one more thing while on the topic of Rest in Peace...... some useful thoughts:
The Consequences of Killing Saddam
by Robert Dreyfuss
Since the US invasion of Iraq, by one widely reported estimate,
as many as 655,000 Iraqis have been killed, in air strikes, by bombs,
in
death-squad executions, and generalized civil strife. Now, add one by
hanging: the kangaroo-court trial and execution of Saddam Hussein. In
life, even in prison, he inspired many loyalists to fight for his
legacy; but his death is certain to spark even fiercer violence, not
just from his remaining lieutenants and senior Baath party officials,
but throughout the broader Sunni Arab community in Iraq. It pushes any
hope of Sunni-Shiite reconciliation farther away, inflames passions on
both sides, and solidifies the image of the United States in Iraq as a
bloodthirsty occupier.
Convicted of war crimes by a puppet Iraqi regime that dispensed with
niceties such as evidence and rebuttal, Saddam Hussein was blamed by
his fiercest critics--such as Kanan Makiya,
author of Republic of Fear, and others with strong motive to
inflate the scale of Saddam's crimes--of killing 300,000 Iraqis during
his thirty-five year rule (1968-2003). In less than four years, George
W. Bush has more than doubled that, with no end in sight. As war
criminals go, Bush wins hands down.
The 655,000 US victims in Iraq do not include the hundreds of thousands
of Iraqis, mostly children, who died during a twelve-year era of
US-imposed sanctions on Iraq from 1991 to 2003, but those deaths, at
least, were obscured by a fig leaf of legality, since the sanctions had
been approved by the UN Security Council. Bush's Iraq War had no such
cover: it was deemed "illegal" by Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary
general.
In a statement written in advance of Saddam's hanging, Bush warned that
his death "will not end the violence in Iraq"--truer words have not
been spoken. No longer Iraq's ruler, since his capture Saddam had
become a symbol of the power struggle between the Shiite Arab religious
parties that have come to rule parts of Baghdad and southern Iraq and
the growing, Sunni-led resistance army that controls most of several
provinces to the north and west of the capital, along with significant
swaths of western Baghdad.
His death will, of course, inspire the religious Shiites into
intensifying their jihad, cementing their belief in the righteousness
of their cause. Far more importantly, however, it will spark a burning
desire for revenge among the Sunni Arabs, and not just among Baath
party veterans. The commanders and organizers of the insurgency are
primarily drawn from those veterans and from the former Iraqi army
officer corps, who were mostly Sunni. But their base is among the
tribes and clans of western, Sunni Iraq--and since the US invasion, the
sons of those tribes have been increasingly enlisting in the resistance
army, often to the dismay of some of the more conservative tribal
elders.
An overwhelming majority of the Sunni Arab population of Iraq now
supports the resistance, and its intensity is likely to grow
significantly in the wake of Saddam's death. Earlier this year, 300
Sunni tribal leaders met in Anbar to issue a demand that Saddam Hussein
be released from
prison, just one indication that support for the former president of
Iraq was widespread. "The execution of Saddam means that the flame of
vengeance will be ignited and it will hurt the body of Iraq with
unrecoverable wound," a Sunni tribal leader told the New York
Times.
Indeed, despite the talk of a surge of US forces to pacify the Iraqi
capital, the fiercest fighting in Iraq is north and west of Baghdad, in
the heart of Sunni Iraq. On December 24, the US military command
announced the deaths of three more Marines and two more soldiers there,
bringing the total for December to 108 Americans dead and making the
month the bloodiest of 2006. At least a year ago, the US military
determined that the war in Sunni Iraq was lost militarily, and that it
could only be resolved through a political deal between Sunnis, Shiites
and Kurds. Now, the United States faces a stark choice: either abandon
Anbar altogether, or face a years-long counterinsurgency campaign there
that will mean Fallujah-style, house-to-house fighting in dozens of
cities and towns.
A political accord for national reconciliation, always an iffy
proposition, is now even more difficult to achieve, in the wake of
Saddam's execution. The Shiite religious bloc, were it not intent on an
all-out victory that humiliates the Sunni community, might have held
out a life sentence for Saddam as part of a deal that included amnesty
for insurgents, the cancellation of the draconian de-Baathification
laws, the reconstitution of the army, and a power-sharing formula that
includes Iraq's oil wealth. Now that bargaining chip--and it is a major
one--is lost.
And something else is lost. Since his capture in 2003, Saddam has been
interrogated by US officials, including CIA officers. According to
sources close to the resistance, US officials--including Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice and former Secretary of State Donald
Rumsfeld--met with Saddam Hussein earlier this year, to ask if he would
cooperate in some way to urge the resistance to lay down its arms. (He
refused.) But whatever transpired between US officials and Saddam since
he was captured, none of it is public. Not a single journalist
interviewed Saddam. As far as we know, he wrote no memoir in prison.
The countless secrets that he had, about 35 years of his leadership, he
has taken to the grave. Decades of history have been lost,
irrecoverably. Perhaps one of the reasons for the hurried rush to the
gallows, even before a series of other staged, show trials could be
arranged, was to make guarantee that Saddam's secrets never see the
light of day.
This article can be found on the web at:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070108/c ... ing_saddam"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believe is false."- William Casey, CIA Director 1981
