The Murderer's Gibbet
Cole in Salon.com on the Saddam Execution
My article on the execution of Saddam is out in Salon.com. Excerpt:
' The body of Saddam, as it swung from the gallows at 6 a.m. Saturday Baghdad time, cast an ominous shadow over Iraq. The execution provoked intense questions about whether his trial was fair and about what the fallout will be. One thing is certain: The trial and execution of Saddam were about revenge, not justice. Instead of promoting national reconciliation, this act of revenge helped Saddam portray himself one last time as a symbol of Sunni Arab resistance, and became one more incitement to sectarian warfare. '
Read the whole thing.
See also Salon.com's Editor's picks for 2006, ten articles that include my "Israel's Failed-State Policy."
Consider subscribing to Salon.com for the coming year. Much of what I've written there in the past year would not have been published by most other magazines.
See also Paul Richter's article on how Saddam's execution is not actually a turning point for Iraq. I am quoted.
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/30/2006 12:30:00 AM
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11 Comments:
I'm not a fan of Saddam, but it was stupid - and in bad taste - to do this on the morning of Eid al-Adha.
Juan, a good critical review of the Saddam trial. I think it is too early to evaluate the historical significance of this event, but the processés regrettable flaws are apparent and consistent with the bungled occupation as a whole. Take the trial of ceausescu-it was an unambiguous event and cathartic building block towards a reformed state and healed nation. In comparision the Saddam process was botched at every level. First, the highly peculiar judge switch exposed this as a monkey court that made a legally strong case into trumped up show trial that is symbolic of US unilateralism. Cowboy justice shows how Bush is culturally illiterate, self-absorbed, and personally vindictive (pay attention Christians) and how the neo-cons have no grasp of the difference between power and force and remain clueless in combatting global jihadism. Second, the manipulation of the trial in conjunction with the US elections for Republican gain revealed how hollow the US commitment to democracy, freedom, and justice really is. Third, Saddamès hasty execution for the Jawail massacre rather than the more heinous Halabja attack undermines the regime change rationale and denies Kurds any satisfaction. This trial stopped being about historical turn paging and nation building a long time ago, and its whole macabre handling at the end points out not the relevance or irrelevance of Saddam but the panic, division, and weakness of the current regime which treated him essentially like a hot potato rather than a criminal against the united Iraqi people. Fourth, can anybody explain to me how you invent a process where Saddam ends up looking like not only a martyr and becomes almost rehabilitated as an icon for the necessity of Machivillian force to counter deep sectarian divisions?
I will be interested to read Bushés personal involvement in this sordid affair. My hunch is that his fingerprints are all over this and even if they are not he will surely burn his fingers on this. After all, the bubble boy who cringed at Saddam defying his father was given a real lesson in humiliation, and gathering from juniorès bizarre behavior of late I think that realization of how pyrrhic his victory was is starting to sink in. For the rest of us, the jarring images of a hanging body is going to be hard to reconcile with the idea of righteous and mighty liberating armies as the civil war heats up and living standards in Iraq and the US continue to plummet.
thanks so much for your view! keep going!
Justice for Iraq's people will be done when their primary killers from the past 3 US administrations also go to the gallows for the 3+ Million they've killed to date. Saddam was only a small fry in the big picture.
Where will the main Sunni counter-attack take place (Kirkurk?) and who/what will be the target? I'm sure we won't have long to find out.
And now Turkmenistan. And China will not say no to its latest Iranian gas deal. It seems there's a line drawn in the sand at the Shatt al Arab again. While the Saudis continue to "cut" oil production and Nigeria has another bout of oil delta insurgency.
I expect the new year to be very tense and volitile.
At my site, courtesy of buzzflash, a video... an alternative biography of Saddam Hussein
that show his history as an agent of the CIA and U.S. government since the 1960s
In text, here's a "short list" of crimes Saddam Hussein was never charged with and why:
[Buzzflash editorial]
"No charges related to 60s and 70s because directly on CIA payroll.
No charges related to launching and conducting Iraq-Iran War because
encouraged and financed to do so by US who gave him assets they do not even
give Israelis and just what Bush has done in Iraq and for what several were
hanged for at Nuremberg;
No charges related to thousands tortured and murdered in jails because many
were alleged "communists" from lists turned over by CIA
No charges related to invasion of Kuwait because given a "green light" to
do so by April Glaspie and James Baker;
No charges related to gassing of Kurds in 1988 because trade and special
aid resumed by HW Bush right after it;
No charges related to putting down Shia and Kurd uprisings in 1991 and 1992
because encouraged by US and then those uprising left to die;
etc. Carefully crafted charged to avoid exposing Saddam as "America's
Bitch" and summary and quick execution is for the same purpose."
Watch the video... The truth will out.
Dear Professor Cole
Thanks for the recommendation to Salon.
I enjoyed the editors picks, in particular the piece by Sid Blumenthal
In the event that Baker actually advocates what he thinks, Bush's options will be to admit the errors of his ways and the wisdom of his father and father's men or to cast them and caution aside once again. His choice is either Shakespearean or Wagnerian. .
Oh Bother. One is warned not to play Hamlet on a small stage. There isn't room for the bodies in the final act.
To be able to read articles of this quality for an annual fee of £12 is a bargain. Perhaps you would update the main post to identify the value for money.
Now lets see if we can leverage this value for the rest of the world. 10% of the world have english as their mother tongue but produce 65% of the world's websites which accentuates the digital divide.
You do us an enormous service by translating the Arabic press and publishing slected extracts.
How do we do the same in the opposite direction?
There is no point in me building out high speed broadband all around the world if people have no content they can read to look at.
I found the drawn-out farce of a Potemkin "trial" and subsequent hasty, furtive execution of Saddam Hussein by my government immensly depressing -- sort of like watching a cat leisurely play with a dying mouse prior to killing it just before it could expire naturally of its wounds. Typical of the Texas Stud Hamster, though: petty, cruel, vindictive, and meaningless.
Slobodan Milosevich's old cell at the Hague and an internationally supervised fair trial for Saddam Hussein would have served "justice" as much as anything else. But then, this whole sordid public-relations disaster never had anything to do with "justice," an arcane and recondite subject about which America seems day by day less and less able to demonstrate an understanding.
Prof. Cole: your Salon article on the execution is lucid and comprehensive. Many thanks for your important work, again.
You mention the tribunal's "unique" sense of timing with respect to the holiday of Eid Al-Adha.
Today, in accordance with tradition, Sunnis who can afford to do so are slaughtering a best-quality sheep (or equivalent) to recall Abraham's sacrifice, and are donating some of the meat to charity.
Saddam wrote in his farewell letter that he would be "a sacrifice" for his people.
His executioners have forever tied him to the verses in which the story of Abraham and Isaac is told, but also to the annual literal killing of an expensive animal and its communal consumption. I'd say a former head of state is a pretty expensive animal.
What, incidentally, is the Maliki government planning to do with the body? Cremation is forbidden in Islam because any alteration of a body, alive or dead, is considered a desecration. But a tomb would pose security problems.
In contravention to Islamic law, some Iraqis have been tattooing addresses and phone numbers on their legs so that their democratized bodies can be returned to their loved ones.
Maybe, in a similarly practical vein, Mr. Maliki will permit the incineration of just one Iraqi corpse.
No, Iraq is not Vietnam
Now about 35 years separate us from the Vietnam war which is more than Vietnam-WW2 time lag! Also, WW2 ended 60+ years ago which is slightly more than Vietnam-WW1 time lag. This simple comparison alone gives a simple explanation for the huge gap between the modern neoconservative and LBJ/Nixon/Ford mentality. Basically, what happens is that neoconservative foreign policy makers simulate the cold war rhetoric about global struggle without any particular understanding of what WW1, WW2 and the cold war were really about.
Recent execution of Saddam Hussein is one stunning example of this historical amnesia. Back in the post-WW2 period, it was perfectly clear that public execution of a major political rival by the right of the winner is easy. The really difficult part is dealing with the consequences. Sure, if another side is serious about its goals, they are not going to be intimidated by symbolic moves like this. Symmetric response by counter-executions is just one of many options, the problem is, there are lots of unpredictable asymmetric responses that can be expected when the conflict will inevitably escalate.
From this prospective, celebration of Hussein's execution as a "milestone on the road to the Iraqi democracy" could not look more sinister. Not only the neocons miss the actual historical prospective, they also completely ignore the simple fact that Hussein was a mortal enemy of the Khomeinists with whom, unlike with Israel, he fought for real, not symbolically - and with great physical damage. So, there is little doubt that they will take full advantage of his execution. It is hard to imagine that responsible post-WW2 decision-maker would fail to notice subtle side effects like this one, but make no mistake, for the neocons this logic is pure gibberish.
Sure, nobody in the ME takes Saddam's hanging as anything else than pure revenge, but this is still not the whole story. What is worse, religious radicals must take execution of Saddam as a militaristic ritual sacrifice of the sort we know from the Greek mythology. Only Hussein's close followers are going to mourn his death, but religious revolutionaries know better than anybody else how to respond to the symbolic moves of this kind - it is exactly their area of expertise. So, if Saddam's execution is a milestone of any kind, it is a milestone on the road to even more vicious religious warfare.
Public human sacrifices and their celebrations were not part of essentially secular Vietnam conflict, the neocons together with their Islamist rivals own a copyright for this unfortunate innovation. Now we all are going to learn the hard way the price of their experimentation in ideological engineering.
Juan Cole. Saddam: The death of a dictator
Fairness of Hussein's trial will be judged by equal application of the law
What law is at play? It's the law against disproportionate use of force. Hussein was executed for his disproportionate retaliation against inhabitants of the town of Dujail.
It could be argued that, for Hussein's punishment to be considered just, then similar crimes must also be punished. Bush and Olmert have both committed similar crimes; Bush with Fallujah and Iraq in general, and Olmert with Lebanon.
Thinking of George Orwell's essay "Revenge is Sour" in the present context and remembering as well his little poem in Animal Farm called "Beasts of England" instigated a little effort of my own: "Beasts of My Land."
http://themisfortuneteller.blogspot.com/2006/12/beasts-of-my-land.html
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