Rene — ROBERT FISK: THIS WAS A GUILTY VERDICT ON AMERICA AS WELL
Topic(s): Iraq | Comments Off on Rene — ROBERT FISK: THIS WAS A GUILTY VERDICT ON AMERICA AS WELLROBERT FISK: THIS WAS A GUILTY VERDICT ON AMERICA AS WELL
http://www.independent.co.uk/
Published: 06 November 2006
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?
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?