Is Saddam Hussein a scapegoat?

On November 5, Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death by hanging by a special tribunal, set up in Baghdad, on the charges of killing of 148 men and boys. Saddam Hussein failed to stop the killings, which he claimed took place after a purported assassination attempt against him on July 8, 1982. Saddam has also been held accountable for the torture and mass killings of Shias and Kurds during his rule.

During his ten years of tyrannical rule Saddam had problems within Iraq and with neighbours. He always claimed Kuwait as the 26th province of Iraq. Then in 1990s, he decided to take control of it.

A well-known investigative journalist Murray Waas had mentioned in his article “Who Lost Kuwait”, published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian on January 30, 1991, that five days before the invasion of Kuwait William H. Webster, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, briefed President Bush Sr that Saddam Hussein was likely to invade Kuwait and predicted that Saddam would probably seize only the Rumaila oil fields and the islands of Bubiyan and Warba, not the whole country.

One week prior to the invasion of Kuwait Saddam Hussein was assured by the then US Ambassador, April Glaspie that the US would not intervene in inter-Arab disputes and gave Saddam a go-head signal. Glaspie also assured Saddam that the United States was neutral in all Iraq-Kuwait border disputes and that she had direct instructions from the president to seek better relations with Iraq.

This pledge regarding the taking control of Kuwait made sense to Saddam because the US had eagerly courted his regime during that time and in the past, especially in the wake of the Iran-Contra affair.

At one stage when Representative Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) asked Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly if it would be correct to say that, if Iraq invaded Kuwait, the United States would not be obligated to commit its military forces in Kuwait's defence. Kelly replied, “That is correct”. These statements all sent consistent and accommodating messages to Saddam.

When Saddam took control of Kuwait through his military might, he found United States turned her back and stood-up with the other members of the UN Security Council asking him to withdraw from Kuwait immediately.

When he refused to leave Kuwait by the January 15, 1991 deadline - set by the United Nations - then President of US, Bush Sr, launched “Operation Desert Storm”.

Five weeks later, the non-stop bombing of Iraq was followed by a fully-fledged ground assault, employing hundreds of thousands of US-led ground troops. Exactly 100 hours after the ground war began Kuwait was freed from Iraqi forces.

After the war, Bush Sr collected the full cost of the war - $35 billion - from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other Gulf states. US administration declared the recession, that the US was facing prior to the Gulf War, was lessened because of a $9-billion arms sale to Arab countries in the Gulf War.

During “Operation Desert Storm”, the US-led forces dropped more than 20,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq’s surface, killing hundreds of civilians and destroying homes and other civilian property. It is worth remembering that current US Vice President Dick Cheney, who was then the defence secretary of the Bush Sr administration, was the mastermind behind this Gulf War.

During the ten years of the Iraq-Iran war the US backed Saddam Hussein completely. The US sold more than $2 billion of sophisticated equipment to Iraq and Saddam was provided with mass killing weapons to deal with the rising Kurdish liberation movement.

The recently sacked Donald Rumsfield was the key planner of the deals between the then US administration and Saddam Hussein.

In the 2000, US Presidential election, US Republican Party campaigned for the removal of Saddam Hussein, to get Iraq free from Saddam totalitarianism, bring democracy to Iraq and to rid Iraq of Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs). The 2000 election results apparently showed that the people of United Stated trusted George W. Bush on Iraq and a Republican victory in presidential election made him the president of United States.

In 2003, the US and the UK used allegations of Iraqi WMD as a key reason for going war. The US asked the international community to take action against Saddam Hussein because Saddam had violated the United Nation Security Council Resolution 1441 regarding WMD. The US and the United Kingdom attempted to get the UN Security Council resolution approved but France, Russia and later China signalled they were not prepared to use force against Iraq.

Despite the historic opposition from the international community shown by the huge demonstrations by millions of people in almost every major city of the world, President George W. Bush put the United Nations aside, formed a coalition of the willing and on March 20, 2003, invaded Iraq through US-led forces.

Subsequently, reports from the chief US weapons inspector and other surveys revealed Iraq had no stockpiles of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

The invasion of Iraq was called “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. The proclaimed goals were to disarm Iraq from WMD, make the country a safer place for Iraqi people and free from terrorists’ threats to the outside world.

Saddam claimed that his army and the people of Iraq would never let the US army return home alive and they would be buried in the streets of Iraq. Many analysts had already predicted that, as there was no exit strategy, if the operation failed a reaction could spread to the entire Middle East.

Whether President Bush accepts it or not, the reality is that since the invasion of Iraq, the death toll of US soldiers has been continuously rising. Suicide attacks and ambushes on US and western convoys are now a daily occurrence in Iraq. Iraq has never been such a divided and dangerous place.

In the last year or so the US army generals have claimed the situation in Iraq is declining into a full-scale civil war. On average 50 to 60 people are killed with deadly bomb blasts every day. According to a study, published in the Wall Street Journal in October 2006, about 600,000 Iraqis have died from the violence since the US-led invasion in 2003. The entire Iraqi infrastructure has collapsed. There are hardly any basic civil facilities such as water, power and healthcare.

The Iraqi conditions have stirred an international reaction. The continuous killings of Iraqi civilians have given more excuses to the extremists and so the world has witnessed more suicide incidents in the last four years in Iraq than anywhere else in the world.

Terrorism has increased globally. Osama bin Laden and his key members are still hiding in Afghanistan. The Taliban in Afghanistan are rising again. Several new terrorists groups in Iraq and elsewhere have been established since the invasion of Iraq. The hatred against US has increased remarkably, not only in the Middle East but in the Islamic world. US popularity in the western world has decreased and the US image has been damaged even among its closest allies.

President George W. Bush never accepted the basic realities and mistakenly committed the US and other forces to a war with no end.

One by one key supporters of the war in Iraq - both within the US and around the world - either lost their status or had to change their policy.

For example, in the US, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfield was sacked recently. Colin Powell and Richard Armitage left after the 2004 election. George Tenet, CIA chief who was the producer of Iraq’s WMD issue, was sacked. Jose Maria Aznar, the Spanish Prime Minister, was ousted after the Madrid bombs. Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, lost his office last April.

Eventually, the people of the US voted against Bush’s military operation in Iraq. Bush’s Republican Party received an historic defeat in the recent congressional elections.

But returning to Saddam’s death penalty, some international legal experts and human rights groups have already questioned the impartiality of the Iraqi trial court. When Saddam’s death sentence was announced George W. Bush claimed it as a victory for the United States in achieving her goals in Iraq. But how many of those have really been achieved?

Nevertheless, if Saddam deserves to be hanged would his death bring any change in the present anarchical situation in Iraq? Then, even if democracy and peace is implemented in Iraq - which seems impossible in the present situation - who will be held responsible for the torture and killing of about half a million people in Iraq? Will anyone be held accountable and brought to the international court of justice?