by Robert Fisk
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.
In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we
have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent
- we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib
- and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the
swinging corpse of the dictator we created. . . .
FULL TEXT
Robert Fisk is the author of 'The Great War for Civilisation'
Stephen C. Pelletiere, "Did Saddam
Gas His Own People?," New York Times, January 31, 2003
Edited by Joyce Battle, "Shaking Hands with
Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984," National
Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 82, February 25, 2003
Robert Fisk, "'The Court in Charge of
Trying Saddam Has No Legal Standing'," Independent, July 1, 2004
George Friedman, "America's Secret
War," Strategic Forecasting, Inc., October 11, 2005
Robert Parry, "Bush Silences a
Dangerous Witness," consortiumnews.com, December 30, 2006
Robert Fisk, "He
takes his secrets to the grave. Our complicity dies with him,"
Independent, December 31, 2006
Rupert Cornwell, "How
Washington and London helped to create the monster they went to war to
destroy," Independent, December 31, 2006
"Iraqis Say They Were Better Off Under Hussein," Angus Reid
Global Monitor, January 3, 2007
Shawn Doherty, "Former
Abu Ghraib guard says prisoners were treated even worse than was reported,"
Capital Times, October 1, 2008