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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
6, 2006
Justice and Hypocrisy
A
Guilty Verdict on America, as Well
By ROBERT FISK
So America's one-time ally has been
sentenced to death for war crimes he committed when he was Washington's
best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about his atrocities
and even supplied the gas--along with the British, of course--yet
there we were yesterday declaring it to be, in the White House's
words, another "great day for Iraq". That's what Tony
Blair announced when Saddam Hussein was pulled from his hole
in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we're going to string
him up, and it's another great day.
Of course, it couldn't happen
to a better man. Nor a worse. It couldn't be a more just verdict--nor
a more hypocritical one. It's difficult to think of a more suitable
monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched by his executioner,
the equally monstrous hangman of Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Widad,
who would strike his victims on the head with an axe if they
dared to condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party
before he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged at Abu
Ghraib in
1985 after accepting a bribe to put a reprieved prisoner to death
instead of the condemned man.
But we can't mention Abu Ghraib
these days because we have followed Saddam's trail of shame into
the very same institution. And so by hanging this awful man,
we hope--don't we?--to look better than him, to remind Iraqis
that life is better now than it was under Saddam.
Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster
that we have inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that.
Life is now worse. Or rather, death is now visited upon even
more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on his Shias and
Kurds and--yes, in Fallujah of all places--his Sunnis, too. So
we cannot even claim moral superiority. For if Saddam's immorality
and wickedness are to be the yardstick against which all our
iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We only sexually
abused prisoners and killed a few of them and murdered some suspects
and carried out a few rapes and illegally invaded a country which
cost Iraq a mere 600,000 lives ("more or less", as
George Bush Jnr said when he claimed the figure to be only 30,000).
Saddam was much worse. We can't be put on trial. We can't be
hanged.
"Allahu Akbar," the
awful man shouted--God is greater. No surprise there. He it was
who insisted these words should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag,
the same flag which now hangs over the palace of the government
that has condemned him after a trial at which the former Iraqi
mass murderer was formally forbidden
from describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now George
Bush's Secretary of Defence. Remember that handshake? Nor, of
course, was he permitted to talk about the support he received
from George Bush Snr, the current US President's father. Little
wonder, then, that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans
had been urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-term US
elections.
Anyone who said the verdict
was designed to help the Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House
spokesman, blurted out yesterday, must be "smoking rope".
Well, Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it might
be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam verdict--not
the trial itself, please note--was "scrupulous and fair".
The judges will publish "everything they used to come to
their verdict."
No doubt. Because here are
a few of the things that Saddam was not allowed to comment upon:
sales of chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant--so appalling--that
he has been sentenced to hang on a localised massacre of Shias
rather than the wholesale gassing of Kurds over which George
W Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when
they decided to depose Saddam in 2003--or was it in 2002? Or
2001? Some of Saddam's pesticides came from Germany (of course).
But on 25 May 1994, the US
Senate's Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs produced
a report entitled "United States Chemical and Biological
Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and their possible impact
on the Health Consequences (sic) of the Persian Gulf War".
This was the 1991 war which
prompted our liberation of Kuwait, and the report informed Congress
about US government-approved shipments of biological agents sent
by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier. These included
Bacillus anthracis, which produces anthrax; Clostridium botulinum;
Histoplasma capsulatum; Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens
and Escherichia coli. The same report stated that the US provided
Saddam with "dual use" licensed materials which assisted
in the development of chemical, biological and missile-system
programmes, including chemical warfare agent production facility
plant and technical drawings (provided as pesticide production
facility plans).
Yes, well I can well see why
Saddam wasn't permitted to talk about this. John Reid, the British
Home Secretary, said that Saddam's hanging "was a sovereign
decision by a sovereign nation". Thank heavens he didn't
mention the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two
components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in 1988, and
another £50,000 worth of the same vile substances the following
year.
We also sent thionyl chloride
to Iraq in 1988 at a price of only £26,000. Yes, I know
these could be used to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But
this was the same country--Britain--that would, eight years later,
prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi children on
the grounds that it could be used for--you guessed it--"weapons
of mass destruction".
Now in theory, I know, the
Kurds have a chance for their own trial of Saddam, to hang him
high for the thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would
certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death sentence review
period. But would the Americans and British dare touch a trial
in which we would have not only to describe how Saddam got his
filthy gas but why the CIA--in the immediate aftermath of the
Iraqi war crimes against Halabja--told US diplomats in the Middle
East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was dropped by the
Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam still being at the time
our favourite ally rather than our favourite war criminal). Just
as we in the West were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds
during the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988.
And--dare we go so deep into
this betrayal of the Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded
their country?--then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering
countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds after they
staged an uprising against the Baathist regime at our specific
request--thousands whom webetrayed by leaving them to fight off
Saddam's brutal hordes on their own. "Rioting," is
how Lord Blair's meretricious "dodgy dossier" described
these atrocities in 2002--because, of course, to call them an
"uprising" (which they were) would invite us to ask
ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath. Answer: us.
I and my colleagues watched
this tragedy. I travelled on the hospital trains that brought
the Iranians back from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds
bubbling in giant blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth
to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their wounds. The
British and Americans didn't want to know. I talked to the victims
of Halabja. The Americans didn't want to know. My Associated
Press colleague Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed
in their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The Americans
and the British didn't care.
But now we are to give the
Iraqi people bread and circuses, the final hanging of Saddam,
twisting, twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have inflicted
justice upon the man whose country we invaded and eviscerated
and caused to break apart. No, there is no sympathy for this
man. "President Saddam Hussein has no fear of being executed,"
Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese lawyer on his team, said in Beirut
a few days ago. "He will not come out of prison to count
his days and years in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will
come out of prison to go to the presidency or to his grave."
It looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu went there.
Milosevic escaped sentence.
The odd thing is that Iraq
is now swamped with mass murderers, guilty of rape and massacre
and throat-slitting and torture in the years since our "liberation"
of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi government we are currently
supporting, democratically elected, of course. And these war
criminals, in some cases, are paid by us, through the ministries
we set up under this democratic government. And they will not
be tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism. And
our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so obscenely
joined?
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