The White House has arranged to announce two days before the November 7, 2006, elections a guilty verdict for Saddam Hussein and, no doubt, plans to finally murder him. Meanwhile an appeals process is delaying until at least five days after the elections release of photos of members of the U.S. military and its contractors raping and murdering children and adults at Abu Ghraib.
While use of the death penalty is one of many American practices that much of the world views as barbaric, there can be little doubt that Saddam Hussein is guilty of major crimes stretching far beyond those he's been tried for, and including many in which the United States has been complicit.
A famous image shows Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. There's nothing wrong with shaking hands with a dictator. It's potentially far more productive than slaughtering 650,000 of his nation's people. Bush should be shaking hands and talking with the leaders of Iran and North Korea rather than threatening to destroy their countries. The trouble is that Rumsfeld wasn't meeting with Hussein in order to promote democracy. Rumsfeld was there on December 20, 1983, as a special envoy for President Ronald Reagan to assist in Iraq's efforts to kill Iranians, including through the use of chemical weapons – an illegal practice that Rumsfeld has more recently used himself against civilians in Iraq, most notably in Fallujah.
The Reagan administration knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons. Nonetheless, following Rummy's visits in December of 1983 and March of 1984, the United States established full diplomatic ties with Iraq on November 26, 1984. Reagan and Rummy and the rest of the truly Neo cons also supplied Iraq with helicopters and other "dual use" equipment and materials (including anthrax), provided intelligence and satellite data to assist Iraq's bombing raids on Iran, prevented passage of strong Senate legislation cutting off assistance to Iraq, and prevented any UN Security Council resolution that would have directly condemned Iraq by insisting that Iran was also using chemical weapons. When Iraq used chemical weapons to slaughter Kurds in Halabja in March of 1988, the Reagan administration falsely blamed Iran. The George Bush Sr. administration continued to supply Iraq with weapons, despite Iraq's then real chemical and biological weapons programs, until the day before Iraq invaded Kuwait, August 2, 1990.
For all the crimes that Saddam Hussein committed, with and without U.S. assistance or approval, it is noteworthy that there was no terrorism in the nation he controlled, not until we spent over $400 billion of our U.S. tax dollars to transform Iraq into the "central front in the War on Terror" and a training ground for a generation of terrorists.
In the course of making the world less safe for democracy, Donald Rumsfeld has overseen the slaughter of 650,000 Iraqis and 3,000 Americans. He has targeted civilians, journalists, hospitals, and ambulances. He has used white phosphorous as a weapon on civilian families. He has used depleted uranium and a new form of napalm. (When did melting the skin off children become a family value?) He has approved the hiding of prisoners from the Red Cross, the detention of Americans and non-Americans without charge or counsel, and the use of torture. Acceptable torture techniques at Abu Ghraib were posted on the wall in a memo from Rumsfeld.
So, by all means, let's talk about Saddam Hussein's guilt and how much fun it will be to kill him. But let's remember who supported him for decades. And let's ask ourselves what the 650,000 Iraqis we've killed already were guilty of. Wasn't the plan to liberate them, not murder them? Here is guilt aplenty for Rumsfeld, Bush, and Cheney, and the corporate interests they serve.
_________
This article draws on research done by United for Peace and Justice.
David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press and of the introduction to "The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. (more...)
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website or its editors.
America the land of the stink..where death smells good
What was Saddam getting from the USA besides weapons? I think it dawned on him that the US was using him to fight an American war with Iran.
Why should Iraqi soldiers die fighting for America? And when America was giving Iraq nothing to their Servicemen in fighting America's war against Iran, I think he recognized his payment.
That was taking back Kuwait; a territory that was originally Iraq at the beginning of the Century; before the US and Britian took it away from Iraq in order that they could provide a secure shipping export port for Heroin and Opium coming from Turkey bound for China.
Certainly America had no intention of making an Arlington Monument for Iraqis who fought for America in the Iraq Iran War. The Iraqi soldiers were mere fodder in America's shitspreader being dispersed to their graves.
Incidentially I wonder how many Iraqi soldiers who survived the Iraq Iran War when they fought for America were alive, gunned down and bull-dozed into trenches upon their surrender to American forces when Kuwait was so called liberated?
I wonder how that feels to be a soldier to be used by another country (USA) to fight America's war, and then to be slaughtered by the very Americans who were originally supporting them with weapons? And Bush says the UN is irrelevant?
Talk about a no win rock in a hard place situation! I give more honor and condolences to those poor buggers than the military John Waynes from America now in Iraq.
Such a despicable murdering American Political catastrophe.
And America thinks it will win the war on terror! Somehow I find that thought somewhat irrelevant.
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Dom Jermano (20 articles, 0 quicklinks, 40 diaries, 930 comments) on Wednesday, Oct 25, 2006 at 12:09:34 AM
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