Why America executed Saddam
By Garba A Isa
yekuwa@yahoo.com
On Saturday December 31st, 2006 which was the day of sacrifice or Eid el-Kabir, the former Iraqi leader was hanged at dawn on genocide charges against Iraq's Shia's in the 80's. It was a great affront to the sensitivities of the Muslim world to sacrifice Saddam Hussein on such a festive day before the glare of World Television Channels.
America should not expect to face the collective wrath of God and the world Muslims and win in the long run. Saddam's tortuous political career was no doubt often brutal and bloody, but no match for the "killing fields" unleashed on Iraq since the American invasion of 2003.
Saddam was bolstered by American, British and French war arsenals and Conservative Arabs' petrol-dollars to fight the Islamic Republic of Iran under the late Ayatollah Khomeini (1980-1988). Iraq emerged after the Iran-Iraq war as the most dubiously publicised "strongest military power" in the Gulf region. American military strategists were alarmed that a secular Arab radical Saddam Hussein armed to the teeth was a threat to Israel and the client Arab regimes particularly in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
After the Iranian Islamic revolution of February 1979, one of America's policies in the region remained to ensure that Saudi Arabia "does not become another Iran" thus after Saddam was allegedly lured into invading the tiny oil-rich neighbour Kuwait in August 1990, America got the golden opportunity to occupy Saudi Arabia "without firing a single shot" through the mobilisation of a so-called coalition force of some 570,000 soldiers to "liberate" Kuwait and "protect" Saudi Arabia from Saddam. The Kuwaiti invasion gave the Americans the opportunity to cut his military manpower and hardware to size: of the one million soldiers with whom Iraq went to war in January 1991, roughly 300,000 were allegedly put out of action. Some 3,008 tanks of Iraq's estimated 6,000 were lost. Iraq lost 100 of its 500 military aircrafts in addition to the loss of 2,180 artillery pieces out of its estimated total of 3,700 at the beginning of the war.
From the intensity of the air raids over Baghdad, Basra and other cities in January 1991, some 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have perished in the war. The war dubbed as "Operation Desert Storm" by former American President George Bush and "The Mother of all Wars" by the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was the greatest turning point for the former Iraqi President and indeed the military, industrial and economic fortunes of Iraq. Today, 16 years after the so-called liberation of Kuwait from Iraq and about four years after the fall of Saddam's regime, the American soldiers were still dug in Saudi Arabia to confirm a well-planned, long drawn occupation. It should be noted that when America first sent its soldiers to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, they were told to prepare for a "long stay" there.
It is incredible: before our very eyes, the West led by America built-up Saddam Hussein to destroy the Islamic Revolution in neighbouring Iran. We also watched as they destroyed and eventually hanged him for the sake of oil and Israel.
It is ironic that the West led by America now pontificating over Saddam's "genocide" against the Kurds or the chemical attack against the Shiites actually aided and abetted those "crimes" when Saddam was their good guy in their blind campaign against "militant Islam" led by Khomeini in neighbouring Iran.
Saddam and his close lieutenants were thus tried for "crimes" in which American, British and French political and military leaders were co-conspirators. No wonder therefore the so-called Saddam genocides now being over dramatised to the world, were tenaciously hidden by the West and their media when the going was good between them and the former Iraqi leader.
A pertinent question is why did America decide to destroy the same secular Saddam they helped build up and armed to the teeth to fight the Islamic Republic of Iran? The deposed Iraqi leader was used to fight Iran because it suited Western strategic calculations then. Part of Saddam's greatest undoing was his cling to Arab radicalism in his Kuwait adventure, which isolated him from the Islamic resistance constituency. This Islamic sentiment was however successfully evoked by the post Saddam resistance fighters to bog down the Yankees into a bloody fiasco these past four years.
The underlying reasons for the Iraqi invasion were far from the so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), used as the smokescreen for the military offensive. American and British-led invasion of Iraq was meant to disarm a Muslim nation to protect Israel, to ensure free flow of concessionary oil and to prevent the rising tide of Islam. Under "The Project for the New American Century" (PNAC) founded by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, Zalmay Khalilzad and the now-indicted Lewis Libby, among others in September 2000, "they publicly called for sending U.S. forces into Iraq -- even if Saddam Hussein was already gone" (Chris Floyd April 14, 2006).
Part of America's dilemma in the region is the choice between "Islamic fundamentalism" and "Arab (secular) radicalism" both which are a threat to its region's trump cards; Oil and Israel.The American policy of "Regime change" in Iraq following the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, was informed by the desire to repeat the Afghan model by installing a puppet president in the garb of Hamid Karzai.
But is Karzai a good model to copy? This is a Western installed so-called president who was holed up in the capital and few urban areas guarded by foreign forces while the Talibans controlled much of the countryside. In Iraq also, what we have are bunch of puppets led by President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nouri Al-Malaki equally holed up in a Baghdad two square-miles enclave, the so-called "Green Zone" daring not to move freely among the people.
America's journey into the bloody Iraqi quagmire which began even long before the March 2003 invasion brought it face to face with the post Saddam Resistance forces called "Insurgents" by the West. They were largely made up of former Iraqi soldiers, the Republican Guards and several other official and volunteer militias believed to have melted away with their weapons after Saddam Hussein's fall
The Islamic sentiment was successfully evoked by the post Saddam Iraqi resistance fighters in concert with Al-Zarqawi and his group to bog down the Yankees into a bloody fiasco these past three years. But as mentioned earlier, the decisive situation for America's short and medium term plans for the Middle East may be the ultimate result of the bloody battles taking place between it and the masked Iraqi resistance fighters in the theatre of war.
The fighters have succeeded in drawing the Americans into their worst nightmare since their lost war in Vietnam; hand-to-hand gorilla-styled combats with several undefined battlefields. The Americans' frantic effort to build a reliable and capable Iraqi proxy to fight the occupation war on their behalf has so far proved largely unsuccessful. In spite of several elections "held at gunpoint" as London's the Economist described them, credible and popular governments have failed to emerge under American occupation in Iraq. The apparently well orchestrated plan to balkanise the country or break it up along sectarian divides seems to be failing despite several tragic or bloody sectarian provocations aimed at pitching the Sunnis against the Shi'as.
A curious development is how America is playing sectarian politics in Iraq by presenting itself as the friend of the Shi'as. This is the country that is antagonistic to the same Shi'as in neighbouring Iran. The concern of the West is not whether one is a Shi'a or Sunni, but whether he plays their cards or not.
Before the alleged capture of Saddam Hussein in a "hole" in December 2003, the World was made to believe that he was commanding the anti-American resistance. But the intensification of the resistance and their sophistication thereafter, was a clear signal that a new force had stepped in to take over after Saddam's ouster.
The same scenario played itself out following the death of Al-Zarqawi who by the Western account themselves was only in control of about 15 per cent of the overall Iraqi insurgency before his death. Despite its nauseating distraction to the international Muslim community and the Iraqi patriots, the Eid day shameful execution of Saddam will militarily only worsen the military fortunes American troops rather than demoralise the ever determined Iraqi resistance fighters.
In Al-Zarqawi like in the case of Saddam, at least the West knew the "Enemy combatants"- this may not be the same with their "successors" in the current messily undefined war in Iraq. It does not look as though things will get better for the occupation forces and their puppet soldiers and government at least in the short term as a result of Saddam's vengeful and hurried hanging. The ability of the Americans to read the handwriting on the walls and make a face saving withdrawal from the baseless Iraqi occupation seems to be the only option left to them. Any time the American and British forces thought they had pacified Iraq; the resistance will fight back with another tactic.
The imminent so-called "new" Iraq policy to be unveiled by President George W. Bush may simply be the recycling of old drink in a new bottle given the American President's well known arrogant approach to the intractable fiasco. On a final note though the sad saga in relationship between Saddam Hussein and the West was a clear case of the futility of playing a puppet role to them given their well known policy of Use and Dump with devastating consequences for the countries involved: Marcos in the Philippines. Mobutu in Zaire, Noriega in Nicaragua, Nimeiri in the Sudan and Pinochet in Chile to cite only few examples.
Saddam thought to revolt against his betrayal by the West in the build-up to his defeat in Kuwait in 1991 by resorting to the rhetoric of "liberation of the Arabs and Islamic holy places from the west." It was an effort too late up to the bitter end through his barbaric hanging by the puppet regime of Prime Minister Al-Maliki on the orders of America's President George Bush.
Saddam knew too much of the Western dirty plans for the Gulf and indeed the Middle East to be left alone as a renegade defiant Arab radical who was clearly becoming closer to Islam. The American President may also wanted to tell other potential Arab and Islamic radical leaders that Saddam's fate could await them.
That message is may only relevant to those secular leaders who "Love the World and fear death". Perhaps, Saddam's three-year ordeal in the hands of his American captors and his agonising death on Eid day of Sacrifice, may have atoned for most or all his sins and earned him the "Martyrdom" status he craved for towards the end of his life. America meanwhile should smile no longer in Iraq even after Saddam's demise given the familiar vicious cycles of bloodletting.
Meanwhile only the direct intervention of God will rescue Iraq from the yawns of the "War hawks" described aptly by the former Malaysian President Mahathir Muhammad as "People with Blood-Soaked Hands" If the Iraqi conflict escalates further beyond control, the ultimate losers will include its intended beneficiaries: the West led by America and Britain, Israel and the client secular Arab regimes.
The gainers may include the dreaded "Islamic Fundamentalists" who have already seized the post-Saddam initiatives in the last three years. It is they who may take the suspended "Mother of all Wars" (ironically began by Saddam), to its logical conclusions.
Garba A. Isa, Yekuwa Communications, Kano