The execution of Saddam Hussein By the Editorial Board
30 December 2006

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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.

See Also:
A legal farce: Iraqi court confirms Saddam Hussein's death sentence
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/dec2006/huss-d27.shtml>[27 December 2006]
Iraqi prime minister calls for Saddam Hussein to be hanged before year's end
<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/nov2006/mali-n11.shtml>[11 November 2006]
As Hussein sentenced to death, US pushes to rehabilitate his
functionaries<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/nov2006/iraq-n08.shtml>
[8 November 2006]
Saddam Hussein's death sentence: a travesty of
justice<http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/nov2006/huss-n06.shtml>
[6 November 2006]

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