WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East : Iraq
The execution of Saddam Hussein
By the Editorial Board
30 December 2006
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.
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