saddam failed to cooperate fully in international efforts to ensure his programs for creating weapons of mass destruction had been dismantled. Iraqis, once among the region's most prosperous, were impoverished.

The final blow came when U.S.-led troops invaded in March 2003. Saddam's regime fell quickly, but political, sectarian and criminal violence have created chaos that has undermined efforts to rebuild Iraq's ruined economy.

While he wielded a heavy hand to maintain control, Saddam also sought to win public support with a personality cult that pervaded Iraqi society. Thousands of portraits, posters, statues and murals were erected in his honor all over Iraq. His face could be seen on the sides of office buildings, schools, airports and shops and on Iraq's currency.

[bcbm]

Pix?

[OneBrickOneVoice]

Anyone else notice the pro-Americanness of the articles on this subject? I was on Yahoo News is articles like EVIL DICTATOR KILLED and TYRANY WHO IMPOSED TYRANNY IN IRAQ HANGED. Don't get me wrong, Saddam was a evil shithead but is this a new propaganda tool of the War on Terror?

[YSR]

Yeah, one couldn't help by notice that irritating bullshit, LH. I watched Hannity and Colmes as they killed him. Oy vey.

The thing is trying to detourn the imperialist propaganda into a pro-working class point. Every time I talk with anyone about the issue I just point out that he should be swinging next to every other world leader.

Personally, I don't think you should kill a dictator unless it's Mussolini style, but that's just me.

[OneBrickOneVoice]

Originally posted by Young Stupid [email protected] 30, 2006 07:30 am
Yeah, one couldn't help by notice that irritating bullshit, LH. I watched Hannity and Colmes as they killed him. Oy vey.
omg are you okay? I'd rather have my heart ripped out by a goblin than watch Hannity and Colmes.

[( R )evolution]

Yeah I swear. fucking half of the articles on the front page of yahoo is dumbass shit like "Saddam ruled through evil" next article "Saddam stay in power cause of fear" serouisly this is obvouis propganda.

[Janus]

This may have been a small symbolic victory for his punishers against his remaining supporters but it has no real practical effect on the resistance or the continuing war.

[Vargha Poralli]

Any way -1 motherfucker from the rest of assholes.

What pisses me off is the Fact that pinochet escaped this ending.

[mo7amEd]

this is by far the happiest day of my life!

[razboz]

This is the pointless stupid death in a long history of stupid pointless deaths in Iraq. For all i hate people who murder people, Saddam was more valuable to Iraq alive than dead. Dead anyone can make him do anything they want. He can be warped, distorted and used by anyone from iraqi hotdog vendors to mobsters to anyone really. Alive he could at least call for appeasement amongst the various warring factions and perhaps bring a little much needed peace to Iraq. I think that despite the fact he was deposed and so on he probably had some level of support amongst certain sections of the Iraqi military police milita and insurgents. Now he has become a martyre for [insert sect/criminal group here]. Basically everyone. Killing people to solve the problem of people killing people is not a very good idea, as 40 000 years of war might (but didnt) have taught us. And dont get me wrong. Im not an "enemy of the people" or anything. I do not support Saddam Hussein or anyof his idiotic policies.

[Dimentio]

Well, they've found Ahmadinejad so now they do not have any need for the old barbarian any more.

[Tower of Bebel]

Now that Saddam's dead the West doesn't have to fear him telling the truth about the war against iran.
The worst thing is Bush, talking about democracy. how can Bush talk of democracy if only 45% of the Americans vote? If he wins with 51% it means only 23% voted for him...

[razboz]

Originally posted by [email protected] 30, 2006 03:23 pm
Now that Saddam's dead the West doesn't have to fear him telling the truth about the war against iran.
The worst thing is Bush, talking about democracy. how can Bush talk of democracy if only 45% of the Americans vote? If he wins with 51% it means only 23% voted for him...
Especially true when only 49% voted for him the first time round and he won on a technicality.

[( R )evolution]

Originally posted by [email protected] 30, 2006 03:11 pm
This is the pointless stupid death in a long history of stupid pointless deaths in Iraq. For all i hate people who murder people, Saddam was more valuable to Iraq alive than dead. Dead anyone can make him do anything they want. He can be warped, distorted and used by anyone from iraqi hotdog vendors to mobsters to anyone really. Alive he could at least call for appeasement amongst the various warring factions and perhaps bring a little much needed peace to Iraq. I think that despite the fact he was deposed and so on he probably had some level of support amongst certain sections of the Iraqi military police milita and insurgents. Now he has become a martyre for [insert sect/criminal group here]. Basically everyone. Killing people to solve the problem of people killing people is not a very good idea, as 40 000 years of war might (but didnt) have taught us. And dont get me wrong. Im not an "enemy of the people" or anything. I do not support Saddam Hussein or anyof his idiotic policies.
I am certain Saddam would not help any1 in the west. Did you see him in court? On arabic TV, every night they had like 3 min of him just arguing that day in the court room. Calling down to America, Saying he was the only true leader of Iraq. I am happy he is dead.

[razboz]

Originally posted by ( R )evolution+December 30, 2006 04:18 pm--> (( R )evolution @ December 30, 2006 04:18 pm)
[email protected] 30, 2006 03:11 pm
This is the pointless stupid death in a long history of stupid pointless deaths in Iraq. For all i hate people who murder people, Saddam was more valuable to Iraq alive than dead. Dead anyone can make him do anything they want. He can be warped, distorted and used by anyone from iraqi hotdog vendors to mobsters to anyone really. Alive he could at least call for appeasement amongst the various warring factions and perhaps bring a little much needed peace to Iraq. I think that despite the fact he was deposed and so on he probably had some level of support amongst certain sections of the Iraqi military police milita and insurgents. Now he has become a martyre for [insert sect/criminal group here]. Basically everyone. Killing people to solve the problem of people killing people is not a very good idea, as 40 000 years of war might (but didnt) have taught us. And dont get me wrong. Im not an "enemy of the people" or anything. I do not support Saddam Hussein or anyof his idiotic policies.
I am certain Saddam would not help any1 in the west. Did you see him in court? On arabic TV, every night they had like 3 min of him just arguing that day in the court room. Calling down to America, Saying he was the only true leader of Iraq. I am happy he is dead. [/b]
I dont think he wanted to help America. I think he might have wanted to help the Iraqis help him.

[shadowed by the secret police]

Times like these I remember that poem by Oscar Wilde--- "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"---- especially the line: "That Fellow's Got To Swing"

[Jesus Christ!]

I'm glad he's dead, but it won't change anything in Iraq. It's only going to be used as a tool to possibly send more troops in and what not by the Bush Administration.

[Tower of Bebel]

Originally posted by Jesus Christ!@December 30, 2006 06:21 pm
I'm glad he's dead, but it won't change anything in Iraq. It's only going to be used as a tool to possibly send more troops in and what not by the Bush Administration.
I was against his execution. Now that he's dead we lost the most important witness of Saddam's regime! Further trials and further investigation would have been of great historical value!

[OneBrickOneVoice]

Shit. It's not on YouTube yet.

[rebel_heart]

I think noone deserves a fate like this maybe Bush and Blair do anyway, i think Saddam was a great leader and even if they killed him they shouldn't be showing it as some kind of movie i mean many ppl are sentenced to death in the us aren't they? but how many of them do we see dying? on YouTube or Google or whatever...

[chimx]

I can't help but feel uncomfortable with the execution of Saddam, no doubt because it wasn't through the Iraqi people's struggle that Saddam was hung, but through the American government's actions. Its interesting to think that because I disagree with the means, I find the ends morally reprehensible.


i think Saddam was a great leader
I am so aghast by this comment that I dare not even write the simplified internet acronym: what the fuck??

[Red October]

Originally posted by [email protected] 30, 2006 04:44 pm
I can't help but feel uncomfortable with the execution of Saddam, no doubt because it wasn't through the Iraqi people's struggle that Saddam was hung, but through the American government's actions. Its interesting to think that because I disagree with the means, I find the ends morally reprehensible.


i think Saddam was a great leader
I am so aghast by this comment that I dare not even write the simplified internet acronym: what the fuck??
seconded. i would feel a whole lot better about it if the trial wasnt just another mock up distraction in an imperialist war. if his death was at the end of a popular uprising againt the baathists, i would be happier.

and how can you be a leftist and endorse saddam? saddam and his regime were a bunch of murderous fascist thugs.

[Guerrilla22]

You notice the gas attacks were not part of the trail, most likely because he recieved the materials to make his chemical weapons from the uS.

[An archist]

Originally posted by [email protected] 30, 2006 03:23 pm
Now that Saddam's dead the West doesn't have to fear him telling the truth about the war against iran.

Yup, that's most likely the reason why they hung him.
Suppose they started a trial about the gassing of the 5000 Kurds. They would have started to investigate who supplied the materials for the gas (Germany).
Other funfact I remembered: France trained Iraqi Jet pilots and supplied Iraq with anti-aircraft guns (hence why they could be avoided and disabled so easily). When the first gulf war started, several Iraqi pilots where still training in France.
and that's only what's known, with Saddam dead, there's no way of founding out who hepled him and at what level.

[Marukusu]

The worst thing with Saddam's hanging is that he was executed "only" for killing 148 shia muslims in Dujail in 1982, and not for the anfal-operation which killed some 180,000 kurds. That's, in my opinion, an insult to the kurdish people, and all the still living relatives and families to those who where killed.
The iraqis could at the very least have waited until that part of his trial was finished befored they hanged him.

And no, Saddam wasn't a great man though he was pretty progressive compared to most of the fascist asshole-princes and dictators in the Middle East. Saddamite baathists are not included on my list of comrades.

[Tommy-K]

Why the fuck was he hanged anyway? the death penalty (especially hanging) is so medieval and in this case it was completely childish. "yeh saddam, seeing as how you hanged all those people, we're now gonna hang you, see how you like it."

Surely that makes them as bad as mr hussein himself? Surely they are sinking as low as him?

Wasn't it Gandhi who said "an eye for an eye makes us all blind"?

AND if they were so adamant on punishing saddam, why not lock him up in solitary confinement until he dies naturally? surely tht would cause far greater pain than just killing him?

I dont condone what saddam hussein did, (and i dont condone locking people up in solitary confinement untill they die, that was just speaking from the point of view of the Iraqi government) but neither do i condone the death sentence, in any circumstances.

If you want my opinion they should all just fucking grow up.

[Guerrilla22]

And no, Saddam wasn't a great man though he was pretty progressive compared to most of the fascist asshole-princes and dictators in the Middle East
How exactly was Saddam progressive?

[Marukusu]

How exactly was Saddam progressive?

I said that he was progressive compared to many of the other leaders in the Middle East, and that doesn't have to be very progressive.
He abolished the sharia laws, buildt out the infrastructure and allowed women to drive cars for example (yippie-ka-yay).
But still, he was an asshole. He threw his country on the brink of ruin after the unneccessary wars against Iran and Kuweit (USA), gave deranged family members government positions and slaughtered thousands of kurds. No way for a commie to behave.

[Banned]

It will send him down in history and he will be viewed as a martyr by all his supporters!
I think Saddam would have seen his death as honourable and noble as oppossed to rotting in a grotty cell for the rest of his life, which would be viewed as shameful and pathetic! They have achieved nothing by killing him, except for lifting him up as some sort of fucking hero! Anyone that supports his death sentence is a fool, he should have rotted in a cell with the walls plastered with the names of those he killed; and fed bread and water untill he expired!

[The Grey Blur]

had vexed three U.S. presidents
Did anyone else laugh out loud when they saw this? I guess those 'three US presidents' must have been vexed over the exact ways in which he used the funds and armaments they provided him with. ;)

[Wanted Man]

As Peres himself stated, quite openly:

"Saddam Hussein brought about his own demise. This was a man who caused a great deal of harm to his people and who was a major threat to Israel."

And we can't have that, right? Got to get the Americans to the Middle East to deal out some "justice".

But good that this was posted here, it's always nice to see the fervent supporters of imperialism on this forum sounding the horn of victory.

[Janus]

Pix?
Pic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hussein_hangs.jpg)
Post-execution pic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Saddamdead.jpg)
Pre-execution video (http://today.reuters.com/tv/videoChannel.aspx?storyid=a12e30546019929f3625ae1d 8bb4eb8ae3c00394)
Post-execution video (http://edition.cnn.com/video/player/player.html?url=/video/world/2006/12/30/vo.iraq.hussein.dead.body.reut)
Low quality video of execution (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7532034279766935521)

[Joseph Ball]

This is an extract from an article in Kantipur online 30.12.06. It is disgraceful that a sovereign nation has been invaded by imperialist powers, the country has been reduced to rubble and its leader executed by the imperialists.

Maoists denounce execution

Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M) today also flayed the execution of the deposed Iraqi President.

Issuing a statement today, CPN-M spokesperson Krishna Bahadur Mahara said the news of the execution of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has drawn the "grave attention" of the party.

CPN-M said, "Hussein's execution – orchestrated by the Bush administration – is not only a grave violation of human right but also a glaring example of the US's double standards on the issues of human rights and democracy."

"The CPN-M condemns the decision by the puppet government in Iraq to execute Saddam Hussein," the release said, slamming the decision as a "blatant violation of human rights norms."

"Regardless of who killed whom, the act is against international humanitarian law and against the fundamental right to life," the statement added.

The party also appealed to human rights workers and general people across the world to unite in voicing protests against such acts while warning world leaders "not to repeat such activities."

[OneBrickOneVoice]

Originally posted by [email protected] 30, 2006 10:22 pm

And no, Saddam wasn't a great man though he was pretty progressive compared to most of the fascist asshole-princes and dictators in the Middle East
How exactly was Saddam progressive?
compared to other dictators in the mideast, Saddam mainly kept a separation of church of state and encouraged farming co-operatives or some shit like that.


CPN-M said, "Hussein's execution – orchestrated by the Bush administration – is not only a grave violation of human right but also a glaring example of the US's double standards on the issues of human rights and democracy."

Yes I too would've like to see him rot in a jail cell, and condemn US imperialism but this isn't that bad.

[Guerrilla22]

compared to other dictators in the mideast, Saddam mainly kept a separation of church of state and encouraged farming co-operatives or some shit like that.

Nazi Germany maintained a seperation of church and state also, the US does to a certain point also. I've never heard of farming cooperatives in Iraq. He booted the Shiites off their land and gave it to Sunnis, he was an asshole.

[YSR]

Originally posted by [email protected] 30, 2006 07:02 pm
As Peres himself stated, quite openly:

"Saddam Hussein brought about his own demise. This was a man who caused a great deal of harm to his people and who was a major threat to Israel."

And we can't have that, right? Got to get the Americans to the Middle East to deal out some "justice".

But good that this was posted here, it's always nice to see the fervent supporters of imperialism on this forum sounding the horn of victory.
So you find one person who says something about Isreal and everyone who wants Saddam dead is an imperialist? I want all world leaders dead, not just Hussein.

Wake up and smell the coffee, WWSD. You're an apologist for attempted genocide.

[Hiero]

Saddam should never have been trialed and executed under imperialist occupation.

[razboz]

I agree wiht Hiero. I dont really care so much ont he manner of his punishment rather the way in which he was tried. No stable country can be based on a shameful show-trial shuch as this one. All countries Built on violence continue inn violence. Look at Israel, look at Afghanistan, heck just look at iraq. This is only going to give fuel to any residual supporters.

Id alos like to point out that Saddam Hussein actually did help his country modernise in many ways.We can actually draw many parallels between Husseins rule and dStalin's rule. Both gained power thanks to some very tricky political intriguing,both were really into purgeing their party and army quite often, both used a cult of the personality to manatin control, both undertook wars of expansion though saddam failed quite often, and both whipped ailing backward countries into shape through rapid if ruthless industrialisation. Obviously you can find millions of other fdifferences but these are some of th e main similarities i found. Iraq was very very far from being a crushed nation under Saddams dictatorship, at least until he went to war with Iran, and maybe even after that fo a bit.

EDIT

I was going to make a new thread about this but decided not to
Saddam Double 'Hanged!' Charade Ended (maybe)!

From Dick Fojut in Tucson
[email protected]
12-30-6

About the "Saddam" double just sentenced and privately "hanged" - or has a different "body" been substituted while the cleanly shaved double has been flown out of Iraq, his bombastic shouting charade no longer needed?

America's major "news" media are obediently parroting the Bush Administration (and puppet Iraqi government) claim that (the REAL) "Saddam" has been sentenced and hanged - carefully ignoring the following contradictory facts...

* Saddam's Wife (of 25 years), angrily said the Prisoner was NOT Saddam, but one of his doubles


* Saddam's Mistress said the Prisoner was NOT Saddam, but one of his doubles


* Saddam had even, pristine teeth, the Saddam double's teeth were/are uneven and ragged


(Further below, open and read URLS of entire articles detailing the above)

REMEMBER THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S OTHER LIES...
A majority of American voters (and members of Congress) are now aware that President Bush and his cabal of (pro-Israel/anti-Iraq) NeoCon MISadvisors publicly LIED to falsely "justify" their (long pre-planned) war on Iraq...


* They LIED when they claimed Iraq possessed "Weapons of Mass Destruction."


* They LIED when they claimed Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda.


* They LIED when they "inferred" that Iraq and Saddam were DIRECTLY involved in the 2001 9/11 attacks. (Often more than just "inferred" by VP Cheney)


According to a recent poll in Iraq, Cheney's 9/11 lie is believed by a deceived majority of our misinformed troops in Iraq - who still falsely THINK our invasion and occupation is justified "REVENGE" for Iraq's role in 9/11)


* They LIED about Iraqi civilian dead, pretending they were far less than the recent estimate of more than 655,000.


* And they may also be LYING - and hiding - how many American troops have actually died, more than the near 3,000 officially reported. Evidence has surfaced that OVER 10,000 Americans may have died...

http://rense.com/general74/double.htm

I highly advise reading the reast of text on the page before answering to this quote.

[Wanted Man]

Originally posted by Young Stupid [email protected] 31, 2006 05:28 am
So you find one person who says something about Isreal and everyone who wants Saddam dead is an imperialist? I want all world leaders dead, not just Hussein.
"One person" as in the prime minister of Israel? Get a clue.

Anyway, it's a matter of priorities. Had a proletarian revolution occured, in which Saddam would be on the side of the bourgeoisie, and if he had been captured and punished in such a situation, I would cheer. But instead, we've had an imperialist invasion that has killed 3/4 million Iraqis("attempted genocide", anyone? :lol: ), and its puppet government has now hanged Saddam. It's not so much a matter of "wanting Saddam dead", it's a matter of who killed him, why they killed him, and in whose interests he was killed.


Wake up and smell the coffee, WWSD. You're an apologist for attempted genocide.
What the hell are you babbling about? Let's have a look at the logic used here:

Saying Saddam's death should not be cheered at this point = anti-imperialism = apologism for "attempted genocide"???

Well, I've got a better one:

Anti-imperialism = My Little Pony = against eating salad(shamelessly copied from a comrade on S-E, who was responding to a similar leap in logic)

Now you know how much sense you are making. As for "attempted genocide", sure, that's all cool: better than if he was actually successful, right? :lol:

razboz: Don't use that website. It's conspiracy theorist shite.

[JKP]

Originally posted by Spiritual [email protected] 31, 2006 08:05 am
I think it's pretty barbaric that they hanged him. I don't believe in the death penalty. I think it's a lot worse to rot in a cell for the rest of your life than to be executed. And that they hanged him, I mean, that's probably the worst method of execution since it involves a lot of pain. Executions don't have a place in our day and age.
Just FYI, since you're new here, a revolution (of any type) involves people dying, getting executed, and other non humanist things.

I certainly don't mind seeing a former lackey of the U.S like saddam bite the dust. Reagan, Pinochet, Suharto and all the other U.S sponsored monsters died in comfort; these fuckers should of been publicly hanged just like Saddam.

Although I do agree that they should of kept Saddam around a bit longer to extract information from him.

[YSR]

Originally posted by [email protected] 31, 2006 09:16 am
Had a proletarian revolution occured, in which Saddam would be on the side of the bourgeoisie, and if he had been captured and punished in such a situation, I would cheer.
Yay.


But instead, we've had an imperialist invasion that has killed 3/4 million Iraqis("attempted genocide", anyone? :lol: ), and its puppet government has now hanged Saddam. It's not so much a matter of "wanting Saddam dead", it's a matter of who killed him, why they killed him, and in whose interests he was killed.

Okay, I see what you're saying. In your original statement, you made it sound like anyone who wanted Saddam dead would be an imperialist. I suspect that the Kurds, who he tried to eliminate, probably have reason to dislike him a wee bit.


What the hell are you babbling about? Let's have a look at the logic used here:

Saying Saddam's death should not be cheered at this point = anti-imperialism = apologism for "attempted genocide"???

Well, I've got a better one:

Anti-imperialism = My Little Pony = against eating salad(shamelessly copied from a comrade on S-E, who was responding to a similar leap in logic)

Lemme run this by you again: Imperialism=bad

Saddam=attempted genocidal dictator=also bad

Kill 'em all.

[GoaRedStar]

Here a article by the WSWS.

The execution of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein serves not justice, but the political purposes of the Bush administration and its Iraqi stooges. The manner in which the execution was carried out—hurriedly, secretively, in the dark of night, in a mockery of any semblance of legal process—only underscores the lawless and reactionary character of the entire American enterprise in Iraq.

There were conflicting statements throughout Friday about how and under what circumstances the death sentence against Hussein, confirmed by an Iraqi government tribunal December 26, would be carried out. There were continual communications back and forth between the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which nominally controlled the judicial proceedings, and the American military authorities who had physical control of the prisoner and delivered him to the execution site in the US-controlled Green Zone.

The decision to send Hussein to the gallows was not a judicial but a political one. It was signaled by al-Maliki himself after the death sentence was pronounced by a special tribunal on November 5, when the Iraqi prime minister declared that Hussein would be executed before the New Year. In the rush to impose the penalty on that timeline, Iraqi officials ignored both elementary principles of judicial fairness and even their own constitution, which requires confirmation of a death sentence by the current Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani.

As Richard Dicker, international justice director of Human Rights Watch, explained in a column Friday in the Guardian, the legal procedure was a travesty.

“The trial judgment,” he wrote, “was not finished when the verdict and sentence were announced on November 5. The record only became available to defense lawyers on November 22. According to the tribunal’s statute, the defense attorneys had to file their appeals on December 5, which gave them less than two weeks to respond to the 300-page trial decision. The appeals chamber never held a hearing to consider the legal arguments presented as allowed by Iraqi law. It defies belief that the appeals chamber could fairly review a 300-page decision together with written submissions by the defense and consider all the relevant issues in less than three weeks.”

Rather than a tribunal modeled on Nuremberg, where the surviving Nazi leaders received far more extensive due process rights than were accorded Hussein, the proceedings in Baghdad resembled a Stalinist or Nazi show trial, with a puppet judge, a predetermined verdict and a sentence carried out in the dead of night.

The political motives

The most fundamental political motive of the Bush administration is its desire to kill a major opponent, openly, before the eyes of the world, simply to demonstrate its ability and will to do so. In the view of the White House, Saddam is an object lesson to any future opponent of American imperialism: defy the will of Washington, and his bloody fate could be yours.

The execution also provides the Bush administration with an event it can claim as proof of US “success” in Iraq, a diversion from the grisly daily toll of Iraqi and American deaths. The media coverage of the execution has largely overshadowed reports on the death toll among US soldiers, which hit 100 in December and will likely top the 3,000 mark for the war as a whole before the month is out.

The state killing is intended to give at least a short-term political boost to the beleaguered regime of al-Maliki, which is increasingly unpopular and unstable. The Bush administration has been pressing al-Maliki to break with the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, one of his principal political allies, and endorse a US-led military crackdown on the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia loyal to al-Sadr.

Executing Hussein provides a means for Maliki to burnish his credentials with the Shiite majority, who suffered most from Hussein’s rule, while going ahead with plans for intensified violence against the predominantly working class eastern suburbs of Baghdad (Sadr City), a center of Shiite opposition to the US occupation.

Another important political consideration is that the execution of Hussein brings the legal proceedings against the former Iraqi leader to an end before any detailed examination of those crimes in which successive US governments played a major role. The case of the execution of 148 Shiite men at Dujail in 1982 was selected to be tried first because the victims were linked to Dawa, the party of Maliki and the preceding US-backed prime minister, Ibrahim Jafari, and because there was no direct US involvement.

This was not the case for most of the other, far bloodier, episodes in the career of Saddam Hussein. The second case, the so-called Anfal campaign of mass killing of Kurds in 1987-88, towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war, was scheduled to resume January 8. Any serious investigation of those atrocities, culminating in the gassing of Kurds at Halabja, would shed light on the role of successive US administrations.

Hussein launched the war on Iran in September 1980 with the tacit backing of the Carter administration, which was then locked in a confrontation with Iran over the student seizure of the US embassy in Tehran and the taking of US officials as hostages. The Reagan administration subsequently provided significant aid to Hussein throughout the eight years of war, supplying tactical military intelligence used to target Iranian forces for chemical weapons attacks, and backing arms sales to Iraq by European allies of the United States such as Britain, France and Germany. On two occasions, in 1983 and 1984, Donald Rumsfeld was sent to Iraq as a special US envoy to reassure Hussein that despite occasional noises about human rights violations, the US would maintain its allegiance to Baghdad in the war.

The other major case against Hussein, over the bloody suppression of revolts by Kurds and Shiites in 1991, threatened to be even more problematic for the Bush administration, since Bush’s own father, the first president Bush, first encouraged the uprisings at the end of the Persian Gulf War, then came to the cold-blooded decision that the continuance of Hussein’s dictatorship was preferable to a collapse of the Iraqi state, which might benefit Iran, the principal concern of US war planners.

Opposition to Saddam Hussein’s show trial and condemnation of his execution in no way imply political support for the former ruler or his policies. Hussein was a typical representative of the national bourgeoisie in a backward and oppressed country—occasionally coming into conflict with imperialism, but implacably committed to the defense of the privileges and property of the Iraqi bourgeoisie against the Iraqi working class.

Hussein’s first major act of mass repression came at the culmination of his rise to power in the late 1970s, when the Baath Party massacred the leadership of the Iraqi Communist Party and suppressed the large and militant working class movement centered in Baghdad and the oil fields. The present disintegration of Iraq along religious/sectarian lines is one of the long-term consequences of this savage repression of the working class, applauded at the time by the United States.

The Iraqi leader was not, however, tried and sentenced under the auspices of a working class tribunal. He was the subject of a kangaroo court established by an occupation regime after the invasion and conquest of Iraq by the United States. In other words, his crimes were judged and the penalty imposed by those guilty of even greater crimes than his own.

An editorial Friday in the Washington Post perfectly captures the hypocrisy with which the Bush administration, the congressional Democrats and Republicans, and the American media approached the case against Saddam Hussein. The Post sententiously declared its general opposition to the death penalty, before declaring that if it was appropriate for anyone it should be applied to “Saddam Hussein—a man who, with the possible exception of Kim Jong Il, has more blood on his hands than anyone else alive.”

We beg to differ. George W. Bush has already caused the deaths of more Iraqis than Saddam Hussein—some 655,000 since the US invasion in March 2003, according to a study by the Johns Hopkins school of public health—and his term in office still has two years to run. This is to say nothing of the still living US accomplices of Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, and the successive US presidents—Bush’s father, Clinton, Bush himself—who backed the US-led embargo on Iraq that caused the death of an estimated 1.5 million Iraqis from 1991 to 2003.

True justice for the tortured and oppressed people of Iraq, as well as the American, British and other victims of the US-led war, will come only when those responsible for the invasion and occupation—Bush, Cheney and their acolytes—face their own trials for waging an illegal war of aggression.

http://wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/sh-d30.shtml

And here is a another article by Robert Fisk called

A dictator created then destroyed by America

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2112555.ece

Also He takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him. By Robert Fisk

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2114403.ece

[Andy Bowden]

Why do Comrades think there was such a rush to convict and execute Saddam? It hasn't been inflicted upon other anti-US tyrants like Milosevic for example.

So why now?

My guess is that the execution was carried out to stick two fingers to the Sunnis and inflame the civil war.

The fact that one of his executioners was praising Moqtada Al Sadr when he killed him could point to this.

[Jacob Peters]

There will be grave consequences for this callous murder of Iraq's legal president. This was a contrived trial with a pre-meditated verdict. The defense was not even able to gather evidence. This trial was illegal because it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions for an occupying power to change the laws of a country. At the time of his murder, Saddam Hussein was still the legal president of Iraq. Due to the lack of any serious evidence and the risk of its own violations of international law being exposed, the occupying imperialist power dodged trying Saddam Hussein in an international court.

And let's take a look at accomplishments of Comrade Hussein and his revolutionary predecessors:

Education:
This social history is confirmed in the efforts of the government to generalize opportunities for basic education throughout the country. Between 1976 and 1986, the number of primary-school students increased 30 percent; female students increased 45 percent, from 35 to 44 percent of the total. The number of primary-school teachers increased 40 percent over this period. At the secondary level, the number of students increased by 46 percent, and the number of female students increased by 55 percent, from 29 to 36 percent of the total. Baghdad, which had about 29 percent of the population, had 26 percent of the primary students, 27 percent of the female primary students, and 32 percent of the secondary students.

The number of students seeking to pursue higher education in the 1980s increased dramatically. Accordingly, in the mid-1980s the government made plans to expand Salah ad Din University in Irbil in the north and to establish Ar Rashid University outside Baghdad. The latter was not yet in existence in early 1988 but both were designed ultimately to accommodate 50,000 students. In addition, at the end of December 1987, the government announced plans to create four more universities: one in Tikrit in the central area, one each at Al Kufah and Al Qadisiyah in the south, and one at Al Anbar in the west. Details of these universities were not known.

Social welfare:
Iraq, with its socialist economy, pays considerable attention to welfare. This regard for social benefits has been increased by the war. No statistics were available in early 1988 by which to judge the scope of benefits paid by the government to its servicemen and their families. Nonetheless, journalistic reports indicated that martyrs' benefits--for the families of war dead-- and subsidies for young men who volunteer for service tended to be extremely generous. A family that had lost a son in the fighting could expect to be subsidized for life; in addition, it was likely to receive loans from the state bank on easy terms and gifts of real estate. Minimal information was available in early 1988 concerning social welfare coverage. The most recent published data was that for 1983, when the government listed 824,560 workers covered by social security. In addition, pensions were paid to retirees and disabled persons as well as compensation to workers for maternity and sick leaves.

Electricity:
Iraqi electric power consumption increased by a factor of fourteen in the twenty-year period between 1968 and 1988, and in the late 1980s it was expected to double every four to five years. Ongoing rural electrification contributed to increased demand; about 7,000 villages throughout the nation were provided electricity in the same twenty-year period. The destruction in 1980 of power-generating facilities near the Iran-Iraq border interrupted only temporarily the rapid growth in production and consumption. In 1981 the government awarded US$2 billion in contracts to foreign construction companies that were building hydroelectric and thermal generating plants as well as transmission facilities. By 1983 the production and consumption of electricity had recovered to the prewar levels of 15.6 billion kwh (kilowatt hours) and 11.7 billion kwh, respectively. As previously commissioned projects continued to come onstream, Iraq's generating capacity was expected to exceed 6,000 megawatts by 1986. In December 1987, following the completion of power lines designed to carry 400 million kwh of power to Turkey, Iraq became the first country in the Middle East to export electric power. Iraq was expected to earn US$15 million annually from this arrangement. Long-range plans entailed exporting an additional 3 billion kwh to Turkey and eventually providing Kuwait with electricity.

Liberation of Women:
The first parliamentary elections since Iraq became a republic in 1958 were held in June 1980, and the First National Assembly convened at the end of that month. Baath Party candidates won 75 percent, or 187, of the 250 seats. The remaining 25 percent were won by parties allied with the Baath and by independent parties. Elections for the Second National Assembly were held in October 1984. Approximately 7,171,000 votes were cast in that election, and the Baath won 73 percent (183) of the seats. Thirty-three women were elected to the assembly. Saadun Hammadi was elected chairman of the assembly, and two years later he was made a member of the RCC.

Land Reform:
There was little doubt that this massive migration and the land reform reduced the number of landless peasants. The most recent comprehensive tenurial statistics available before the war broke out--the Agricultural Census of 1971--put the total farmland (probably meaning cultivable land, rather than land under cultivation) at over 5.7 million hectares, of which more than 98.2 percent was held by "civil persons." About 30 percent of this had been distributed under the agrarian reform. The average size of the holdings was about 9.7 hectares; but 60 percent of the holdings were smaller than 7.5 hectares, accounting for less than 14 percent of the total area. At the other end of the scale, 0.2 percent of the holdings were 250 hectares or larger, amounting to more than 14 percent of the total. Fifty-two percent of the total was owner-operated, 41 percent was farmed under rental agreements, 4.8 percent was worked by squatters, and only 0.6 percent was sharecropped. The status of the remaining 1.6 percent was uncertain. On the basis of limited statistics released by the government in 1985, the amount of land distributed since the inception of the reform program totaled 2,271,250 hectares

Sunni-Shia solidarity:
The Shias continued to make good progress in the economic field as well during the 1980s. Although the government does not publish statistics that give breakdowns by religious affiliation, qualified observers noted that many Shias migrated from rural areas, particularly in the south, to the cities, so that not only Basra but other cities including Baghdad acquired a Shia majority. Many of these Shias prospered in business and the professions as well as in industry and the service sector. Even those living in the poorer areas of the cities were generally better off than they had been in the countryside. In the rural areas as well, the educational level of Shias came to approximate that of their Sunni counterparts.

Although the Shias had been underrepresented in government posts in the period of the monarchy, they made substantial progress in the educational, business, and legal fields. Their advancement in other areas, such as the opposition parties, was such that in the years from 1952 to 1963, before the Baath Party came to power, Shias held the majority of party leadership posts. Observers believed that in the late 1980s Shias were represented at all levels of the party roughly in proportion to government estimates of their numbers in the population. For example, of the eight top Iraqi leaders who in early 1988 sat with Husayn on the Revolutionary Command Council--Iraq's highest governing body-- three were Arab Shias (of whom one had served as Minister of Interior), three were Arab Sunnis, one was an Arab Christian, and one a Kurd. On the Regional Command Council--the ruling body of the party--Shias actually predominated

During the war, a number of highly competent Shia officers have been promoted to corps commanders. The general who turned back the initial Iranian invasions of Iraq in 1982 was a Shia.

Although about three-quarters of the lower ranks of the army were Shias, as of early 1988, no general insurrection of Iraqi Shias had occurred.

Alignment with anti-Imperialist bloc:
In 1972 the Baathist regime signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. Article 1 stated that the treaty's objective was to develop broad cooperation between Iraq and the Soviet Union in economic, trade, scientific, technical, and other fields on the basis of "respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and non-interference in one another's internal affairs." Under the treaty, Iraq obtained extensive technical assistance and military equipment from the Soviet Union.

Urbanization
Demographic estimates based on the 1987 census reflected an increase in the urban population from 5,452,000 in 1970 to 7,646,054 in 1977, and to 11,078,000 in 1987 or 68 percent of the population. Census data show the remarkable growth of Baghdad in particular, from just over 500,000 in 1947 to 1,745,000 in 1965; and from 3,226,000 in 1977 to 3,845,000 in 1987.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/iqtoc.html


1982, and not for the anfal-operation which killed some 180,000 kurds. That's, in my opinion, an insult to the kurdish people, and all the still living relatives and families to those who where killed.

There is no serious evidence that Kurds were gassed. To begin with there were never any victims produced. International relief organizations who examined the Kurds -- in Turkey where they had gone for asylum -- failed to discover any. Nor were there ever any found inside Iraq. The claim rests solely on testimony of the Kurds who had crossed the border into Turkey, where they were interviewed by staffers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Given these dubious allegations, your claim that 180,000 Kurds were killed is flautlent at best.

[The Grey Blur]

Originally posted by Jacob [email protected] 01, 2007 02:22 am
There will be grave consequences for this callous murder of Iraq's legal president. This was a contrived trial with a pre-meditated verdict. The defense was not even able to gather evidence. This trial was illegal because it is a violation of the Geneva Conventions for an occupying power to change the laws of a country. At the time of his murder, Saddam Hussein was still the legal president of Iraq. Due to the lack of any serious evidence and the risk of its own violations of international law being exposed, the occupying imperialist power dodged trying Saddam Hussein in an international court.

And let's take a look at accomplishments of Comrade Hussein and his revolutionary predecessors:

Education:
This social history is confirmed in the efforts of the government to generalize opportunities for basic education throughout the country. Between 1976 and 1986, the number of primary-school students increased 30 percent; female students increased 45 percent, from 35 to 44 percent of the total. The number of primary-school teachers increased 40 percent over this period. At the secondary level, the number of students increased by 46 percent, and the number of female students increased by 55 percent, from 29 to 36 percent of the total. Baghdad, which had about 29 percent of the population, had 26 percent of the primary students, 27 percent of the female primary students, and 32 percent of the secondary students.

The number of students seeking to pursue higher education in the 1980s increased dramatically. Accordingly, in the mid-1980s the government made plans to expand Salah ad Din University in Irbil in the north and to establish Ar Rashid University outside Baghdad. The latter was not yet in existence in early 1988 but both were designed ultimately to accommodate 50,000 students. In addition, at the end of December 1987, the government announced plans to create four more universities: one in Tikrit in the central area, one each at Al Kufah and Al Qadisiyah in the south, and one at Al Anbar in the west. Details of these universities were not known.

Social welfare:
Iraq, with its socialist economy, pays considerable attention to welfare. This regard for social benefits has been increased by the war. No statistics were available in early 1988 by which to judge the scope of benefits paid by the government to its servicemen and their families. Nonetheless, journalistic reports indicated that martyrs' benefits--for the families of war dead-- and subsidies for young men who volunteer for service tended to be extremely generous. A family that had lost a son in the fighting could expect to be subsidized for life; in addition, it was likely to receive loans from the state bank on easy terms and gifts of real estate. Minimal information was available in early 1988 concerning social welfare coverage. The most recent published data was that for 1983, when the government listed 824,560 workers covered by social security. In addition, pensions were paid to retirees and disabled persons as well as compensation to workers for maternity and sick leaves.

Electricity:
Iraqi electric power consumption increased by a factor of fourteen in the twenty-year period between 1968 and 1988, and in the late 1980s it was expected to double every four to five years. Ongoing rural electrification contributed to increased demand; about 7,000 villages throughout the nation were provided electricity in the same twenty-year period. The destruction in 1980 of power-generating facilities near the Iran-Iraq border interrupted only temporarily the rapid growth in production and consumption. In 1981 the government awarded US$2 billion in contracts to foreign construction companies that were building hydroelectric and thermal generating plants as well as transmission facilities. By 1983 the production and consumption of electricity had recovered to the prewar levels of 15.6 billion kwh (kilowatt hours) and 11.7 billion kwh, respectively. As previously commissioned projects continued to come onstream, Iraq's generating capacity was expected to exceed 6,000 megawatts by 1986. In December 1987, following the completion of power lines designed to carry 400 million kwh of power to Turkey, Iraq became the first country in the Middle East to export electric power. Iraq was expected to earn US$15 million annually from this arrangement. Long-range plans entailed exporting an additional 3 billion kwh to Turkey and eventually providing Kuwait with electricity.

Liberation of Women:
The first parliamentary elections since Iraq became a republic in 1958 were held in June 1980, and the First National Assembly convened at the end of that month. Baath Party candidates won 75 percent, or 187, of the 250 seats. The remaining 25 percent were won by parties allied with the Baath and by independent parties. Elections for the Second National Assembly were held in October 1984. Approximately 7,171,000 votes were cast in that election, and the Baath won 73 percent (183) of the seats. Thirty-three women were elected to the assembly. Saadun Hammadi was elected chairman of the assembly, and two years later he was made a member of the RCC.

Land Reform:
There was little doubt that this massive migration and the land reform reduced the number of landless peasants. The most recent comprehensive tenurial statistics available before the war broke out--the Agricultural Census of 1971--put the total farmland (probably meaning cultivable land, rather than land under cultivation) at over 5.7 million hectares, of which more than 98.2 percent was held by "civil persons." About 30 percent of this had been distributed under the agrarian reform. The average size of the holdings was about 9.7 hectares; but 60 percent of the holdings were smaller than 7.5 hectares, accounting for less than 14 percent of the total area. At the other end of the scale, 0.2 percent of the holdings were 250 hectares or larger, amounting to more than 14 percent of the total. Fifty-two percent of the total was owner-operated, 41 percent was farmed under rental agreements, 4.8 percent was worked by squatters, and only 0.6 percent was sharecropped. The status of the remaining 1.6 percent was uncertain. On the basis of limited statistics released by the government in 1985, the amount of land distributed since the inception of the reform program totaled 2,271,250 hectares

Sunni-Shia solidarity:
The Shias continued to make good progress in the economic field as well during the 1980s. Although the government does not publish statistics that give breakdowns by religious affiliation, qualified observers noted that many Shias migrated from rural areas, particularly in the south, to the cities, so that not only Basra but other cities including Baghdad acquired a Shia majority. Many of these Shias prospered in business and the professions as well as in industry and the service sector. Even those living in the poorer areas of the cities were generally better off than they had been in the countryside. In the rural areas as well, the educational level of Shias came to approximate that of their Sunni counterparts.

Although the Shias had been underrepresented in government posts in the period of the monarchy, they made substantial progress in the educational, business, and legal fields. Their advancement in other areas, such as the opposition parties, was such that in the years from 1952 to 1963, before the Baath Party came to power, Shias held the majority of party leadership posts. Observers believed that in the late 1980s Shias were represented at all levels of the party roughly in proportion to government estimates of their numbers in the population. For example, of the eight top Iraqi leaders who in early 1988 sat with Husayn on the Revolutionary Command Council--Iraq's highest governing body-- three were Arab Shias (of whom one had served as Minister of Interior), three were Arab Sunnis, one was an Arab Christian, and one a Kurd. On the Regional Command Council--the ruling body of the party--Shias actually predominated

During the war, a number of highly competent Shia officers have been promoted to corps commanders. The general who turned back the initial Iranian invasions of Iraq in 1982 was a Shia.

Although about three-quarters of the lower ranks of the army were Shias, as of early 1988, no general insurrection of Iraqi Shias had occurred.

Alignment with anti-Imperialist bloc:
In 1972 the Baathist regime signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. Article 1 stated that the treaty's objective was to develop broad cooperation between Iraq and the Soviet Union in economic, trade, scientific, technical, and other fields on the basis of "respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity and non-interference in one another's internal affairs." Under the treaty, Iraq obtained extensive technical assistance and military equipment from the Soviet Union.

Urbanization
Demographic estimates based on the 1987 census reflected an increase in the urban population from 5,452,000 in 1970 to 7,646,054 in 1977, and to 11,078,000 in 1987 or 68 percent of the population. Census data show the remarkable growth of Baghdad in particular, from just over 500,000 in 1947 to 1,745,000 in 1965; and from 3,226,000 in 1977 to 3,845,000 in 1987.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/iqtoc.html


1982, and not for the anfal-operation which killed some 180,000 kurds. That's, in my opinion, an insult to the kurdish people, and all the still living relatives and families to those who where killed.

There is no serious evidence that Kurds were gassed. To begin with there were never any victims produced. International relief organizations who examined the Kurds -- in Turkey where they had gone for asylum -- failed to discover any. Nor were there ever any found inside Iraq. The claim rests solely on testimony of the Kurds who had crossed the border into Turkey, where they were interviewed by staffers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Given these dubious allegations, your claim that 180,000 Kurds were killed is flautlent at best.
Ban

[Jacob Peters]

I would also like to add that I supported Iraq in her effort in 1980 to liberate the Arab-inhabited Khuzestan territory under the wrath of the demented mullahcracy which seized power in Iran. As Khuzestan is ethnic Arab territory, Iraq had every right to bring about self-determination on the behalf of oppressed Arabs. Arab oil and Arab territory only belong to Arab countries. Much Iranian polemics of "Arab aggression" is empty propaganda. For the most part, the territory Iraq entered consisted of Arabs. I support the Baathist and Sunni resistance in Iraq who are fighting to liberate their country from dual American-Iranian domination.

[Comrade J]

Haha, you sound like the sorta guy who posts on socialistparadise.net.


Social welfare:
Iraq, with its socialist economy, pays considerable attention to welfare. This regard for social benefits has been increased by the war. No statistics were available in early 1988 by which to judge the scope of benefits paid by the government to its servicemen and their families. Nonetheless, journalistic reports indicated that martyrs' benefits--for the families of war dead-- and subsidies for young men who volunteer for service tended to be extremely generous. A family that had lost a son in the fighting could expect to be subsidized for life; in addition, it was likely to receive loans from the state bank on easy terms and gifts of real estate. Minimal information was available in early 1988 concerning social welfare coverage. The most recent published data was that for 1983, when the government listed 824,560 workers covered by social security. In addition, pensions were paid to retirees and disabled persons as well as compensation to workers for maternity and sick leaves.

Since when did Iraq have a socialist economy?

[Jacob Peters]

Many components of Iraq's economy were socialist. There was land reform, collectivization, and nationalization of petroleum. There was socialized education, socialized medicine, and generous welfare benefits. Refer to the Library of Congress country study.

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/iqtoc.html

[Cheung Mo]

The bastard deserved it: He and his nationalist cronies in the Ba'ath Party were funded by Washington as a counter-balanace to a socialist-leaning government.

[Jacob Peters]

What the fuck are you talking about? Iraq had been a traditional ally of the USSR and the socialist bloc. A treaty of friendship between Iraq and the USSR was signed in 1972. The Baath Party in Iraq and Syria conducted genuinely socialist policies which included the distribution of land to peasants and the nationalization of industry and natural resources. In the 1970s there was a progressive national front with the communists.

And how the fuck do "nationalists" like the Baathists come around to providing autonomy to the Kurds?

Article 5

(b) The Iraqi People are composed of two principal nationalisms: the Arab Nationalism and the Kurdish Nationalism.
(c.) This Constitution acknowledges the national rights of the Kurdish People and the legitimate rights of all minorities within the Iraqi unity.

Article 7
(a) Arabic is the official language.
(b) The Kurdish language is official, besides Arabic, in the Kurdish Region.

http://www.mallat.com/iraq%20const%201970.htm

[Comrade J]

Do you post on socialistparadise.net?

If you do, please tell everyone in the Antifa thread they are a ****, it's the most ridiculous load of bollocks I've ever had the great misfortune of reading. Apparently, Antifa are pro-Zionist murderers who want to kill Christian children.
And I'm not exaggerating, seriously go read it.

[RevolutionaryMarxist]

Originally posted by LeftyHenry+December 30, 2006 07:39 am--> (LeftyHenry @ December 30, 2006 07:39 am)
Young Stupid [email protected] 30, 2006 07:30 am
Yeah, one couldn't help by notice that irritating bullshit, LH. I watched Hannity and Colmes as they killed him. Oy vey.
omg are you okay? I'd rather have my heart ripped out by a goblin than watch Hannity and Colmes. [/b]
Fox News is the only free news channel my TV Plan offers, so its the only news I can watch =(

And Personally I find it interesting that the media isn't jumping all over this "Baath 'Socialist' Party" thing as a way to attack socialism.

[Joseph Ball]

I wish to protest about some of the comments that have been made on this thread including the use of expletives.

We have just seen the President of a sovereign nation executed by a government controlled by the US and UK who still presume to lecture the oppressed nations about 'human rights' 'democracy' and 'the rule of law'. The disgusting behaviour of US/UK puppets as Saddam was executed is testament to the utter bankruptcy of western values. It's a cop-out to say as some do that 'I support his death but I just wish it hadn't been done by the US but by the people of Iraq.' This is to replace a concrete analysis of the situation with fantasied alternative scenarios-which is the usual methodology of Trotskyists, anarchists and liberals when analysing any aspect of the anti-imperialist struggle.

Jacob Peters has a perfect right to express his views. Trotskyists who call for him to be banned are just showing which side they are on when push comes to shove. However, Peters undermines his own arguments by the use of expletives. I also take issue with the idea that Baathist Iraq was socialist. The Baathists overthrew Qassim in 1963. Qassim was a nationalist who legalised the communist party. Immediately after the coup the Baathists started killing communists. Saddam also mounted a savage repression of communists in the 70s (mainly revisionists by the time, admittidly).

Saddam used oil money to create a welfare state for his people and there was also state intervention in industry etc. But this on its own is not socialism. Saddam was a bourgeois nationalist. However, after 1991 he was in an antagonistic relationship with western imperialism. As western imperialism is the main enemy of the people of the world (at the current time) anti-imperialists must make a united front with all those that oppose it and who can be united with.

Many will say-'what about Saddam's crimes'. But let's be scientific about this. According to the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies 80% of the population feel the situation in the country was better before it was occupied (see the UK Guardian newspaper 01.01.07 see http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1980775,00.html). This is one reason why socialists support the United Front. Whatever Saddan did-better him than imperialism. Mesmerised by fantasies of western powers going around the world spreading democracy and 'civilisation' western populations are unable to grasp such relatively simple points and this is a problem that afflicts much of the western left too.

Also, don't forget the United Front is only a stage in replacing governments like Saddams with socialist regimes that promote the rights of the workers and peasants and guarantee the rights of different national groups.

[Jacob Peters]

However, Peters undermines his own arguments by the use of expletives.

This is a manifestation of bourgeois formality on your part. I did not insult any one by using what you consider to be an expletive.


I also take issue with the idea that Baathist Iraq was socialist. The Baathists overthrew Qassim in 1963. Qassim was a nationalist who legalised the communist party.

Kassim had been highly discredited. The economy was in a horrendous condition and his government was unable to suppress the costly Kurdish insurrection. Kassem had badly alienated by revolutionary Arabic countries like Egypt. Through a series of inept manoevres he even forfeited support from the socialist bloc. Kassim and his oppressive regime deserved to be overthrown. In 1963, a nationwide strike by higher and secondary level students was so paralyzing that only 10 percent appeared for mid-year exams. Except for the communists, all of Kassim's allies had abandoned him.

The characterization of the Baathists as bourgeois anti-socialist nationalists is distortive. Governments led by Baathists in Iraq and Syria have always been anti-imperialist any friendly with the socialist bloc. Baathist countries have implemented land reform, liberated women, nationalized industry and petroleum, and provided free education and medical care.


Immediately after the coup the Baathists started killing communists. Saddam also mounted a savage repression of communists in the 70s (mainly revisionists by the time, admittidly).

You mean the Iraqi Communist Party members? The same "communists" who were receiving financial support from the Iranian communist parties to topple Saddam Hussein in the heat of the Iran-Iraq war? The same "communists" who welcomed the terrorist attack and terrorist invasion of Iraq by the U.S. and are on record celebrating their "liberation" by the U.S. imperialists? The same "communists" who collaborated with the newly-created US puppet regime through the IGC? Surely you cannot mean these "communists".

These "communists" cheered the execution of Iraq's legal president S.Hussein:

The following are relevant points in a statement issued Nov. 5 by the Iraqi Communist Party:

“Iraqi Communists, along with the overwhelming majority of our people, have received with deep satisfaction the news of the verdict on the tyrant Saddam Hussein."
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/10226/1/142/

The Baathist coup in 1963 was short lived. The army overthrow the Baathist government on 17 November 1963 and the Baathists would not regain their power until 1968 when they reconciled with the communists. The conflict between the Baathists and communists was started by the communists. In 1978 it was found that Communists were establishing secret cells in units of Iraq's armed forces.


. Saddam was a bourgeois nationalist.

I don't quite see how a bourgeois nationalist would come around to giving recognition to the Kurds. An example of a bourgeois nationalist would be Atatürk. This claim that the acknowledgement of a national identity is fallacious. All countries which defined themselves as adhering to Marxist-Leninism had nationalist characteristics whether it be in the "Vietnamese Fatherland Front" or Mao Zedong's ardent Chinese nationalism manifested by aggression unleashed on India in 1962 and USSR in 1969. This denunciation of nationalism is misplaced since all resistance movements against foreign occupation have had at least some nationalist characteristics.

[Comrade_Scott]

This execution made no sense. First off he had many other trials to see out(no justice for the kurds) and secondly it is not going to stop the violence if anything it will increase it the sunnis will see the hanging as vengence not justice and increase the attacks. I feel sorry for the common iraqi a pointless illegal warand still no justice. sad days in iraq today and for a long time after

[Jacob Peters]

First off he had many other trials to see out(no justice for the kurds)

At the behest of Iran and western imperialists trying to destabilize Iraq, the Kurdish rebel groups launched a series of insurrections. They were defeated in what was all respects a fair fight.

In 1975, Iran agreed to close its borders to the Kurdish rebels and abandon support for their cause. Unsurpringly, their uprising collapsed soon after.

A report by the U.S. House of Representatives' Select Committee on Intelligence, in 1976 concluded that Nixon had ordered the CIA to send to Kurdish rebels, via Iran, untraceable Soviet and Chinese small arms and ammunition worth $1 million.

Kurdish rebel groups in Iraq have only ever been used as chess pieces by America,Iran, and others vying to rule the country by proxy. It is inconsistent to condemn Iraq for reacting to violence with violence but turn a blind eye against the terrorism of Kurdish rebel groups. The Baathists were generous to the Kurds by giving them autonomy in the constitution. In 1974 President Bakr promulgated a law providing self-government for the Kurdish area. The law made Kurdish an official language in Kurdistan, permitted the area to have its own budget, and made provision for an elected legislative and executive council. The city of Irbīl was made the capital of Kurdistan.

Iraqi Kurdish leaders today are nothing but quislings. While the PKK deserves symapthy due to its Marxist character and destabilization of a fascist country aligned with western imperialism, Kurdish rebel groups in Iraq have been imperialist pawns in trying to destabilize Iraq.

Iraqi Kurdish rebels have even tried to obstruct the liberation of Kurds by the PKK. In October 1992, Iraqi Kurds seized the main PKK base near Sidakan.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent — that is, a cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-08.htm

[metalero]

Washington was in urge need to get rid of Saddam since he knew that most of his atrocities were sponsored by Reagan administration, including persecution and torture of communists in Irak, let alone quimical warfare against Iran and the Kurds. One more impunity for the empire, who's getting away hiding their crimes.

[Joseph Ball]

I criticised the use of expletives on this thread because we are meant to be above the level of the masked traitors who hanged the leader of a sovereign nation on the orders of their US/UK masters while baying like animals. Some of the posts on this thread, including the use of an obscene term with sexist conotations seemed to be reducing things to that level. I don't think Jacob Peters post was on that level and in general I would unite with it but in this context the use of expletives was ill-advised.

I'm not a purist when it comes to the use of the word 'socialism'. I acknowledge there are different socialisms but that Marxist-Leninist-Maoism is the most advanced form of socialism that has been developed. Socialisms that do not acknowledge two-line struggle in the party and Cultural Revolution will tend to suffer as a result and their progress will tend to be blocked or reversed. I really can't see Saddam as a socialist however. I think you can acknowledge that nationalism in an oppressed nation is positive and acknowledge that the United Front with bourgeois nationalists is positive without having to describe people like Saddam as socialist. This is the Maoist line. Which Maoists has Jacob been talking to that condemn all nationalists?

[Jacob Peters]

Which Maoists has Jacob been talking to that condemn all nationalists?

I never said that Maoists condemn nationalists since they seem to embrace various liberation movements with a nationalist character. It is the narrow-minded sectarianism employed by Trotskyists that is highly problematic.

[Phalanx]

There's no reason we should've supported Saddams actions. He oppressed ethnic groups (Kurds), sent Iraqi workers to their needless deaths in the Iran-Iraq War and again in the Gulf War, and was a friend of Washington for a number of years. The only purpose he served during the occupation was to proclaim himself as a martyr. History will remember the man as doing more harm than good for humanity.

[fashbash]

On the subject of hanged dictators... My very good friend's grandad was present at the hanging of Mussolini :o There were only two british soldiers there when it happened, and he was one of them but he refuses to talk about it, and it's insensitive to ask. Just thought I'd toss that in there. You can move on to the the next reply now. :ph34r:

[Jacob Peters]

He oppressed ethnic groups (Kurds)

That is inaccurate considering the generous autonomy provided to the Kurds. The cause of the Iraqi-Kurdish conflict was the Kurdish rebellion which on the behalf of the oppressive monarchy and demented mullahcracy of Iran as well as the CIA engaged in a campaign to destabilize Iraq.

Kurdish rebellion was hardly anything new when Saddam Hussein became president. The Kurdish rebellion was a large factor in bringing down Kassem. Segments of the Kurdish rebellion were outright traitors that cooperated with the Iranian Republican Guards.


sent Iraqi workers to their needless deaths in the Iran-Iraq War

Iraq was hardly to blame for the war. It were the expansionist designs of the mullahcracy and the immoral occupation of Arab territory in Khuzestan that was to blame for the conflict. Iran had been sponsoring Kurdish rebel groups in an effort to destabilize Iraq.

Border incidents had been a frequent since Iraq severed diplomatic relations with Iran in 1971 following Iran's occupation of three strategic islands in the Persian Gulf. More than 23 frontier skirmishes were reported in 1972, and 60 were reported in 1973.


and again in the Gulf War

Kuwait is rightfully Iraqi territory stolen by the British imperialists. In the liberation of Kuwait, Iraqi casualties amounted to just 37 lost planes. The liberation of Kuwait was for the most part non-violent. To blame Saddam Hussein for the murderous aggression which followed is fallacious. It would be like blaming a woman for getting raped.


and was a friend of Washington for a number of years.

Iraq was a traditional ally of the USSR. In the 1980s Iraq had broad international support. USSR, China, and the Arab League supported Iraq in its attempt to liberate Arab territory from the Iranian mullahs. Although Washington has been blatantly inconsistent and dishonest in its policies towards Iraq, S.Hussein was by no means a Washington puppet. Washington had gone as far as to list Iraq as "state sponsor of terrorism" in 1979.

[Jacob Peters]

That does not signify that S.Hussein was a Washington puppet. I could just as easily make the same case by showing pictures of Nixon with Mao and Brezhnev.

[Janus]

It seems that this execution is only going to further the sectarianism that is already going on in Iraq and will do more harm than good. Much of this is of course due to what happened at the execution itself with the Shiite executioners.

[Sean]

Saddam Hussein was obviously an asshole, but no more an asshole than those who installed then removed him. Any media outlet with even an inch of credibility would have called this one on exactly what he was and where he came from. Not a single one did. I personally felt the world get lighter when they got him, but fact of the matter is that he was installed and funded by the same ones who had him hang. Where was the interest when he DID carry out atrocities? But you certainly can't boo-hoo him since he was just another cog in the machine. The one thing I hate though (and it always happens) is that if you mention any of these or any points mentioned in the thread, YOU are automatically pro-saddam hussein, not the assholes that made him.

[Phalanx]

That is inaccurate considering the generous autonomy provided to the Kurds. The cause of the Iraqi-Kurdish conflict was the Kurdish rebellion which on the behalf of the oppressive monarchy and demented mullahcracy of Iran as well as the CIA engaged in a campaign to destabilize Iraq.

There was absolutely nothing 'generous' about the way Saddam treated the Kurds. I don't think settling hundreds of thousands of Arabs in Kurdistan is a way of respecting autonomy. Not to mention gassing and general oppression of Kurds. Or is that all a big Western media lie?


Iraq was hardly to blame for the war. It were the expansionist designs of the mullahcracy and the immoral occupation of Arab territory in Khuzestan that was to blame for the conflict. Iran had been sponsoring Kurdish rebel groups in an effort to destabilize Iraq.

Don't try to tell me that an Iranian province was responsible for the war. Saddam believed Iraq had full control over the entire waterway, and decided to go to war over it.


Kuwait is rightfully Iraqi territory stolen by the British imperialists. In the liberation of Kuwait, Iraqi casualties amounted to just 37 lost planes. The liberation of Kuwait was for the most part non-violent. To blame Saddam Hussein for the murderous aggression which followed is fallacious. It would be like blaming a woman for getting raped.

Instead of putting Iraqi lives on the line by invading Kuwait, Saddam could've tried to get Kuwait in other ways. Just look at how well the invasion did for Iraq :rolleyes:. The nation getting raped (at the time) was Kurdistan, not Iraq.


That does not signify that S.Hussein was a Washington puppet. I could just as easily make the same case by showing pictures of Nixon with Mao and Brezhnev.

Those world leaders didn't supply each other with arms. Although much of Iraqs' arsenal came from the USSR, the USA and France supplied millions in arms shipments.

[Jacob Peters]

There was absolutely nothing 'generous' about the way Saddam treated the Kurds.

I was not speaking exclusively about Saddam. He became president when Bakr resigned in 1979. But Baathist rule in Iraq begun in 1968. The Baathists gave extensive autonomy to the Kurds. But the Kurdish rebel groups at the behest of Iran and the CIA unleashed an insurrection. The Baathists were violently provoked by Kurdish rebels to who they simply reacted to with violence. It was in all respects a fair fight given the arms smuggled through Iran and the CIA in support of the Kurdish rebels.


Not to mention gassing and general oppression of Kurds. Or is that all a big Western media lie?

It is debateable as to whether Iraq gassed the Kurds. Western media blamed Iraq in order to demonize the her and build a case to tear the country apart. Iraq rejected the allegation that it was responsible for gassing Hajabla. It was also found that Iran employed poisonous gases in the conflict. But there is no conclusive evidence showing Iraq was responsible for the attack on Hajabla. It was more likely than not Iran which did so. An opinion piece in the NY Times found:

And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent — that is, a cyanide-based gas — which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0131-08.htm

[Severian]

Originally posted by Jacob [email protected] 01, 2007 10:04 pm

There was absolutely nothing 'generous' about the way Saddam treated the Kurds.

I was not speaking exclusively about Saddam. He became president when Bakr resigned in 1979. But Baathist rule in Iraq begun in 1968. The Baathists gave extensive autonomy to the Kurds. But the Kurdish rebel groups at the behest of Iran and the CIA unleashed an insurrection. The Baathists were violently provoked by Kurdish rebels to who they simply reacted to with violence. It was in all respects a fair fight given the arms smuggled through Iran and the CIA in support of the Kurdish rebels.
Oy. Yes, the Iraqi Kurdish rebels were backed by the shah's regime. This doesn't make Kurdish nationalism their creation, or remove the justice of their demand for self-determination. And "autonomy" under a totalitarian regime is necessarily meaningless.

The Kurdish question should be put in the broader context of the 1958 revolution in Iraq. After the overthrow of the monarchy, working people and all kinds of oppressed groups began coming forward and pressing their own demands. The rise of Ba'athism marked the suppression of that revolution, and the Iraqi working class. Parallel with that was the suppression of the Kurds.


It is debateable as to whether Iraq gassed the Kurds.
...
[i]And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

No, it's not reasonably debatable. And it's not surprising that the U.S., at the time, would try to blame Iran. Considering that U.S. policy was to back Iraq in the war, including intelligence cooperation to help Iraq use poison gas more effectively.

In 1988, while the Iraqi regime was massacring the population of Halabja, the U.S. Navy was deployed to the Gulf to protect Kuwaiti tankers shipping Iraqi oil.

[Jacob Peters]

Yes, the Iraqi Kurdish rebels were backed by the shah's regime. This doesn't make Kurdish nationalism their creation, or remove the justice of their demand for self-determination.

No one said that Kurdish nationalism was a creation of the Shah. There is lack of self-determination when the Kurdish rebels in the 1970s were completely dependent on arm smuggling from Iran. When Iran and Iraq signed a treaty in 1975, the Kurdish insurrection fell apart exposing the Kurdish insurrection in Iraq as nothing but a foreign proxy. The secession of Kurdish areas from Iraq would be a gross violation of Iraq's territorial integrity. You selectively employ this ridiculous sectarianism by denouncing the Baathists for not being Marxist but at the same time disregarding the absence of proletarian qualities in the Kurdish insurrection in Iraq. Even the "Kurdistan Democratic Party" collaborated with the American invaders and play a part in the institutions installed by the occupation.


And "autonomy" under a totalitarian regime is necessarily meaningless.

An alliance between Baathists and communists in the 1970s in the National Progressive Front fails to qualify as "totalitarian". The term "totalitarian" for the most part is a bloated term employed by western polemcists that slander any country's system of government that fails to conform to what is found in the west. You try to cast doubt on the presence of autonomy in the Iraqi Kurdish region without really being familiar with the situation there. The fact is that Baghdad had little control of the autonomous Kurdish region.


The rise of Ba'athism marked the suppression of that revolution, and the Iraqi working class. Parallel with that was the suppression of the Kurds.

That is inaccurate considering breakthrough progress for Iraqi workers and peasants in the 1970s. The fact is that the Kassem regime was overthrown because it lost all support.


And it's not surprising that the U.S., at the time, would try to blame Iran. Considering that U.S. policy was to back Iraq in the war, including intelligence cooperation to help Iraq use poison gas more effectively.

What are you talking about? The US distinctly blamed Iraq for the attack in 1988. Your insinuation that that these reports skewed out of political favoritism for Iraq lacks any proof. Just as Iraq stated, a UN investigation in 1988 found that both sides used chemical weapons. You employ yet more selective sectarianism by denouncing Iraq for diplomatic contact with Washington while ignoring illegal CIA assistance to Kurdish rebels.

[Severian]

Originally posted by Jacob Peters+January 01, 2007 10:35 pm--> (Jacob Peters @ January 01, 2007 10:35 pm) No one said that Kurdish nationalism was a creation of the Shah. [/b]
Except you:

exposing the Kurdish insurrection in Iraq as nothing but a foreign proxy.


The secession of Kurdish areas from Iraq would be a gross violation of Iraq's territorial integrity.

So? What kind of argument is this for a supposed revolutionary leftist?


You selectively employ this ridiculous sectarianism by denouncing the Baathists for not being Marxist

You might as well call me a sectarian for opposing Pinochet, or suggest I oppose Bush for "not being Marxist".

A sectarian is someone who puts a special ideological doctrine before the class struggle. But by supporting the Ba'thist regime which crushed the Iraqi working class, you're simply on the wrong side of the class struggle.

Thread: Fascist roots of Ba'athist ideology (http://www.revleft.com/index.php?showtopic=16918)

A Timeline (http://libcom.org/history/articles/iraq-1900-2000/) covering revolution and counterrevolution in Iraq[/url], see especially the years after 1958.

A bit more info on how the Ba'athist regime crushed the workers' movement in Iraq. (http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/view/4197/1/213)


An alliance between Baathists and communists in the 1970s in the National Progressive Front fails to qualify as "totalitarian".

Oh, bullshit. The Communist Party joined the Ba'ath government in the hopes it would make the Ba'thists stop slaughtering them. A futile hope, of course.


Your insinuation that that these reports skewed out of political favoritism for Iraq lacks any proof.

Aside from the proof I gave, that the U.S. was supporting Iraq in the war. Are you in the habit of believing everything the U.S. intelligence agencies claim?


Just as Iraq stated, a UN investigation in 1988 found that both sides used chemical weapons.

And, of course, the UN is a pure and unbiased referee. Not at all the instrument of the 5 permanent Security Council members. It's wholly irrelevant that in 1988, 4 or 5 of those permanent members (U.S., Britain, France, USSR, China?) were supporting Iraq against Iran. Would you like to buy a bridge in Brooklyn?


“Iraqi Communists, along with the overwhelming majority of our people, have received with deep satisfaction the news of the verdict on the tyrant Saddam Hussein."
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/10226/1/142/

While I don't agree with this viewpoint, you might think for a moment why the Iraqi CP - and yes, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis - hold it. Could this have to do with Hussein's record of terror against the Iraqi working class and the overwhelming majority of Iraq's population?

You denounce them for treason to the nation, because they supported the U.S. invasion. Well, for communists the larger issue is treason to the working class. From that viewpoint supporting the Ba'thist regime is as bad as supporting the U.S. occupation.

The issues in this execution are essentially the same as in the Nuremburg trials. The big fish eat the little ones, and the more powerful war criminals execute the less powerful ones.

The U.S. occupation - and their client regime in Iraq - have no right to pass judgement on Hussein. No right to execute anyone. In their hands, the courts and executioners will always be primarily a weapon against the working class. There are damn few millionaires on death row.

These war crimes trials are part of imperialism asserting the extraterritorial reach of their justice. You don't have to whitewash Hussein in order to recognize that. So obviously you have other reasons for doing so.

Oh, and Joseph Ball's statement about "puppets" of the U.S. contains a false implication. Clients, yes. But the people leading the Iraqi regime, and staffing its police and army, have their own reasons to hate Saddam - nobody from the U.S. embassy needed to pull a string to make them taunt or execute him. In fact, the U.S. government reportedly encouraged Maliki to postpone the execution.


Joseph Peters
I support the Baathist and Sunni resistance in Iraq who are fighting to liberate their country from dual American-Iranian domination.

I'd also like to point out this insane implication that the U.S. and Iranian governments are somehow in cahoots. Of course, this idea is widespread among the ultrarightists known as the "Iraqi resistance", and has fueled a lot of sectarian violence against Iraq's Shi'a population.

[Severian]

Originally posted by Joseph [email protected] 01, 2007 01:05 pm
Jacob Peters has a perfect right to express his views. Trotskyists who call for him to be banned are just showing which side they are on when push comes to shove.
That's a strange statement. This board has a policy of banning fascists and racists. Is that some kind of class treachery in your view?

Peters has shown which side he's on, and it's not the side of the working class. How about you?

[shadowed by the secret police]

The media makes it look like it was the Prime Minister of Iraq that gave the go-ahead to execute Saddam but the fact is he was killed (by U.S. orders) in order to silence any secrets he may have on AmeriKKKa. Dah, right?

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1231-25.htm

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1231-23.htm

[pandora]

The execution of Saddam Hussein was wrong[/FONT]

This is a global mistake that could create an epidemic of state executions.
As many are aware, only leftist leaders are normally killed, right wing leaders such as Pinchot get to live to a ripe old age.

This is a horrible precedent to killing world leaders that do not agree with the military captialist right wing interests.

Saddam committed most of his atrocities under the advice of the CIA the same as the Shah.
Although they did work his ethnic prejudices in allowing and/or encouraging Kurdish attacks.

However, Saddam's use was to attack the Islamic state of Iran after the fall of the Shah. When he stopped taking orders from the CIA, and even tried to loosen up some of the restictions in his country, modernize, and started interacting even with pop culture, for instance making fun of Austin Powers, it was decided he must be eliminated, for he was getting away with making fun of Bush and the hawks.

That was his crime.
If he was executed for "crimes against humanity" [please] Pinchot and Milosevic would have led him up there. Darfur anyone? That's happening now, and we could give a shit less.

No this is clearly a warning against those that oppose U.S. oil interests and have a loud voice.
Anyone that agrees with such a crime as this execution is allowing themselves to be manipulated by defense interests (with U.S. defense contractors contracting out to other nations, it is no longer even U.S.--Lockheed Martin UK, etc.)

This is a dark day that allows more darkness to seep into the ethics of our global world view.

Humanists should never condone execution of political prisoners, or others due to the injustices economically and class wise in all legal systems in the globe currently.

It is barbaric and logically wrong

[Red Tomato]

The execution of Saddam Hussein was wrong[/FONT]

This is a global mistake that could create an epidemic of state executions.
As many are aware, only leftist leaders are normally killed, right wing leaders such as Pinchot get to live to a ripe old age.

This is a horrible precedent to killing world leaders that do not agree with the military captialist right wing interests.

I totally agree. first, I'm against the death penalty. second, right-wing standards are based off of dumb capitalism. capitalism is dumb. capitalism is greed. capitalists want oil to drive their pennyless economy. now remember, capitalist america wants better deals on oil. the iraq war is about O.I.L.

[QUOTE]As many are aware, only leftist leaders are normally killed, right wing leaders such as Pinchot get to live to a ripe old age.
we must end the killings of left-wing peoples!! lets start a revolution. saddam should have been saved!

[Joseph Ball]

Sevarin-'
Originally posted by Joseph [email protected] 01, 2007 01:05 pm
Jacob Peters has a perfect right to express his views. Trotskyists who call for him to be banned are just showing which side they are on when push comes to shove.
That's a strange statement. This board has a policy of banning fascists and racists. Is that some kind of class treachery in your view?

Peters has shown which side he's on, and it's not the side of the working class. How about you?'

Joseph Ball-Sevarin, usually your comments are challenging, though incorrect in my opinion. This one is just puzzling. Jacob Peters is not a fascist or a racist. I unite with him insofar as I support a united front of all those who oppose Western imperialism, the main enemy of the people of the world. Jacob goes a bit further and says Saddam was a socialist, which I don't accept.

In the modern world the main contradiction is between imperialism and the oppressed people's. Lenin explained this contradiction in 'Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism'. Trotskyists, ultra-leftists ('council communists' etc.) and anarchists tend to make the error of believing that the contradiction is still that expounded by Marx in Capital. That is, they make the error that the main contradiction is between the workers and the national capitalists. But in a world, dominated by imperialism the main force oppressing the workers in the oppressed nations is international finance capital (the peasants are oppressed, mainly, by semi-feudal relations). This is because imperialist finance capital dominates the economies of these countries and subordinates the national capitalists.

In oppressor nations, it is not true to say that finance capital subordinates the national capitalists, though there may be some conflicts of interest. The western worker benefits from the super-profits extracted from the oppressed nation worker by imperialist finance capital.

Therefore, in neither the the oppressed nation, nor the oppressor nation is their a conflict between national capitalists and the proletariat. However, the fundamental contradiction is still between proletarian and capitalist. If, for example, western workers ceased to benefit from superprofits (as could have happened, in a partial way, in the 70s oil crisis), their contradiction with national capitalists would return with a vengence.

Given, the main contradiction is between western imperialism and the oppressed peoples we must unite with everyone who is fighting western imperialism. An example of what happens with a wrong line are those people who privilige 'trade union rights' in Iraq over supporting the resistance. They tend to end up supporting traitor parties like the modern Iraqi communist party that have abandoned the socialist line and have set up a phony, bosses union to impress gullible westerners-and who also sat in the puppet government when Falluja was being destroyed.

[Pawn Power]

With all of Saddam’s other crimes to choose from, why on earth would you hang him for executing the people suspected of involvement in the Dujail plot?

Because the United States was not involved in that one. It was involved in the massacre of the Iraqi Communists (the US Central Intelligence Agency gave Saddam their membership lists). It was implicated up to its ears in Saddam’s war against Iran — to the point of arranging for Iraq to be supplied with the chemicals to make poison gas, providing Baghdad with satellite and AWACS intelligence data on Iranian targets, and seconding US Air Force photo interpreters to Baghdad to draw Saddam the detailed maps of Iranian trenches that let him drench them in poison gas.

Saddam Hussein Hanged for the Wrong Reason (http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&article=90555)


It was not the Iraqi government but its American masters that chose to execute Saddam Hussein in a great rush as soon as the first sentence was confirmed, thus canceling all the other trials on far graver charges that awaited him. The current Iraqi government had nothing to hide if those trials went ahead; the United States government did.

An interesting article on why Saddam was hung for the killings of the 144 villagers in the town of Dujail and not one of his many other vile crimes. The answer involves covering up some of the U$'s dirty secrets.

[Lings]

I honestly dont care if saddam had died or lived, as long as it had been the decition of the iraqie people and not the american lakeys. Those fuckers who sentenced saddam have no right to sentence anyone in iraq for any reason what so ever.
The only death that would have been worthy of saddam is by the hands of the iraqie working class and its allies, not by the dishonest bourgies justicesystem of the imperialists.

[Lord Testicles]

I couldn't care less if saddam was killed, personally I'm dissapointed that they didn't suspension hang him and let him jig, but what really pisses me off is when world leaders get away e.g pinochet.

[Star]

Except you:

You are putting words in the mouths of others. It was never said that the concept of Kurdish nationalism is a foreign creation. I in fact supported the PKK and the Republic of Mahabad. Instead it was exposed that the reactionary Kurdish insurrection against the government composed of communists and socialists in Iraq was a foreign proxy. This is manifested by how the Iran-Iraq agreement in 1975 resulted in the collapse of the Kurdish insurrection. To support the proxies of capitalist imperialist powers is bourgeois nationalism and class treason in that it conflicts with the workers' desire to preserve their country. Support for a foreign proxy engaged in a secessionist campaign is tantamount to trying to fragment the working class along ethnic and cultural lines. There must not be secession for Iraqi Kurdistan but rather a unified workers' Iraq.


So? What kind of argument is this for a supposed revolutionary leftist?

You have a misunderstanding of self-determination. The Kurdish insurrection against the Iraqi state during Kassim, Bakr, and Hussein alike was a manifestation not of self-determination but of imperialist subversion. The "self-determination" card is regularly played by imperialist powers seeking to tear apart a country too strong to subjugate e.g Eritrea, Tibet, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, etc. Show a single instance where there has been support by the vast majority of workers in the secession of part of their country's territory. Luxemburg explained that self-determination in the case of Poland weakened the proletarian movement and only helped to strengthen the bourgeoisie. Secessionism at the behest of imperialism and its elitist domestic bourgeois proxy is to be opposed.


You might as well call me a sectarian for opposing Pinochet

The Baathists are not in any way comparable to Pinochet. The Baathists are socialists who have had friendly relations with the Marxist socialist bloc and other revolutionaries. Pinochet was a CIA puppet who forced disastrous neoliberal policies on the Chilean people.


But by supporting the Ba'thist regime which crushed the Iraqi working class, you're simply on the wrong side of the class struggle.

You don't base this on any facts but instead out of some silly doctrine opposing all non-Marxist socialists. The facts show that there was enormous progress for Iraqi workers and peasants in the 1970s. Of course it fell short of a true workers' state, Iraq nontheless made remarkable progress during the National Progressive Front.


Thread: Fascist roots of Ba'athist ideology

That thread you posted is rife with omissions, errors, and overall selective propaganda. Glancing at it, a blatant falsehood is that Baathists believe in strictly a one-party government.


A Timeline covering revolution and counterrevolution in Iraq[/url], see especially the years after 1958.

Have you taken into consideration the lack of support for Kassim by the workers and peasants?


Oh, bullshit. The Communist Party joined the Ba'ath government in the hopes it would make the Ba'thists stop slaughtering them.

I am not interested in analyzing as to why the CP joined the Baathists. You regurigtated capitalist propaganda of "totalitarian" Iraq which had been discredited. But had the Baathists been comparable to Pinochet the way you have insinuated, then it would be unthinkable for the communists to have cooperated with them.


Aside from the proof I gave, that the U.S. was supporting Iraq in the war. Are you in the habit of believing everything the U.S. intelligence agencies claim?

"US supported Iraq in the war" is not any sort of proof. If anything, it is a fallacy.

You seem to be in the habit of accepting what the the bourgeoisie and their foreign proxies tell you about "Kurdish genocide by Iraq" when in fact the Iraqi-Kurdish conflict was was in all respects a fair fight in which the Iraqi people were victorious over foreign proxies.


And, of course, the UN is a pure and unbiased referee. Not at all the instrument of the 5 permanent Security Council members. It's wholly irrelevant that in 1988, 4 or 5 of those permanent members (U.S., Britain, France, USSR, China?) were supporting Iraq against Iran. Would you like to buy a bridge in Brooklyn?

What could possibly be any more unbiased than "both sides used chemical weapons?" Your accusation of bias simply does not correspond because America had condemned Iraq for the gassing. The support of Iraq by members of the Security Council is irrelevant to the activities of other branches by the UN. Just like the refusal of the Security Council on various occasions to condemn Israel has had little effect on the outlook of the General Assembly. Your refusal to acknowledge that Iran used poison gas seems to show that you are biased in favour of religious hierarchy.


supporting the Ba'thist regime is as bad as supporting the U.S. occupation.

The failure to support a government under imperialist aggression is tantamount to complicity with imperialism and is borderline treason. Aside from employing rather predictable sectarianism against the Baathists on the basis that their ideology is devoid of Marxism, you regurgitate familiar bourgeois propaganda about the atrocities they allegedly commited. You seem to not understand how propaganda is employed by the bourgeoisie in order to justify conquest and imperialism.


I'd also like to point out this insane implication that the U.S. and Iranian governments are somehow in cahoots.

There was no insinuation that the US and Iranian governments are in cahoots. Both have a common goal of trying to dominate Iraq.

Your arguments consist of nothing but baseless theories and strawman after strawman. Numerous false remarks by you include: "Contrary to what you claim, you said Kurdish nationalism is not a foreign creation", " Contrary to what you claim, U.S and Iran are not in cahoots", etc.

[Severian]

Originally posted by shadowed by the secret [email protected] 02, 2007 09:46 am
The media makes it look like it was the Prime Minister of Iraq that gave the go-ahead to execute Saddam but the fact is he was killed (by U.S. orders) in order to silence any secrets he may have on AmeriKKKa.
Saddam Hussein spent a little over 3 years in jail. This fact is not exactly consistent with the theory that Uncle Sam was in a rush to silence him.

If he knew something embarassing to Washington, he had plenty of time to reveal it. But in reality, there's nothing secret about Washington's support to the Ba'athists, both initially in crushing the Iraqi working class and Communist Party, and later during the Iran-Iraq war.

Incidentally, Saddam's executioners were shouting the name of Moqtada al-Sadr among other slogans. This is a multi-sided conflict. The Sadrists and "resistance" are hitting harder at each other (and Iraqi civilians) than either is at the U.S.

I should also comment on this business about "executing a head of state" that some people have been talking about. This is a rotten argument. Nobody is above the law, including heads of state. As communists, let's not have any superstitious respect for them.

If you grant the U.S. and its client regime have the right to try and punish other Iraqis for "war crimes" - which I don't - then there's no reason to make an exception for Saddam. If national sovereignty doesn't cover everyone, why should it cover the head of state specially?

The U.S. government normally makes a sort of exception for heads of state - it doesn't assassinate them because someone might retaliate against the U.S. president. But there's no reason communists should have any respect for this reason or exception.

[Star]

This is a rotten argument. Nobody is above the law, including heads of state. As communists, let's not have any superstitious respect for them.

Actually, the argument is based on international law. There is nothing superstitious about pointing out that the trial had no legal basis and that the US occupation is illegal. You make the bewildering characterization of these arguments as "superstitious".

[Joseph Ball]

Sevarin-'I should also comment on this business about "executing a head of state" that some people have been talking about. This is a rotten argument. Nobody is above the law, including heads of state. As communists, let's not have any superstitious respect for them.'

Joseph Ball-The point is that we should fight for the national soverignty of oppressed nations when they are attacked by imperialist nations. This means that we must oppose usurping that soverignty in order to overthrow and execute a Head of State. 'Nobody is above the law'-the only law in imperialism is that the strong crush and exploit the weak. Mao showed how the weak can become the strong through the Party, the People's Army and the United Front.

[Severian]

Originally posted by Joseph [email protected] 03, 2007 06:05 pm
The point is that we should fight for the national soverignty of oppressed nations when they are attacked by imperialist nations. This means that we must oppose usurping that soverignty in order to overthrow and execute a Head of State.
Already refuted - as I pointed out earlier:
If you grant the U.S. and its client regime have the right to try and punish other Iraqis for "war crimes" - which I don't - then there's no reason to make an exception for Saddam. If national sovereignty doesn't cover everyone, why should it cover the head of state specially?

Your use of national sovereignty as specially applying to the head of state reminds me of one Iraqi's answer to a question about the Geneva Convention. "It's a treaty protecting the rights of presidents", he answered, since he'd only heard its protections mentioned in relation to Saddam's detention, not that of other Iraqis.

No, we should oppose this because Saddam's a human being (I regretfully admit) not because he's a head of state. It's just as wrong for the U.S. to, for example, snatch a bunch of Bosnian citizens and haul them off to Guantanamo, after the Bosnian Supreme Court had ruled their was insufficient evidence to extradite them. That's just as much a violation of national sovereignty, not to mention their individual human rights.

[Joseph Ball]

Sevarin's argument that we should oppose the treatment of Saddam because he was a human being, is again puzzling. Of course, I wouldn't want any human being to die in the degrading circumstances that Saddam died in (although the exectuioners degraded themselves far more than they degraded Saddam). A President shouldn't have more rights than other citizens qua their status as a person. However, an important part of national sovereignty is the power and security of the leaders of a nation. If the leaders of a nation can be picked off at will by the oppressor nations the nation is not going to have much power over its own destiny. Therefore we need to understand the question dialectically as a unity of opposites, rather than one-sidely and moralistically.