Robert Fisk
London
Independent
Saturday, January 6, 2007
The lynching of Saddam Hussein - for that is what we are talking
about - will turn out to be one of the determining moments in
the whole shameful crusade upon which the West embarked in March
of 2003. Only the president-governor George Bush and Lord Blair
of Kut al-Amara could have devised a militia administration in
Iraq so murderous and so immoral that the most ruthless mass murderer
in the Middle East could end his days on the gallows as a figure
of nobility, scalding his hooded killers for their lack of manhood
and - in his last seconds - reminding the thug who told him to
"go to hell" that the hell was now Iraq.
"Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,"
Malcolm reported of the execution of the treacherous Thane of
Cawdor in Macbeth. Or, as a good friend of mine in Ballymena said
to me on the phone a few hours later, "The whole bloody thing
was obscene." Quite so. On this occasion, I'll go along with
the voice of Protestant Ulster.
Of course, Saddam gave his victims no trial; his enemies had
no opportunity to hear the evidence against them; they were mown
down into mass graves, not handed a black scarf to prevent the
hangman's noose from burning their neck as it broke their spine.
Justice was "done", even if a trifle cruelly. But this
is not the point. Regime change was done in our name and Saddam's
execution was a direct result of our crusade for a "new"
Middle East. To watch a uniformed American general - despite the
indiscipline of more and more US troops in Iraq - wheedling and
whining at a press conference that his men were very courteous
to Saddam until the very moment of handover to Muqtada al-Sadr's
killers could only be appreciated with the blackest of humour.
Note how the best "our" Iraqi government's officials
could do by way of reply was to order an "enquiry" to
find out how mobile phones were taken into the execution room
- not to identify the creatures who bawled abuse at Saddam Hussein
in his last moments. How very Blairite of the al-Maliki government
to search for the snitches rather than the criminals who abused
their power. And somehow, they got away with it; acres of agency
copy from the Green Zone reporters were expended on the Iraqi
government's consternation, as if al- Maliki did not know what
had transpired in the execution chamber. His own officials were
present - and did nothing.
That's why the "official" videotape of the hanging
was silent - and discreetly faded out - before Saddam was abused.
It was cut at this point, not for reasons of good taste but because
that democratically elected Iraqi government - whose election
was such "great news for the people of Iraq" in the
words of Lord Blair - knew all too well what the world would make
of the terrible seconds that followed. Like the lies of Bush and
Blair - that everything in Iraq was getting better when in fact
it was getting worse - butchery was supposed to have been presented
as a solemn judicial execution.
Worst of all, perhaps, is that the hanging of Saddam mimicked,
in ghostly, miniature form, the manner of his own regime's bestial
executions. Saddam's own hangman at Abu Ghraib, a certain Abu
Widad, would also taunt his victims before pulling the trap door
lever, a last cruelty before extinction. Is this where Saddam's
hangmen learned their job? And just who exactly were those leather-jacketed
hangmen last week, by the way? No one, it seemed, bothered to
ask this salient question. Who chose them? Al-Maliki's militia
chums? Or the Americans who managed the whole roadshow from the
start, who so organised Saddam's trial that he was never allowed
to reveal details of his friendly relations with three US administrations
- and thus took the secrets of the murderous, decade-long Baghdad-Washington
military alliance to his grave?
I would not ask this question were it not for the sense of profound
shock I experienced when touring the Abu Ghraib prison after "Iraq's
liberation" and meeting the US-appointed senior Iraqi medical
officer at the jail. When his minders were distracted, he admitted
to me he had also been the senior "medical officer"
at Abu Ghraib when Saddam's prisoners were tortured to death there.
No wonder our enemies-become-friends are turning into our enemies
again.
But this is not just about Iraq. More than 35 years ago, I was
being driven home from school by my Dad when his new-fangled car
radio broadcast a report of the dawn hanging of a man at - I think
- Wormwood Scrubs. I remember the unpleasant look of sanctity
that came over my father's face when I asked him if this was right.
"It's the law, Old Boy," he said, as if such cruelties
were immutable to the human race. Yet this was the same father
who, as a young soldier in the First World War, was threatened
with court martial because he refused to command the firing party
to execute an equally young Australian soldier.
Maybe only older men, sensing their failing powers, enjoy the
prerogatives of execution. More than 10 years ago, the now-dead
President Hrawi of Lebanon and the since-murdered prime minister
Rafiq Hariri signed the death warrants of two young Muslim men.
One of them had panicked during a domestic robbery north of Beirut
and shot a Christian man and his sister. Hrawi - in the words
of one of his top security officers at the time - "wanted
to show he could hang Muslims in a Christian area". He got
his way. The two men - one of whom had not even been present in
the house during the robbery - were taken to their public execution
beside the main Beirut-Jounieh highway, swooning with fear at
the sight of their white-hooded executioners, while the Christian
glitterati, heading home from night-clubs with their mini-skirted
girlfriends, pulled up to watch the fun.
I suggested at the time, much to Hrawi's disgust, that this should
become a permanent feature of Beirut's nightlife, that regular
public hangings on the Mediterranean Corniche would bring in tens
of thousands more tourists, especially from Saudi Arabia where
you could catch the odd beheading only at Friday prayers.
No, it's not about the wickedness of the hanged man. Unlike the
Thane of Cawdor, Saddam did not "set forth a deep repentance"
on the scaffold. We merely shamed ourselves in an utterly predictable
way. Either you support the death penalty - whatever the nastiness
or innocence of the condemned. Or you don't. C'est tout.
Email
