Robert Fisk: A dictator created then destroyed by America
The Independent/UK
30 December 2006
Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more
deserving of that last walk to the scaffold – that crack of the neck
at the end of a rope – than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the
Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent
Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters
will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and
will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence
was signed – by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans
– on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the
moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.
But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed,
many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a
question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it
is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime
ministers – what about the other guilty men?
No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don’t gas our enemies. George W Bush
is not Saddam. He didn’t invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded
Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead – and
thousands of Western troops are dead – because Messrs Bush and Blair
and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the
Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and
mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.
In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001
we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the
innocent – we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam’s
shame at Abu Ghraib – and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible
crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.
Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest
war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a
half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons
with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the
Americans, who controlled Saddam’s weird trial, forbad any mention of
this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he
not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this
massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our
culpability.
And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium
shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the
murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the
hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the
aftermath of our "victory" – our "mission accomplished" – who will be
found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will come, no
doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in
comfortable and wealthy retirement.
Hours before Saddam’s death sentence, his family – his first wife,
Sajida, and Saddam’s daughter and their other relatives – had given up
hope.
"Whatever could be done has been done – we can only wait for time to
take its course," one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and
had already announced his own "martyrdom": he was still the president
of Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All condemned men face a decision:
to die with a last, grovelling plea for mercy or to die with whatever
dignity they can wrap around themselves in their last hours on
earth. His last trial appearance – that wan smile that spread over the
mass-murderer’s face – showed us which path Saddam intended to walk to
the noose.
I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I have talked
to the Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia who rose up against
the dictator at our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us – and
whose comrades, in their tens of thousands, along with their wives,
were hanged like thrushes by Saddam’s executioners.
I have walked round the execution chamber of Abu Ghraib – only months,
it later transpired, after we had been using the same prison for a few
tortures and killings of our own – and I have watched Iraqis pull
thousands of their dead relatives from the mass graves of Hilla. One
of them has a newly-inserted artificial hip and a medical
identification number on his arm. He had been taken directly from
hospital to his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I have even
shaken the dictator’s soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal
finished his days in power writing romantic novels.
It was my colleague, Tom Friedman – now a messianic columnist for The
New York Times – who perfectly caught Saddam’s character just before
the 2003 invasion: Saddam was, he wrote, "part Don Corleone, part
Donald Duck". And, in this unique definition, Friedman caught the
horror of all dictators; their sadistic attraction and the grotesque,
unbelievable nature of their barbarity.
But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At first, those who
suffered from Saddam’s cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds
wanted to pull the hangman’s lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia
outside Iraq welcome his end. But they – and millions of other Muslims
– will remember how he was informed of his death sentence at the dawn
of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be sacrifice by
Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the ghastly Saddam
cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners from his
jails. "Handed over to the Iraqi authorities," he may have been before
his death. But his execution will go down – correctly – as an American
affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this –
that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders
from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the
terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes)
Saddam died a "martyr" to the will of the new "Crusaders".
When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency against
American troops increased in ferocity. After his death, it will
redouble in intensity again. Freed from the remotest possibility of
Saddam’s return by his execution, the West’s enemies in Iraq have no
reason to fear the return of his Baathist regime. Osama bin Laden will
certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there’s a
thought. So many crimes avenged.
But we will have got away with it.