Bush Sees Hanging of Saddam as an Important Milestone for Iraq

By Bill Gallagher
Created Jan 9 2007 - 8:30am

- from the Niagara Falls Reporter [1]

CHIPPAWA, ONTARIO -- President George W. Bush is bursting with pride. He's
finally done something in Iraq with careful planning and efficiency.
Executing Saddam Hussein went off like clockwork. Just transfer him from
U.S. military custody to the Iraqi government, and Saddam's neck was snapped
in a jiffy.

Bush was resting and relaxing at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, when he got
the wonderful news. If only all else in Iraq would go so smoothly. The
execution served as an example of the orderly "freedom" Bush thought would
be so easy to transplant in Saddam's old turf.

Watching him humbled and swinging from the hangman's noose was -- as Bush
assured us -- "an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a
democracy." The United States remains the only major democracy that permits
capital punishment, the state-sanctioned murder those in the civilized world
consider cruel and barbaric. Most Americans don't have a clue what the rest
of the world, especially Europeans, think about our strange clinging to the
death penalty as a suitable way to deal with crime and how we consider it a
useful tool in imposing social order.

But Bush, who lost count of the people he sent to death while governor of
Texas, considers execution an important civics lesson for the Iraqis. "This
is how we handle things in Texas, and it will work in Iraq too," Bush
probably thought. He's been so right on other aspects of the forced
democracy and freedom-through-violence formula for Iraq, so why not show
them that retribution works from the bottom to the top.

Since the Iraqis have been doing such a marvelous job of killing each other
in an endless cycle of revenge murders, let's show them how that same
principle is carried out on the top. Saddam was a brutal dictator who
murdered his own people; so let's kill him to teach people that killing is
bad.

Leaders in the Vatican -- unlike Bush and his co-religionists, the
revenge-and-Rapture types who label themselves as Christians -- have
profoundly different views on capital punishment.

Rev. Federico Lombardi, a Vatican spokesman, said the execution of Saddam
was "tragic and reason for sadness." While Bush sees hanging people as the
stairway to democracy, Father Lombardi said execution "is not a way to
reconstruct justice in Iraqi society."

While the invasion and occupation have largely shattered Iraqi society, Bush
sees progress. People are voting, electing new governments every six months
or so. All that torture that went on at Abu Ghraib was a public-relations
stumble people are either quickly forgetting or emulating.

The chaos we see every day in Iraq, the violence and depravation, are just
elements of the course of democracy. Recall how former defense secretary
Donald Rumsfeld once reflected on civic order in Iraq: "Things happen."

The deposed Iraqi ruler was hanged for crimes against humanity.
Specifically, Saddam was convicted for his role in the killings of 148 men
and boys in Dujail, a Shiite town in northern Iraq. People there plotted to
kill Saddam, and he ordered mass executions. The mainstream media dutifully
reported Saddam's horrible crimes.

But absent in most of the reporting on the incident was the fact that Saddam
was our staunch ally at the time and the Reagan administration was providing
him with intelligence reports and other support in the war Iraq was then
waging against Iran. My enemy's enemy is my friend, or so the thinking went.

That support, at least, indirectly aided Saddam in crushing his political
opposition, especially among Iraqi Shiites and Kurds. During this time, our
chummy relationship helped get Iraq off a United Nations list of rogue
nations supporting terrorism.

During the runup to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, one of the Busheviks'
favorite one-liners about Saddam was that he used weapons of mass
destruction "on his own people." The reference was to Saddam's use of poison
gas on Kurdish villages.

Condoleezza Rice used to use the line about 20 times a week. More aptly put,
Saddam killed his own people with some invaluable help from the U.S.
government. We provided him with satellite photos he used to pinpoint gas
attacks on Iranian troops and, oh yes, those troublesome Kurds.

At the time, Ronald Reagan's personal envoy to Saddam was none other than
Donald Rumsfeld, the now-disgraced architect of the present war in Iraq.
Maybe Saddam gave Rummy some tips on military strategy when they met,
exchanged gifts and sipped scotch together. It's hard to decide which of the
two did more damage and caused more agony in Iraq.

Bush will forever brag about taking out Saddam and building the scaffold for
his execution. Bush has a perverted sense of justice, and presiding over the
execution of "the dictator" who once tried to "kill my daddy" provides him
with the smug satisfaction only a sick mind enjoys.

Had Saddam been your normal two-bit murderous despot, Bush wouldn't have
given him a second thought. But Saddam just happened to be around during a
time in history when Islamic fanatics attacked the United States, killing
3,000 of our people.

Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks, but for a time
Bush convinced most Americans that he did and that he posed an imminent
threat to our national security.

Saddam was building and hiding terrible weapons he planned to give to groups
like al-Qaeda. We couldn't let "the smoking gun be a mushroom cloud." Saddam
was evil itself, the devil in the desert who had to be stopped. Bush and his
people manufactured the lies, the mainstream media peddled them, and a
frightened, gullible public bought them.

Saddam presided over a pseudo-nation British map-makers crafted as they
divvied up the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The British had a
frustrating and ultimately failed occupation in Iraq.

Saddam was a product of Iraq's fractious politics and the Sunni domination
the neighboring Saudis originally placed in power there. Saddam was a
ruthless autocrat who ruled in much the same manner as the Saudi royal
family, minus the Oxford education and smooth smile.

The world would have ignored him had he not tried a little oil-grab in
Kuwait and the United States led an Army to send the Iraqis back home. From
then on, Saddam was nothing more than a regional irritant, a threat to his
own people, no different from any number of dictators the United States has
befriended; the recently departed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet quickly
comes to mind.

But then Bush seized an opportunity. He needed Saddam. Bush found Osama bin
Laden and al-Qaeda far too elusive, and they didn't even have their own
nation. Saddam fit the bill and he happened to control the second-largest
oil reserves in the world. With Vice President Dick Cheney whispering into
his ear, Bush set out to make Saddam a villain rivaling Hitler and Stalin.
Although a murderous bastard, Saddam never belonged in that infamous
pantheon. Bush used 9/11 as the pretext to invade Iraq, a goal long in the
crosshairs of Cheney and the other neocon nation-builders. Their experiment
is a manifest failure. The only remaining question is how much more terror,
death and suffering will result from their arrogant bullying.

Saddam deserved a footnote in history -- a shotgun-toting bully who used
brutality and murder as a way to stay in power. He should have rotted in
prison for the rest of his life, isolated and alone.

That's the worst kind of punishment for a megalomaniac. But Bush, who had
already made Saddam bigger and more important than he ever was in life, has
given him the death he wanted.

He also has reaffirmed a practice Saddam appreciated -- hanging people to
teach them lessons and believing executions make the government better and
more efficient. Just call it justice.
_______
BILL GALLAGEHR

About author Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara
Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail
address is gallaghernewsman@sbcglobal.net [2].

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson