December 29, 2006
SWING TIME:
Official: Saddam to be executed tonight (CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA and QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA, 12/29/06, Associated Press)
The official witnesses to Saddam Hussein's impending execution gathered Friday in Baghdad's fortified Green Zone in final preparation for his hanging, as state television broadcast footage of his regime's atrocities.With U.S. forces on high alert for a surge in violence, the Iraqi government readied all the necessary documents, including a "red card" — an execution order introduced during Saddam's dictatorship.
Soccer makes a useful contribution to the world, at last.
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Hanging Saddam won't bring peace to Iraq (Con Coughlin, 30/12/2006, Daily Telegraph)
This was a man whose maniacal policies – whether launching unnecessary wars with Iran and Kuwait or the genocidal purges of his own people that were a perennial feature of Iraqi politics – resulted in the deaths of up to one million people during the 35 years he dominated the nation.That puts him on a par with Stalin, the political figure Saddam most admired as he rose through the ranks of the Ba'ath party during the early 1960s. Indeed, the reason why Saddam's regime lasted in power for so long, despite the various attempts to assassinate him and the constant eruption of violent rebellion, was his dexterity in imitating the ruthless and all-encompassing state security structure that Stalin used to maintain his iron grip over the Soviet Union. As a consequence, hardly a family in Iraq escaped without losing a beloved father or son, mother or daughter to Saddam's tyranny.
One of the great ironies of Saddam's year-long trial for ordering the 1982 massacre of 142 villagers in the Shia town of Dujail was his lawyers' constant reference to the Geneva Conventions to save their client from the gallows, a fate that was effectively pre-ordained from the moment he was dragged unceremoniously out of his hiding hole in Tikrit by American Marines in December 2003.
As president of Iraq, Saddam completely ignored the internationally recognised treaty on the conduct of war. When the Kurds sided with the Iranians during the 1980s, Saddam silenced them by dropping chemical weapons on their villages and forcibly driving the survivors into exile. Kuwaiti civilians captured after Saddam invaded their country in 1990 were subjected to the most horrible torture imaginable, from being slowly electrocuted to death to being thrown into vats of boiling water.
Even during his trials in Baghdad – both for the Dujail massacre and the notorious chemical weapons attack on Halabja at the end of the Iran-Iraq war – at no point did Saddam concede that he had done anything wrong. In the case of Dujail, he insisted it was his duty as president to take punitive action against the villagers after their failed assassination attempt; a similar argument was made with regard to the Halabja massacre, where Saddam's defence was that he was defending the nation's interests in attacking the Kurdish villagers who were siding with the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war.
This twisted logic and utter lack of any moral or ethical compass made Saddam a threat not just to his own country, but also to the entire region. About the only serious political aspiration he held throughout his career was to be the leader of a Saladin-like pan-Arab revival, in which all the Arab nations would be united under the rule of one benevolent leader – Saddam Hussein.
Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of America and Britain launching a military campaign to depose him in the spring of 2003, few can deny that the long-term future of Iraq and the wider Middle East is brighter without the butcher of Baghdad.