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Invasion of Iraq: Hang 'em High in Baghdad
Posted on Wednesday, January 03 @ 11:49:55 UTC
Topic: Saddam
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 The Object Lesson of Saddam's Execution
by Kurt Nimmo, kurtnimmo.com
December 30, 2006
It was like a scene from a Sergio Leone spaghetti western—Saddam Hussein, or somebody we are told is Saddam Hussein, was marched to the gallows and strung up, a victim of frontier justice, the frontier in this case being a country illegally and brutally invaded for the sake of Israel, as Philip Zelikow unabashedly tells us, not that the corporate media pays attention to such bothersome details.
In old B-movies, characters often declared the guilty to be "hung at dawn," and this is precisely what happened to the man we are told was Saddam. "Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn on Saturday for crimes against humanity, a dramatic, violent end for a leader who brutally ruled Iraq for three decades before he was toppled by a U.S.-led invasion in 2003," reports the CIA's favorite newspaper, the Washington Post.
Saddam's alleged crimes against humanity were more fiction than reality—he was ultimately convicted of killing a handful of people in response to an assassination attempt against him, never mind the horrific stories of mass graves, containing the bodies of hundreds of thousands, fantastic charges the puppet government, installed and micromanaged by the perfidious neocons, were unable to make stick, even with incessant media hype.
Of course, Saddam's crimes pale in comparison to those committed by the United States, including the imposition of sanctions against Iraq, resulting in the murder of more than a million, 500,000 of them children. Saddam did not kill 655,000, the number of dead estimated by the Lancet to have perished since the United States invaded. Not unlike a Mafia consigliere, Rumsfeld trotted off to Iraq to shake Saddam's hand and sell him weapons to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians. Meanwhile, the murderous Israelis sold the Iranians weapons to kill Iraqis.
But what is really disgusting is the prospect of the corporate media gloating over Saddam's execution. In the hours before Saddam was handed over to the puppet government installed by the neocons, coiffured talking heads on Fox News chatted about broken necks, asphyxiation, how it may take up to eight minutes for Saddam to swing at the end of a rope before strangling to death. "We heard his neck snap," Sami al-Askari, a lickspittle of the installed prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, told Reuters. "Saddam's execution puts an end to all the pathetic gambles on a return to dictatorship," said al-Maliki, never mind lately the neocons have talked about installing a dictator in Baghdad.
"Senior administration officials have acknowledged to me that they are considering alternatives other than democracy," an anonymous "military affairs expert" told the Times Online in August. "Everybody in the administration is being quite circumspect, but you can sense their own concern that this is drifting away from democracy."
Recall the neocon Jonah Goldberg suggesting on the pages of the "liberal" Los Angeles Times that it "would be great if the U.S. could find an Iraqi Augusto Pinochet." Never mind that Pinochet was responsible for "disappearing" at least 3,200 people, torturing tens of thousands, and launching a bloody coup, with help of the CIA, that resulted in the murder of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile.
According to the scurrilous Goldberg, there is a "plus side" to all of this, as "Pinochet's abuses helped create a civil society," that is to say "civil" for multinational corporations and neolib bankers, a process Goldberg calls "free-market reforms," a catch phrase for neoliberal thievery and back-to-back fire sales of the public trust, a process Goldberg claims "lifted the Chilean people out of poverty."
Au contraire, Sparky. In fact, as Sara Larrain has documented, Chile's "poverty rate grew from 20 percent of the population in 1970 to 40 percent in 1985. Today, after 13 years of 6 to 7 percent annual growth, almost 30 percent of the Chilean population (about 4 million people) still struggles at the poverty level. And poverty today is not because of the lack of jobs, since the unemployment rate is only 5 to 6 percent. The poor have jobs, but they have very low-paying jobs."
Neolibs like to call this exponentially increasing misery the "Chilean Miracle," a situation Goldberg and the neocons want to replicate in Iraq—or that is to say the three Bantustans the neocons are diligently working to carve off the body of a supine and increasingly disassembled Iraq.
"Which model do you think the average Iraqi would prefer?" Goldberg continues. "Which model, if implemented, would result in future generations calling Iraq a success? An Iraqi Pinochet would provide order and put the country on the path toward liberalism, democracy and the rule of law," never mind that large numbers of Iraqis, indeed a vast majority, tell us they would prefer the rule of Saddam to "liberalism, democracy and the rule of law," translating daily into chaos, murder, disease, and staggering poverty. But never mind. According to Goldberg, "if you can contemplate reinstalling a Hussein, you'd count yourself lucky to have a Pinochet."
Indeed, Pinochet is the model, not only in Iraq but here in America. Bush considers himself the unitary decider, able to attach unconstitutional "signing statements" to laws (more than 800 to date), never mind that George Washington said a president "must approve all the parts of a bill, or reject it in toto" (the former George, of course, is irrelevant, even despised, by the current crop of neofascist Straussian neocons, followers of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist and Hobbesian troll). Our version of the Pinochet "model" condones torture, war crimes (including nuclear war through depleted uranium), and the implementation of a nightmarish police state, complete with a massive snooping apparatus.
Finally, it should be remembered Pinochet was arrested in London back in 1998 at the request of a Spanish judge who sought his extradition on various charges of international criminality, including torture. Although Pinochet was held for a year, he was eventually sent back to Chile, as he was in poor health.
More recently, Donald Rumsfeld, AG Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet, Stephen Cambone, former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo (who advocates torturing children), David S. Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers face criminal prosecution in Germany for crimes against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, most notably for their roles in the routine torture at Camp Gitmo and Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Of course, this was the reason, at least in part, the Military Commissions Act was passed earlier this year—it provides a get out of jail card for these malicious criminals.
Bush and crew will likely never face justice, or for that matter the prospect of hooded thugs fitting a rope around their necks. In America, war criminals are allowed to retire and write their memoirs.
Saddam was executed not so much as an act of justice—as if a kangaroo court, installed by an occupation military force, can seriously deliver justice—for the U.S. government does not give a damn about justice for the Iraqi people, or for that matter any other people, but rather the execution of Saddam was engineered to serve as an object lesson to those who would resist the combined interests of the international banker criminal cartel, the think tank neolibs, and their neocon kissing cousins who serve the interests of the Likudniks in Israel, with plenty of profitable spillover for the military-industrial-intelligence complex, a behemothic monster over shadowing the threat Dwight Eisenhower warned us about as he left office on January 17, 1961.
Reprinted from:
http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=705
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