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A reflection on who is guilty in the matter of Saddam

"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."

Needless to say the above are the words of Robert Fisk in his introduction in an article in The Independent on the whole Saddam and Iraq situation - both now, the recent past and going back many years. Pay particular attention to Fisk's prognosis of things to come.....

Comments

BwcaBrownie said…
My opinion is that hanging Saddam was in poor taste and I take no joy in it.
'They' haven't caught Osama so they just had to kill somebody (as well as the thousands of enlisted men who have died).
My view is that Saddam did the same terrible things that America did to Senegal Slaves, Australia did to the Aborigine tribes, and that Pinochet Pol Pot and the Sandanista regimes did. It's not like he stood out rom the crowd - oh! wait a sec - OIL is involved isn't it?
December 31, 2006 1:26 pm
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