The World of Saddam Hussein
Sat12-30, 02:17PM Saddam Hussein reportedly executed-joy by Shi'ites he oppressed- resentment bySunnis across Iraq's violent sectarian divide
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A road to nowhere but Change is possible
1. George W Bush the Predident of the USA; 2.Saddam at his trial 2006; 3.Appearing on New Year's day 2001; 4.The Iraqi leader stares down on his citizens ; 5.Saddam Hussein insists that the Gulf War was a victory for Iraq; 6.His son was Uday was injured in an attack. 7. Saddam became the Ace of Spades and became one of the four most mosted men in the world after the President Bush ordered the final take of Iraq by the USA
The Kurds were persecuted by the Iraqi regime
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majidida al-Tikriti (Arabic: ???? ???? ??? ?????? ????????? - addam -usayn -abdu-l-maid al-tikriti[1]; born April 28, 1937[2]),
was the President of Iraq from July 16, 1979 until April 9, 2003, when he was deposed during the United States-led invasion of Iraq. As a leading member of the Iraqi Baath Party, which espoused secular pan-Arabism, economic modernization, and Arab socialism, Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup that brought his party to long-term power. As vice president under his cousin, the frail General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Saddam tightly controlled conflict between the government and the armed forces by creating repressive security forces and cementing his own firm authority over the apparatus of government. As president, Saddam ran an authoritarian government and maintained power through the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) and the Gulf War (1991). Saddam's government repressed movements that it deemed threatening, particularly those of ethnic or religious groups that sought independence or autonomy. While he remained a popular hero among many Arabs for standing up to Israel and the United States, some in the international community continued to view Saddam with deep suspicion following the 1991 Gulf War. Saddam was deposed by the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq, and captured by U.S. forces on December 13, 2003. On November 5, 2006, he was convicted of crimes against humanity by the Iraq Special Tribunal and was sentenced to death by hanging.
Youth
Saddam Hussein was born in the town of Al-Awja, 8 miles (13 km) from the Iraqi town of Tikrit, to a family of shepherds. His mother, Subha Tulfah al-Mussallat, named her newborn son "Saddam", which in Arabic means "One who confronts". He never knew his father, Hussein 'Abd al-Majid, who disappeared six months before Saddam was born. Shortly afterward, Saddam's 13-year-old brother died of cancer, leaving his mother severely depressed in the final months of the pregnancy. Saddam's mother also tried to abort the baby by attempting suicide. The infant Saddam was sent to the family of his maternal uncle, Khairallah Talfah, until he was three.[4] His mother remarried, and Saddam gained three half-brothers through this marriage. His stepfather, Ibrahim al-Hassan, treated Saddam harshly after his return. At about the age of 10, Saddam fled the family and returned to live in Baghdad with his uncle, Kharaillah Tulfah. Tulfah, the father of Saddam's future wife, was a devout Sunni Muslim. Later in his life, relatives from his native Tikrit would become some of his closest advisors and supporters. According to Saddam, he learned many things from his uncle, a militant Iraqi nationalist. Under the guidance of his uncle, he attended a nationalistic secondary school in Baghdad. In 1957, at age 20, Saddam joined the revolutionary pan-Arab Ba'ath Party, of which his uncle was a supporter. Revolutionary sentiment was characteristic of the era in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. The stranglehold of the old elites (the conservative monarchists, established families, and merchants) was breaking down in Iraq. Moreover, the populist pan-Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt would profoundly influence the young Ba'athist, even up to the present day. The rise of Nasser foreshadowed a wave of revolutions throughout the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, which would see the collapse of the monarchies of Iraq, Egypt, and Libya. Nasser challenged the British and French, nationalized the Suez Canal, and strove to modernize Egypt and unite the Arab world politically. In 1958, a year after Saddam had joined the Ba'ath party, army officers led by General Abdul Karim Qassim overthrew Faisal II of Iraq. The Ba'athists opposed the new government, and in 1959, Saddam was involved in the attempted United States-backed plot to assassinate Qassim.[12] Saddam was shot in the leg, but escaped to Tikrit with the help of CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents. Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred to Beirut for a brief CIA training course. From there he moved to Cairo where he made frequent visits to the American embassy. During this time the CIA placed him in a upper-class apartment observed by CIA and Egyptian operatives. (UPI 'analysis' article) He was sentenced to death in absentia. Saddam studied law at the Cairo University during his exile.
Rise to Power
Concerned about Qassim's growing ties to Communists, the CIA gave assistance to the Ba'ath Party and other regime opponents.[5] Army officers with ties to the Ba'ath Party overthrew Qassim in a coup in 1963. Ba'athist leaders were appointed to the cabinet and Abdul Salam Arif became president. Arif dismissed and arrested the Ba'athist leaders later that year. Saddam returned to Iraq, but was imprisoned in 1964. He escaped prison in 1967 and quickly became a leading member of the party. In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless coup led by Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr that overthrew Abdul Rahman Arif. al-Bakr was named president and Saddam was named his deputy. Saddam soon became the regime's strongman. According to biographers, Saddam never forgot the tensions within the first Ba'athist government, which informed his measures to promote Ba'ath party unity as well as his ruthless resolve to maintain power and programs to ensure social stability. Soon after becoming deputy to the president, Saddam demanded and received the rank of four-star general despite his lack of military training.
Modernization
Saddam consolidated power in a nation riddled with profound tensions. Long before Saddam, Iraq had been split along social, ethnic, religious, and economic fault lines: Sunni versus Shi'ite, Arab versus Kurd, tribal chief versus urban merchant, nomad versus peasant. Stable rule in a country rife with factionalism required the improvement of living standards. Saddam moved up the ranks in the new government by aiding attempts to strengthen and unify the Ba'ath party and taking a leading role in addressing the country's major domestic problems and expanding the party's following. Saddam actively fostered the modernization of the Iraqi economy along with the creation of a strong security apparatus to prevent coups within the power structure and insurrections apart from it. Ever concerned with broadening his base of support among the diverse elements of Iraqi society and mobilizing mass support, he closely followed the administration of state welfare and development programs. At the center of this strategy was Iraq's oil. On June 1, 1972, Saddam oversaw the seizure of international oil interests, which, at the time, had a monopoly on the country's oil. A year later, world oil prices rose dramatically as a result of the 1973 energy crisis, and skyrocketing revenues enabled Saddam to expand his agenda. Within just a few years, Iraq was providing social services that were unprecedented among Middle Eastern countries. Saddam established and controlled the "National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy" and the campaign for "Compulsory Free Education in Iraq," and largely under his auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels; hundreds of thousands learned to read in the years following the initiation of the program. The government also supported families of soldiers, granted free hospitalization to everyone, and gave subsidies to farmers. Iraq created one of the most modernized public-health systems in the Middle East, earning Saddam an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). [13] [14] To diversify the largely oil-based economy, Saddam implemented a national infrastructure campaign that made great progress in building roads, promoting mining, and developing other industries. The campaign revolutionized Iraq's energy industries. Electricity was brought to nearly every city in Iraq, and many outlying areas. Before the 1970s, most of Iraq's people lived in the countryside, where Saddam himself was born and raised, and roughly two-thirds were peasants. But this number would decrease quickly during the 1970s as the country invested much of its oil profits into industrial expansion. Nevertheless, Saddam focused intensely on fostering loyalty to the Ba'athist government in the rural areas. After nationalizing foreign oil interests, Saddam supervised the modernization of the countryside, mechanizing agriculture on a large scale, and distributing land to peasant farmers.[7] The Ba'athists established farm cooperatives, in which profits were distributed according to the labors of the individual and the unskilled were trained. The government's commitment to agrarian reform was demonstrated by the doubling of expenditures for agricultural development in 1974-1975. Moreover, agrarian reform in Iraq improved the living standard of the peasantry and increased production, though not to the levels Saddam had hoped for. Saddam became personally associated with Ba'athist welfare and economic development programs in the eyes of many Iraqis, widening his appeal both within his traditional base and among new sectors of the population. These programs were part of a combination of "carrot and stick" tactics to enhance support in the working class, the peasantry, and within the party and the government bureaucracy. Saddam's organizational prowess was credited with Iraq's rapid pace of development in the 1970s; development went forward at such a fevered pitch that two million persons from other Arab countries and Yugoslavia worked in Iraq to meet the growing demand for labor. In 1976, Saddam rose to the position of general in the Iraqi armed forces, and rapidly became the strongman of the government. At the time Saddam was considered an enemy of Communism and radical Islamism. Saddam was integral to U.S. policy in the region, a policy which sought to weaken the influence of Iran and the Soviet Union.[citation needed] As the weak, elderly al-Bakr became unable to execute his duties, Saddam took on an increasingly prominent role as the face of the government both internally and externally. He soon became the architect of Iraq's foreign policy and represented the nation in all diplomatic situations. He was the de facto ruler of Iraq some years before he formally came to power in 1979. He slowly began to consolidate his power over Iraq's government and the Ba'ath party. Relationships with fellow party members were carefully cultivated, and Saddam soon accumulated a powerful circle of support within the party. Succession In 1979 al-Bakr started to make treaties with Syria, also under Ba'athist leadership, that would lead to unification between the two countries. Syrian President Hafez al-Assad would become deputy leader in a union, and this would drive Saddam to obscurity. Saddam acted to secure his grip on power. He forced the ailing al-Bakr to resign on July 16, 1979, and formally assumed the presidency. Shortly afterwards, he convened an assembly of Ba'ath party leaders on July 22, 1979. During the assembly, which he ordered videotaped, Saddam claimed to have found spies and conspirators within the Ba'ath Party and read out the names of 68 members who he thought could oppose him. These members were labeled "disloyal" and were removed from the room one by one and taken into custody. After the list was read, Saddam congratulated those still seated in the room for their past and future loyalty. The 68 people arrested at the meeting were subsequently put on trial, and 22 were sentenced to execution for treason.
Saddam Hussein as a secular leader
Saddam saw himself as a social revolutionary and a modernizer, following the Nasser model. To the consternation of Islamic conservatives, his government gave women added freedoms and offered them high-level government and industry jobs. Saddam also created a Western-style legal system, making Iraq the only country in the Persian Gulf region not ruled according to traditional Islamic law (Sharia). Saddam abolished the Sharia law courts, except for personal injury claims. Domestic conflict impeded Saddam's modernizing projects. Iraqi society is divided along lines of language, religion and ethnicity; Saddam's government rested on the support of the 20% minority of largely working class, peasant, and lower middle class Sunnis, continuing a pattern that dates back at least to the British mandate authority's reliance on them as administrators. The Shi'a majority were long a source of opposition to the government's secular policies, and the Ba'ath Party was increasingly concerned about potential Sh'ia Islamist influence following the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Kurds of northern Iraq (who are Sunni Muslims but not Arabs) were also permanently hostile to the Ba'athist party's pan-Arabism. To maintain his regime Saddam tended either to provide them with benefits so as to co-opt them into the regime, or to take repressive measures against them. The major instruments for accomplishing this control were the paramilitary and police organizations. Beginning in 1974, Taha Yassin Ramadan, a close associate of Saddam, commanded the People's Army, which was responsible for internal security. As the Ba'ath Party's paramilitary, the People's Army acted as a counterweight against any coup attempts by the regular armed forces. In addition to the People's Army, the Department of General Intelligence (Mukhabarat) was the most notorious arm of the state security system, feared for its use of torture and assassination. It was commanded by Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's younger half-brother. Since 1982, foreign observers believed that this department operated both at home and abroad in their mission to seek out and eliminate Saddam's perceived opponents.[8] Saddam justified Iraqi nationalism by claiming a unique role of Iraq in the history of the Arab world. As president, Saddam made frequent references to the Abbasid period, when Baghdad was the political, cultural, and economic capital of the Arab world. He also promoted Iraq's pre-Islamic role as Mesopotamia, the ancient cradle of civilization, alluding to such historical figures as Nebuchadrezzar II and Hammurabi. He devoted resources to archaeological explorations. In effect, Saddam sought to combine pan-Arabism and Iraqi nationalism, by promoting the vision of an Arab world united and led by Iraq. As a sign of his consolidation of power, Saddam's personality cult pervaded Iraqi society. Thousands of portraits, posters, statues and murals were erected in his honor all over Iraq. His face could be seen on the sides of office buildings, schools, airports, and shops, as well as on Iraqi currency. Saddam's personality cult reflected his efforts to appeal to the various elements in Iraqi society. He appeared in the costumes of the Bedouin, the traditional clothes of the Iraqi peasant (which he essentially wore during his childhood), and even Kurdish clothing, but also appeared in Western suits, projecting the image of an urbane and modern leader. Sometimes he would also be portrayed as a devout Muslim, wearing full headdress and robe, praying toward Mecca.
Foreign affairs
In foreign affairs, Saddam sought to have Iraq play a leading role in the Middle East. Iraq signed an aid pact with the Soviet Union in 1972, and arms were sent along with several thousand advisers. However, the 1978 executions of Iraqi Communists and a shift of trade toward the West strained Iraqi relations with the Soviet Union, leading to a more Western orientation from then until the Gulf War in 1991, though Saddam continued to receive the largest share of his armaments from the Soviet bloc. He made a state visit to France in 1976, cementing close ties with some French business and conservative political circles. Saddam led Arab opposition to the 1979 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. In 1975 he negotiated an accord with Iran that contained Iraqi concessions on border disputes. In return, Iran agreed to stop supporting opposition Kurds in Iraq. Saddam initiated Iraq's nuclear enrichment project in the 1980s, with French assistance. The first Iraqi nuclear reactor was named by the French "Osirak", a portmanteau formed from "Osiris", the name of the French experimental reactor that served as template and "Irak", the French spelling of "Iraq". Osirak was destroyed by an Israeli air strike (Operation Opera), because Israel suspected it was going to start producing weapons-grade nuclear material. After Saddam had negotiated the 1975 treaty with Iran, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi withdrew support for the Kurds, who suffered a total defeat. Nearly from its founding as a modern state in 1920, Iraq has had to deal with Kurdish separatists in the northern part of the country. Saddam did negotiate an agreement in 1970 with separatist Kurdish leaders, giving them autonomy, but the agreement broke down. The result was brutal fighting between the government and Kurdish groups and even Iraqi bombing of Kurdish villages in Iran, which caused Iraqi relations with Iran to deteriorate.
The Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988)
In 1979 Iran's Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was overthrown in the Islamic Revolution, thus giving way to an Islamic republic led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The influence of revolutionary Shi'ite Islam grew apace in the region, particularly in countries with large Shi'ite populations, especially Iraq. Saddam feared that radical Islamic ideas — hostile to his secular rule — were rapidly spreading in southern Iraq among the majority Shi'ite population. There had also been bitter enmity between Saddam and Khomeini since the 1970s. Khomeini, having been exiled from Iran in 1964, took up residence in Iraq, at the Shi'ite holy city of An Najaf. There he involved himself with Iraqi Shi'ites and developed a strong, worldwide religious and political following. Under pressure from the Shah, who had agreed to a rapprochement between Iraq and Iran in 1975, Saddam agreed to expel Khomeini in 1978. After Khomeini gained power, skirmishes between Iraq and revolutionary Iran occurred for ten months over the sovereignty of the disputed Arvandrud/Shatt al-Arab waterway, which divides the two countries. During this period, Saddam Hussein continually maintained that it was in Iraq's interest not to engage with Iran, and that it was in the interests of both nations to maintain peaceful relations. However, in a private meeting with Salah Omar Al-Ali, Iraq's permanent ambassador to the United Nations, he revealed that he intended to invade and occupy a large part of Iran within months. Iraq invaded Iran by attacking Mehrabad Airport of Tehran and entering the oil-rich Iranian land of Khuzestan, which also has a sizeable Arab minority, on September 22, 1980 and declared it a new province of Iraq. The United Nations and the United States supported him with artillery and medical supplies during this time. In the first days of the war, there was heavy ground fighting around strategic ports as Iraq launched an attack on Khuzestan. After making some initial gains, Iraq's troops began to suffer losses from human wave attacks by Iran. By 1982, Iraq was on the defensive and looking for ways to end the war. At this point, Saddam asked his ministers for candid advice. Health Minister Riyadh Ibrahim suggested that Saddam temporarily step down to promote peace negotiations. Ibrahim’s chopped up body was delivered to his wife the next day.[9] Iraq quickly found itself bogged down in one of the longest and most destructive wars of attrition of the twentieth century. During the war, Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces fighting on the southern front and Kurdish separatists who were attempting to open up a northern front in Iraq with the help of Iran. On March 16, 1988, the Kurdish town of Halabja was attacked with a mix of mustard gas and nerve agents, killing 5,000 civilians, and maiming, disfiguring, or seriously debilitating 10,000 more. (see Halabja poison gas attack) [15]. The attack occurred in conjunction with the 1988 al-Anfal campaign designed to reassert central control of the mostly Kurdish population of areas of northern Iraq and defeat the Kurdish peshmerga rebel forces. The United States now maintains that Saddam ordered the attack to terrorize the Kurdish population in northern Iraq ([16]), but Saddam's regime claimed at the time that Iran was responsible for the attack[10] and the US supported the claim until the early 1990s. Saddam reached out to other Arab governments for cash and political support during the war, particularly after its oil industry severely suffered at the hands of the Iranian navy in the Gulf. Iraq successfully gained some military and financial aid, as well as diplomatic and moral support, from the United States, the Soviet Union, and France, which together feared the prospects of the expansion of revolutionary Iran's influence in the region. The Iranians, claiming that the international community should force Iraq to pay war reparations to Iran, refused any suggestions for a cease-fire. They continued the war until 1988, hoping to bring down Saddam's secular regime and instigate a Shi'ite rebellion in Iraq. The bloody eight-year war ended in a stalemate. There were hundreds of thousands of casualties, perhaps upwards of 1.7 million died on both sides. Both economies, previously healthy and expanding, were left in ruins. Saddam borrowed a tremendous amount of money from other Arab states during the 1980s to fight Iran and was stuck with a war debt of roughly $75 billion. Faced with rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, Saddam desperately sought out cash once again, this time for postwar reconstruction. The desperate search for foreign credit would eventually humiliate the strongman [citation needed] who had long sought to dominate Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East. Tensions with Kuwait The end of the war with Iran served to deepen latent tensions between Iraq and its wealthy neighbor Kuwait. Saddam saw his war with Iran as having spared Kuwait from the imminent threat of Iranian domination. Since the struggle with Iran had been fought for the benefit of the other Gulf Arab states as much as for Iraq, he argued, a share of Iraqi debt should be forgiven. Saddam urged the Kuwaitis to forgive the Iraqi debt accumulated in the war, some $30 billion, but the Kuwaitis refused, claiming that Saddam was responsible to pay off his debts for the war he started. Also to raise money for postwar reconstruction, Saddam pushed oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices by cutting back oil production. Kuwait refused to cut production. In addition to refusing the request, Kuwait spearheaded the opposition in OPEC to the cuts that Saddam had requested. Kuwait was pumping large amounts of oil, and thus keeping prices low, when Iraq needed to sell high-priced oil from its wells to pay off a huge debt. Meanwhile, Saddam showed disdain for the Kuwait-Iraq boundary line (imposed on Iraq by British imperial officials in 1922) because it almost completely cut Iraq off from the sea. One of the few articles of faith uniting the political scene in a nation rife with sharp social, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic divides was the belief that Kuwait had no right to even exist in the first place. For at least half a century, Iraqi nationalists were espousing emphatically the belief that Kuwait was historically an integral part of Iraq, and that Kuwait had only come into being through the maneuverings of British imperialism. The colossal extent of Kuwaiti oil reserves also intensified tensions in the region. The oil reserves of Kuwait (with a population of a mere 2 million next to Iraq's 25) were roughly equal to those of Iraq. Taken together, Iraq and Kuwait sat on top of some 20% of the world's known oil reserves; Saudi Arabia, by comparison, holds 25%. The Kuwaiti monarchy further angered Saddam by allegedly slant drilling oil out of wells that Iraq considered to be within its disputed border with Kuwait. Given that at the time Iraq was not regarded as a pariah state, Saddam was able to complain about the alleged slant drilling to the U.S. State Department. Although this had continued for years, Saddam now needed oil money to stem a looming economic crisis. Saddam still had an experienced and well-equipped army, which he used to influence regional affairs. He later ordered troops to the Iraq-Kuwait border. As Iraq-Kuwait relations rapidly deteriorated, Saddam was receiving conflicting information about how the U.S. would respond to the prospects of an invasion. For one, Washington had been taking measures to cultivate a constructive relationship with Iraq for roughly a decade. [citation needed] The U.S. also sent billions of dollars to Saddam to keep him from forming a strong alliance with the Soviets. [11] U.S. ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie met with Saddam in an emergency meeting on July 25, 1990, where the Iraqi leader stated his intention to continue talks. U.S. officials attempted to maintain a conciliatory line with Iraq, indicating that while George H. W. Bush and James Baker did not want force used, they would not take any position on the Iraq-Kuwait boundary dispute and did not want to become involved. The transcript, however, does not show any explicit statement of approval of, acceptance of, or foreknowledge of the invasion. Later, Iraq and Kuwait then met for a final negotiation session, which failed. Saddam then sent his troops into Kuwait.
The Gulf War
On August 2, 1990, Saddam invaded and annexed the oil-rich emirate of Kuwait. U.S. President George H. W. Bush responded cautiously for the first several days after the invasion. On the one hand, Kuwait, prior to this point, had been a virulent enemy of Israel and was on friendly terms with the Soviets. On the other hand, Iraq controlled ten percent of the world's crude oil reserves and with the invasion had doubled the percentage. [17] U.S. interests were heavily invested in the region,[12] and the invasion triggered fears that the price of oil, and therefore the world economy, was at stake. The United Kingdom was also concerned. Britain had a close historical relationship with Kuwait, dating back to British colonialism in the region, and also benefited from billions of dollars in Kuwaiti investment. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher underscored the risk the invasion posed to Western interests to Bush in an in-person meeting one day after the invasion, famously telling him, "Don't go wobbly on me, George". [citation needed] Cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union made possible the passage of resolutions in the United Nations Security Council giving Iraq a deadline to leave Kuwait and approving the use of force if Saddam did not comply with the timetable. U.S. officials feared that Iraq would retaliate against oil-rich Saudi Arabia, a close ally of Washington since the 1940s, for the Saudis' opposition to the invasion of Kuwait. Accordingly, the U.S. and a group of allies, including countries as diverse as Egypt, Syria and Czechoslovakia, deployed massive amounts of troops along the Saudi border with Kuwait and Iraq in order to encircle the Iraqi army, the largest in the Middle East. During the period of negotiations and threats following the invasion, Saddam focused renewed attention on the Palestinian problem by promising to withdraw his forces from Kuwait if Israel would relinquish the occupied territories in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip. Saddam's proposal further split the Arab world, pitting U.S. and Western-supported Arab states against the Palestinians. The allies ultimately rejected any connection between the Kuwait crisis and Palestinian issues. Saddam ignored the Security Council deadline. With unanimous backing from the Security Council, a U.S.-led coalition launched round-the-clock missile and aerial attacks on Iraq, beginning January 16, 1991. Israel, though subjected to attack by Iraqi missiles, refrained from retaliating in order not to provoke Arab states into leaving the coalition. A ground force comprised largely of U.S. and British armored and infantry divisions ejected Saddam's army from Kuwait in February 1991 and occupied the southern portion of Iraq as far as the Euphrates. Before leaving, Saddam ordered the oil wells across Kuwait to be torched (see Kuwaiti oil fires). On March 6, 1991, referring to the conflict, Bush announced: "What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea - a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind: peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law." In the end, the over-manned and under-equipped Iraqi army proved unable to compete on the battlefield with the highly mobile coalition land forces and their overpowering air support. Some 175,000 Iraqis were taken prisoner and casualties were estimated at approximately 20,000 according to U.S. data, with other sources pinning the number as high as 100,000. As part of the cease-fire agreement, Iraq agreed to abandon all chemical and biological weapons and allow UN observers to inspect the sites. UN trade sanctions would remain in effect until Iraq complied with all terms.
Gulf War aftermath
Iraq's ethnic and religious divisions, together with the resulting postwar devastation, laid the groundwork for new rebellions within the country. In the aftermath of the fighting, social and ethnic unrest among Shi'a Muslims, Kurds, and dissident military units threatened the stability of Saddam's government. Uprisings began in the Kurdish north and Shi'a southern and central parts of Iraq, but were ruthlessly repressed. In 2005 the BBC reported that as many as 30,000 persons had been killed during the 1991 uprisings [18]. The United States, which had urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, did nothing to assist the rebellions and even lifted the Iraqi no-fly zones which allowed Saddam's forces to crush the rebellions. U.S. ally Turkey opposed any prospect of Kurdish independence, and the Saudis and other conservative Arab states feared an Iran-style Shi'a revolution. Saddam, having survived the immediate crisis in the wake of defeat and a car crash, which left a small scar in his face and a injury on a finger, according to his now defected personal doctor, was left firmly in control of Iraq, although the country never recovered either economically or militarily from the Persian Gulf War. Saddam routinely cited his survival as "proof" that Iraq had in fact won the war against America. This message earned Saddam a great deal of popularity in many sectors of the Arab world. Saddam increasingly portrayed himself as a devout Muslim, in an effort to co-opt the conservative religious segments of society. Some elements of Sharia law were re-introduced, such as the 2001 edict imposing the death penalty for sodomy, rape, and prostitution, the legalization of "honor killings" and the ritual phrase "Allahu Akbar". "God is the greatest", in Saddam's handwriting, was added to the national flag. 1991–2003 Relations between the United States and Iraq remained tense following the Gulf War. In April of 1993 the Iraqi Intelligence Service, it is alleged, attempted to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush during a visit to Kuwait. Kuwaiti security forces apprehended a group of Iraqis at the scene of an alleged bombing attempt. On June 26, 1993, the U.S. launched a missile attack targeting Baghdad intelligence headquarters in retaliation for the alleged attempt to attack former President Bush. [19][20] The UN sanctions placed upon Iraq when it invaded Kuwait were not lifted, blocking Iraqi oil exports. This caused immense hardship in Iraq and virtually destroyed the Iraqi economy and state infrastructure. Only smuggling across the Syrian border and humanitarian aid (the UN Oil-for-Food Programme) ameliorated the humanitarian crisis. Limited amounts of income from the United Nations started flowing into Iraq through the UN Oil-for-Food Programme. U.S. officials continued to accuse Saddam Hussein of violating the terms of the Gulf War's cease fire, by developing weapons of mass destruction and other banned weaponry, refusing to give out adequate information on these weapons, and violating the UN-imposed sanctions and no-fly zones. Isolated military strikes by U.S. and British forces continued on Iraq sporadically, the largest being Operation Desert Fox in 1998. Charges of Iraqi impediment to UN inspection of sites thought to contain illegal weapons were claimed as the reasons for crises between 1997 and 1998, culminating in intensive U.S. and British missile strikes on Iraq, December 16-December 19, 1998. After two years of intermittent activity, U.S. and British warplanes struck harder at sites near Baghdad in February, 2001. Saddam's support base of Tikriti tribesmen, family members, and other supporters were divided after the war. In the following years, this contributed to the government's increasingly repressive and arbitrary nature. Domestic repression inside Iraq grew worse, and Saddam's sons, Uday Hussein and Qusay Hussein, became increasingly powerful and carried out a private reign of terror. They likely had a leading hand when, in August 1995, two of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law (Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel), who held high positions in the Iraqi military, defected to Jordan. Both were killed after returning to Iraq the following February. Iraqi cooperation with UN weapons inspection teams was questioned on several occasions during the 1990s and UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Richard Butler withdrew his team from Iraq in November 1998 citing Iraqi non-cooperation, without the permission of the UN, although a UN spokesman subsequently stated that "the bulk of" the Security Council supported the move [21]. After a crisis ensued and the U.S. contemplated military action against Iraq, Saddam resumed cooperation. [22] The inspectors returned, but were withdrawn again on 16 December [13]. Butler had given a report the UN Security Council on 15 December in which he expressed dissatisfaction with the level of compliance. Three out of five of the Permanent Members of the U.N. Security Council subsequently objected to Butler's withdrawal. Saddam continued to loom large in American consciousness as a major threat to Western allies such as Israel and oil-rich Saudi Arabia, to Western oil supplies from the Gulf states, and to Middle East stability generally. U.S. President Bill Clinton maintained economic sanctions, as well as air patrols in the "Iraqi no-fly zones". In October 1998, President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act.[23] The act calls for "regime change" in Iraq and authorizes the funding of opposition groups. Following the issuance of a UN report detailing Iraq's failure to cooperate with inspections, Clinton authorized Operation Desert Fox, a three-day air-strike to hamper Saddam's weapons-production facilities and hit sites related to weapons of mass destruction. Iraq responded by expelling UN inspectors. Several journalists have reported on Saddam's ties to anti-Israeli and Islamic terrorism prior to 2000. Saddam is also known to have had contacts with Palestinian terrorist groups. Early in 2002, Saddam told Faroq al-Kaddoumi, head of the Palestinian political office, he would raise the sum granted to each family of Palestinians who die as suicide bombers in the uprising against Israel to $25,000 instead of $10,000.[24] Some news reports detailed links to terrorists, including Carlos the Jackal, Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas and Osama bin Laden.[25] However, no conclusive evidence concerning links between Saddam and bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization has ever been produced by any US government official. The official assessment by the U.S. Intelligence Community is that contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda over the years did not lead to a collaborative relationship. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was able to find evidence of only one such meeting, as well as evidence of two occasions "not reported prior to the war, in which Saddam Hussein rebuffed meeting requests from an al-Qa'ida operative. The Intelligence Community has not found any other evidence of meetings between al-Qa'ida and Iraq."[26] The Senate Committee concluded that there was no evidence of any Iraqi support of al-Qaeda and that there was convincing evidence of hostility between the two entities.
2003 Invasion of Iraq
The domestic political situation changed in the U.S. after the September 11, 2001 attacks, which bolstered the influence of the neoconservative faction in the presidential administration and throughout Washington. Bush and his cabinet repeatedly linked the Hussein government to the 9/11 attacks on the basis of an alleged meeting in Prague in April 2001 involving an Iraqi intelligence agent and other evidence.[15]. Both a Senate Select Committee and the 9/11 Commission failed to uncover convincing evidence of such a link.[16][17][18] In his January 2002 state-of-the-union message to Congress, President George W. Bush spoke of an "axis of evil" comprised of Iran, North Korea, and Iraq. Moreover, Bush announced that he would possibly take action to topple the Iraqi government. Bush stated, "The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade." Bush went on to say "Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror."[19] As the war was looming on February 24, 2003, Saddam Hussein talked with CBS News anchor Dan Rather for more than three hours — his first interview with a U.S. reporter in over a decade.[20] CBS aired the taped interview later that week. The Iraqi government and military collapsed within three weeks of the beginning of the 2003 invasion of Iraq on March 20. The United States made at least two attempts to kill Saddam with targeted air strikes, but both failed to hit their target. By the beginning of April, Coalition forces occupied much of Iraq. The resistance of the much-weakened Iraqi Army either crumbled or shifted to guerrilla warfare, and it appeared that Saddam had lost control of Iraq. He was last seen in a video which purported to show him in the Baghdad suburbs surrounded by supporters. When Baghdad fell to the Coalition on April 9, Saddam was still preparing to leave. Pursuit and capture Pursuit As the US forces were occupying the Republican Palace and other central landmarks and ministries on April 9, Saddam Hussein had emerged from his command bunker beneath the Al A'Zamiyah district of northern Baghdad and greeted excited members of the local public. In the BBC Panorama programme Saddam on the Run witnesses were found for these and other later events (see Note 15). This impromptu walkabout was probably his last and his reasons for doing what was certainly extremely dangerous and almost cost him his freedom, if not his life, are unclear. It is possible that he wished to take what he thought might be his last opportunity to greet his people as their president. The walkabout was captured on film and broadcast several days after the event on Al-Arabiya Television and was also witnessed by ordinary people who corroborated the date afterwards. He was accompanied by bodyguards and other loyal supporters including at least one of his sons and his personal secretary. After the walk about Saddam returned to his bunker and made preparations for his family. According to his eldest daughter Raghad Hussein he was by this point aware of the "betrayal" of a number of key figures involved in the defence of Baghdad. It appears there was a lot of confusion between Iraqi commanders in different sectors of the capital and communication between them and Saddam and between Saddam and his family were becoming increasingly difficult. This version of events is supported by Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf (at the time, referred to as "Baghdad Bob" and "Comical Ali" due to his consistent denials that US and British forces had made any progress towards Baghdad), the former Information Minister who struggled to know what was actually happening after the US captured Baghdad International Airport. The Americans had meanwhile started receiving rumours that Saddam was in Al A'Zamiyah and at dawn on April 10 they dispatched three companies of US Marines to capture or kill him. As the Americans closed in, and realising that Baghdad was lost, Saddam arranged for cars to collect his eldest daughters Raghad and Rana and drive them to Syria. His wife Sajida Talfah and youngest daughter Hala had already left Iraq several weeks prior. Raghad Hussein stated in an interview for Panorama; "After about midday my Dad sent cars from his private collection for us. We were told to get in. We had almost lost contact with my father and brothers because things had got out of hand. I saw with my own eyes the [Iraqi] army withdrawing and the terrified faces of the Iraqi soldiers who, unfortunately, were running away and looking around them. Missiles were falling on my left and my right - they were not more than fifty or one hundred metres away. We moved in small cars. I had a gun between my feet just in case." (Attributed to Raghad Hussein) Then according to the testimony of a former bodyguard Saddam Hussein dismissed almost his entire staff; "The last time I saw him he said: My sons, each of you go to your homes. We said: Sir, we want to stay with you. Why should we go? But he insisted. Even his son, Qusay, was crying a little. He [Saddam] was trying not to show his feelings. He was stressed but he didn't want to destroy the morale of the people who were watching him, but inside, he was definitely broken." (Attributed to an anonymous former bodyguard) After this he changed out of his uniform and with only two bodyguards to guard him, left Baghdad in a plain white Oldsmobile and made his way to a specially prepared bunker in Dialah on the northern outskirts of the city. Ayad Allawi in interview stated that Saddam stayed in the Dialah bunker for three weeks as Baghdad and the rest of Iraq were occupied by US forces. Initially he and his entourage used satellite telephones to communicate with each other. As this became more risky they resorted to sending couriers with written messages. One of these couriers was reported to have been his own nephew. However, their cover was given away when one of the couriers was captured and Saddam was forced to evacuate the Dialah bunker and resorted to changing location every few hours. There were numerous sightings of him in Beiji, Baquba and Tikrit to the north of Baghdad over the next few months as he shuttled between safe houses disguised as a shepherd in a plain taxi. How close he came to being captured during this period may never be made public. Sometime in the middle of May he moved to the countryside around his home town of Tikrit. A series of audio tapes claiming to be from Saddam were released at various times, although the authenticity of these tapes remains uncertain. Saddam Hussein was at the top of the U.S. list of most-wanted Iraqis, and many of the other leaders of the Iraqi government were arrested, but extensive efforts to find him had little effect. In June in a joint raid by special operations forces and the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment of 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, they captured the former president's personal secretary Abid Hamid Mahmud, Ace of Diamonds and number 4 after Saddam and his sons Uday and Qusay. Documents discovered with him enabled intelligence officers to work out who was who in Saddam's circle. Manhunts were launched nightly throughout the Sunni triangle. Safe houses and family homes were raided as soon as any tip came in that someone in Saddam's circle might be in the area. In July 2003 in an engagement with U.S. forces after a tip-off from an Iraqi informant Saddam's sons were cornered in a house in Mosul and shot to death. According to one of Saddam's bodyguards, the former president actually went to the grave himself on the evening of the funeral: "After the funeral people saw Saddam Hussein visiting the graves with a group of his protectors. No one recognized them and even the car they came in wasn't spotted. At the grave Saddam read a verse from the Koran and cried. There were flags on the grave. After he finished reading, he took the flags and left. He cried for his sons." [citation needed] This story, however, likely resulted to explain the missing flags. The commander of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment in Tikrit and Auja, where the sons were buried, had the cemetery heavily guarded. The flags were removed by US forces to prevent his sons being honored as martyrs. These flags now reside at the National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning, Georgia. The raids and arrests of people known to be close to the former President drove him deeper underground. Once more the trail was growing colder. In August the US military released photo-fits of how Saddam might be disguising himself in traditional garb, hair died grey, even without his signature moustache. By the early autumn the Pentagon had also formed a secret unit – Taskforce 121. Using electronic surveillance and undercover agents, the CIA and Special Forces scoured Iraq for clues. By the beginning of November Saddam was under siege. His home town and powerbase were surrounded and his faithful bodyguards targeted and then arrested one by one by the Americans. Protests erupted in several towns in the Sunni triangle. Meanwhile some Sunni Muslims showed their support for Saddam. On December 12 Mohamed Ibrahim Omar al-Musslit was unexpectedly captured in Baghdad. Mohamed had been a key figure in the President's special security organization. His cousin Adnan had been captured in July by the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment in Tikrit. It appears Mohamed had taken control of Saddam on the run, the only person who knew where he was from hour to hour and who was with him. According to US sources it took just a few hours of interrogation for him to crack and betray Saddam. Within hours Colonel James Hickey (1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Division) together with US Special Operations Forces launched Operation Red Dawn and under cover of darkness made for the village of Ad-Dawr on the outskirts of Tikrit. The informer had told US forces the former president would be in one of two groups of buildings on a farm codenamed Wolverine 1 and Wolverine 2.
Capture
On December 13, 2003, the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) of Iran first reported that Saddam Hussein had been arrested, citing Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani. These reports were soon confirmed by other members of the Iraq Interim Governing Council, by U.S. military sources, and by British prime minister Tony Blair. In a press conference in Baghdad, shortly afterwards, the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, formally announced the capture of Saddam Hussein by saying, "Ladies and gentlemen, we got him." Bremer reported that Saddam had been captured at approximately 8:30 p.m. Iraqi time on December 13, in an underground "spider hole" at a farmhouse in ad-Dawr near his home town Tikrit, in what was called Operation Red Dawn. [27] During the arrest Hussein reportedly said: "I am the President of Iraq," — to which an American soldier replied: "The President of The United States sends his regards." Bremer presented video footage of Saddam in custody. Saddam Hussein was shown with a full beard and hair longer and curlier than his familiar appearance, which a barber later restored. His identity was later reportedly confirmed by DNA testing. He was described as being in good health and as "talkative and co-operative". Bremer said that Saddam would be tried, but that the details of his trial had not yet been determined. Members of the Governing Council who spoke with Saddam after his capture reported that he was unrepentant, claiming to have been a "firm but just ruler". Later it emerged that the tip-off which led to his capture came from a detainee under interrogation. Shortly after his capture, Saddam Hussein was shown on a Department of Defense video on Al-Jazeera receiving a medical examination.
Incarceration
According to US military sources, immediately after his capture on December 13 Saddam was hooded and his hands were bound. He was taken by a military HMMWV vehicle to a waiting helicopter and then flown to the US base located in and adjacent to one of his former palaces in Tikrit. At this base he was paraded before jubilant US soldiers and a series of photographs were taken. After a brief pause he was loaded onto another helicopter and flown to the main US base at Baghdad International Airport and transferred to the Camp Cropper facility. Here he was photographed officially and had his long beard shaved. The next day he was visited in his cell by members of the Iraqi Governing Council including Ahmed Chalabi and Adnan Pachachi. It is believed that he has stayed at this high security location for the majority of time since his capture. Details of his interrogation are unknown. There were rumours that he was flown out of Iraq during a dangerous upsurge in the insurgency during 2004 but this now seems unlikely. On May 20, 2005, Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid newspapers The Sun of U.K. and New York Post, printed photos of Saddam Hussein in his jail cell wearing only his briefs with the headline "Tyrant's in his pants".
Trials
On June 30, 2004, Saddam Hussein (held in custody by U.S. forces at Camp Cropper in Baghdad), and 11 senior Ba'athist officials were handed over legally (though not physically) to the interim Iraqi government to stand trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Particular attention will be paid to his activities in violent campaigns against the Kurds in the north during the Iran-Iraq War, and against the Shiites in the south in 1991 and 1999 to put down revolts. On July 1, 2004, the first legal hearing in Saddam's case was held before the Iraqi Special Tribunal. Broadcast later on Arabic and Western television networks, it was his first appearance in footage aired around the world since his capture by U.S. forces the previous December. On June 17, 2005 The former Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad announced the formation, under his joint chairmanship, of an international Emergency Committee for Iraq, with a main objective of ensuring fair trials for Saddam Hussein and the other former Ba'ath Party officials being tried with him. [28] On July 18, 2005, Saddam was charged by the Special Tribunal with the first of an expected series of charges, relating to the mass killings of the inhabitants of the village of Dujail in 1982 after a failed assassination attempt against him. On August 8, 2005, the family announced that the legal team had been dissolved and that the only Iraq-based member, Khalil al-Duleimi, had been made sole legal counsel. [29] On October 19, 2005 Iraqi authorities put Saddam Hussein back on trial — four days after the October 15 referendum on the new constitution. The trial was adjourned until November 28. On November 8, 2005, Adel al-Zubeidi a defense attorney during the Hussein Trials on the legal team representing Taha Yassin Ramadan was killed. On November 28, 2005, Chief Judge Rizgar Mohammed Amin adjourned the trial until December 5 to allow time to find replacements for two defense lawyers who were slain and another who fled Iraq after he was wounded. On December 5, 2005, Saddam's legal defense team stormed out of the court after questioning its legitimacy and asking about security issues regarding the protection of the defense. Saddam along with his co-defendants railed against Chief Judge Amin and the tribunal. On December 6, 2005, Saddam Hussein shouted that he will not return "to an unjust court" when it convenes for a fifth session the following day. At the end of the session, when the judges decided to resume the trial the next day, Saddam suddenly shouted as the judges left: "I will not attend an unfair trial" and added "Go to hell!" [30] On December 21, 2005, Saddam Hussein claimed in court that Americans had tortured him during his detainment "everywhere on [his] body" and that he had bruises as proof. None were seen, however. [31] On January 23, 2006, Rauf Rashid Abd al-Rahman was nominated interim chief judge of the tribunal. [32] He replaced former chief judge Rizgar Amin, also a Kurd, who resigned after complaining of government interference. On March 15, 2006, Saddam was called by the prosecution as a witness. On the stand, he made several political statements, saying he was still President of Iraq and calling on Iraqis to stop fighting each other and instead fight American troops. The judge turned off Saddam's microphone and closed the trial to the public in response. [33]. Iraqi prosecutors recommended on June 19, 2006 that he receive the death penalty together with his brother Barzan al-Tikriti and former Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan. [34] On June 21, 2006, Khamis al-Obeidi was found shot to death, after he was kidnapped by ten men wearing Iraqi Police uniforms, the men drove away in Iraqi police vehicles. He was a chief defense attorney for Saddam Hussein and his brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti. [35] Also on June 21 it was reported that Hussein had begun a hunger strike in protest at the assassination of his lawyer Khamis al-Obeidi. [36] On June 23, a U.S. official reported that Saddam had ended his hunger strike after missing only one meal. [37] On June 25, 2006, Khalil al-Dulaimi, Saddam's chief lawyer, gave an interview with the Associated Press in which he quoted Saddam as saying the following: "These puppets in the Iraqi government that the Americans brought to power are helpless. They can't protect themselves or the Iraqi people. The Americans will certainly come to me, to Saddam Hussein's legitimate leadership and to the Iraqi Baath Party, to rescue them from their huge quandary." According to the AP, al-Dulaimi indicated that Saddam may wish to negotiate a role in ending the Iraq insurgency by making the verdict in his trial a bargaining chip. There are no indications, however, that the US or the Iraqi government is seeking help from Saddam to end the insurgency.[38] On June 27, 2006, two of Saddam Hussein's lawyers, Ramsey Clark, a former US Attorney-General, and Curtis Doebbler, held a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to call for immediate security for all the Iraqi defense lawyers and to complain in a lengthy and documented statement of the unfair trial being conducted by the American authorities using Iraqis as a front. The two lawyers claimed that the United States had refused to provide adequate protection for the defense lawyers despite repeated requests that were made and that the United States was intentionally ensuring an unfair trial.[39] On July 13, 2006, it was reported that Saddam and "other former regime members" had begun another hunger strike on July 7 to protest the lack of fairness in their trial including the murder of defense lawyer Khamis al-Obeidi.[40] On July 21, 2006 An open letter to the American people from Saddam Hussein was released by his lawyers to the media. The letter dated 7 July urged Americans to "Save your country and leave Iraq." On July 23, 2006, it was reported that Saddam had been taken to hospital where he was being fed by a tube as a result of his hunger strike.[41] On July 26, 2006, Saddam made his final court appearance, during which he said, "I was brought against my will directly from the hospital," "I call on Iraqis to be in harmony and work on evicting the invaders," and, "I ask you, being an Iraqi person, that if you reach a verdict of death, execution, remember that I am a military man and should be killed by firing squad and not by hanging as a common criminal." He also repeated his denunciation of the tribunal as an illegal tool of the American government. [42] On September 15, 2006, The chief judge Abdullah al-Amiri, a Shiite Arab, told the ex-president, "You were not a dictator." Demands from Kurdish and Shiite officials for his removal followed; the judge already had rejected prosecution demands that he step down for allegedly favoring the defense.[43] On September 19, 2006, Mohammed al-Uraibiy, al-Amiri's court deputy and also a Shiite Arab, replaced al-Amiri as a chief judge. [44] [45] [46] [47] On September 25, 2006, Saddam Hussein was expelled from court after arguing with the judge. Hussein's defense team boycotted the trial due to improper policy practices of Tribunal Court.
On November 5, 2006, Saddam Hussein was found guilty of crimes against humanity in ordering the deaths of 148 Shi'ite villagers in the town of Dujail in 1982 and sentenced to death by hanging. His half brother and the judge at the trial of the original case in 1982 were also convicted of similar charges. When the judge announced the verdict, Saddam shouted "God is the Greatest!" and "Long live Iraq. Long live the Iraqi people! Down with the traitors!" [49] [50] [51] [52] According to the New York Times, Saddam Hussein's verdict and sentence will "come under review by the nine-judge appellate chamber of the trial court. There is no time limit for the appeal court's review, but Iraqi and American officials who work with the court said that the earliest realistic date for Mr Hussein's execution, assuming it stood up to review, would be next spring." [53] Iraqi law requires executions to take place within 30 days of the end of the appeal process; however it also forbids the executions of people aged over 70 years old, a status Saddam Hussein acquires on 28 April 2007. [54] On November 5, 2006, President Bush called the trial "a milestone in the Iraqi people's efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law."
Marriage and family relationships
Saddam married Sajida Talfah in 1957. Sajida is the daughter of Khairallah Talfah, Saddam's uncle and mentor. Their marriage was arranged when Saddam was 5 and Sajida was 7; however, the two didn't meet until their wedding. They were married in Egypt during his exile. They had two sons (Uday and Qusay) and three daughters, Rana, Raghad and Hala. Uday controlled the media, and was named Journalist of the Century by the Iraqi Union of Journalists. Qusay ran the elite Republican Guard, and was considered Saddam's heir. Both brothers made a fortune smuggling oil. Sajida, Raghad, and Rana were put under house arrest because they were suspected of being involved in an attempted assassination of Uday on December 12, 1996. General Adnan Khairallah Tuffah, Sajida's brother and Saddam's childhood friend, was allegedly executed because of his growing popularity. Saddam also married two other women: Samira Shahbandar, whom he married in 1986 after forcing her husband to divorce her (she is rumored to be his favorite wife), and Nidal al-Hamdani, the general manager of the Solar Energy Research Center in the Council of Scientific Research, whose husband was apparently also persuaded to divorce his wife. There have apparently been no political issues from these latter two marriages. Saddam has another son, Ali, from Samira.
In August 1995, Rana and her husband Hussein Kamel al-Majid and Raghad and her husband, Saddam Kamel al-Majid, defected to Jordan, taking their children with them. They returned to Iraq when they received assurances that Saddam Hussein would pardon them. Within three days of their return in February 1996, both of the Majid brothers were attacked and killed in a gunfight with other clan members who considered them traitors. Saddam had made it clear that although pardoned, they would lose all status and would not receive any protection. Saddam's daughter Hala is married to Jamal Mustafa Sultan al-Tikriti, the deputy head of Iraq's Tribal Affairs Office. Neither has been known to be involved in politics. Jamal surrendered to U.S. troops in April 2003. Another cousin was Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known in the United States as "Chemical Ali," who was accused of ordering the use of poison gas in 1988. Ali is now in U.S. custody. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Baghdad's airport (Saddam International Airport) was named after him until April 3, 2003 when U.S. forces seized control of the airport, renaming the airport to its current name. In August 2003, Saddam's daughters Raghad and Rana received sanctuary in Amman, Jordan, where they are currently staying with their nine children. That month, they spoke with CNN and the Arab satellite station Al-Arabiya in Amman. When asked about her father, Raghad told CNN, "He was a very good father, loving, has a big heart." Asked if she wanted to give a message to her father, she said: "I love you and I miss you." Her sister Rana also remarked, "He had so many feelings and he was very tender with all of us." [20] In 2005 a GQ interview [57] of four American National Guardsmen from Pennsylvania whose job was to guard Saddam after his capture quoted Saddam as saying, "Reagan and me, good... The Clinton, he's okay. The Bush father, son, no good." According to the soldiers Reagan was a favorite topic of Saddam's. Saddam told them about how Reagan sold him "planes and helicopters" and "basically funded his war against Iran." Saddam told them that he "wish things were like when Ronald Reagan was still president." Detroit awarded Saddam Hussein a key to the city in 1980, because of contributions to several local Detroit Catholic Churches, in particular a $170,000 donation to a church that was in heavy debt.
Government positions held by Saddam Hussein
Head of Security (Mukhabarat) 1963 Vice President of the Republic of Iraq 1968 - 1979 President of the Republic of Iraq 1979 - 2003 Prime Minister of the Republic of Iraq (various non-continuous dates) Head of the Revolutionary Command Council 1979 - 2003
Saddam Hussein profile
Thursday, 4 January, 2001, 13:34
Saddam Hussein insists that the Gulf War was a victory for Iraq By Middle East analyst Gerald Butt Saddam Hussein, President of Iraq for the past two decades, has the dubious distinction of being the world's best known and most hated Arab leader. And in a region where despotic rule is the norm, he is more feared by his own people than any other head of state. A former Iraqi diplomat living in exile summed up Saddam's rule in one sentence: "Saddam is a dictator who is ready to sacrifice his country, just so long as he can remain on his throne in Baghdad." Few Iraqis would disagree with this. Although none living in Iraq would dare to say so publicly. The Iraqi people are forced to consume a daily diet of triumphalist slogans, fattened by fawning praise of the president. The Iraqi leader stares down on his citizens He is portrayed as a valiant knight leading the Arabs into battle against the infidel, or as an eighth-century caliph who founded the city of Baghdad. Evoking the glory of Arab history, Saddam claims to be leading his people to new glory. The reality looks very different. Iraq is bankrupt, its economy and infrastructure shattered by years of economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations following the invasion of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein remains largely isolated from his people, keeping the company of a diminishing circle of trusted advisers - largely drawn from his close family or from the extended clan based around the town of Takrit, north of Baghdad. The path to power The Iraqi president was born in a village just outside Takrit in April 1937. In his teenage years, he immersed himself in the anti-British and anti-Western atmosphere of the day. At college in Baghdad he joined the Baath party. After the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958, Saddam connived in a plot to kill the prime minister, Abdel-Karim Qassem. But the conspiracy was discovered, and Saddam fled the country. In 1963, with the Baath party in control in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein returned home and began jostling for a position of influence. During this period he married his cousin Sajida. They later had two sons and three daughters. Appearing on New Year's day 2001 But within months, the Baath party had been overthrown and he was jailed, remaining there until the party returned to power in a coup in July 1968. Showing ruthless determination that was to become a hallmark of his leadership, Saddam Hussein gained a position on the ruling Revolutionary Command Council. For years he was the power behind the ailing figure of the president, Ahmed Hassan Bakr. In 1979, he achieved his ambition of becoming head of state. The new president started as he intended to go on - putting to death dozens of his rivals. Holding together a disparate nation President Saddam Hussein might defend his autocratic style of leadership by arguing that nothing else could have kept such a vast and diverse nation united. And, for all that Saddam Hussein is criticised and reviled, his opponents have not been able to nominate anyone else who might hold Iraq together - with its Kurds in the north, Sunni Muslims in the centre and Shi'ia in the south. What the outside world calls terror, Saddam calls expediency. The Kurds were persecuted by the Iraqi regime Some years ago a European interviewer nervously quoted reports that the Baghdad authorities might, on occasions, have tortured and perhaps even killed opponents of the regime. Was this true? Saddam Hussein was not offended. Rather, he seemed surprised by the naivete of the question. "Of course," he replied. "What do you expect if they oppose the regime?" But his tactic of imposing his authority by terror has gone far beyond the occasional arrest and execution of opponents. In attempts to suppress the Kurds, for example, he has systematically used chemical weapons. And in putting down a rebellion of Shi'ia in the south he has razed towns to the ground and drained marshland. Not that you would recognise the figure of a tyrant in the portraits that adorn every building and street corner in Iraq. Here you see Saddam, usually smiling benevolently, in a variety of guises and poses - in military uniform, say, or in traditional ethnic dress, or tweed cap and sports jacket; he might be surrounded by his family or be seen jiggling a young child on his knee - the would-be father-figure of the Iraqi nation. A question of judgement The fiction of Saddam Hussein as a benevolent ruler was exposed by two major and catastrophic miscalculations of foreign policy for which his country and his people have paid dearly. His son was Uday was injured in an attack In 1980, Saddam thought he saw an opportunity for glory - to put Iraq at the forefront of the Arab world. He ordered a surprise cross-border attack on Iran. This was meant to be a swift operation to capture the Shatt al-Arab waterway leading to the Gulf. But Iranian resistance was far stronger than he had imagined. Eight years later, with hundreds of thousands of young people killed and the country deep in debt, he agreed on a ceasefire. Still, with enormous oil reserves, Iraq seemed to have the potential to make a swift recovery. An increase in oil prices, Saddam Hussein surmised, would speed up the country's revival still more. Frustrated by his failure to achieve agreement on a price rise by conventional means, the Iraqi president allowed his long-harboured resentment against Kuwait to get the better of him. On 2 August 1990, he made another costly blunder by ordering his army into the neighbouring Gulf state. Fighting qualities In the months that led up to the war of 1991, Saddam Hussein displayed qualities that still make him both adored and hated in the Arab world. On the streets of Arab cities he is admired as a leader who has dared to defy and challenge Israel and the West, a symbol of Arab steadfastness in the face of Western aggression. At the same time, Saddam is feared as a vicious dictator who threatens the security of the Gulf region as a whole. With his older and favourite son Uday crippled in an assassination attempt, his younger son Qusay now controls the elite Revolutionary Guards and the Special Forces which guarantee the president's grip on power. Gulf states and Western countries alike have come to realise that his grip is stronger than it seems - and stronger by far than his grasp of reality often appears to be. He insists that the 1991 Gulf War, which he famously described as the Mother-of-All-Battles, ended in victory for Iraq. By the same token, Saddam boasts that Iraq can shrug off any Western military attack. The Iraqi people have no choice but to nod in agreement. So it will go on until the moment comes for bombastic slogans to be replaced by a succinct epitaph to one of the most infamous dictators of the century. For the overwhelming majority of Iraqis, that moment can not come too soon.
The Latest updated news from Channel 4 News
The Saddam Hussein Interview Iraq
Published: 04-Feb-2003 By: Channel 4 News
We present a world exclusive - Saddam Hussein in his own words. At the weekend, the veteran labour politican Tony Benn travelled to Baghdad to meet and interview the Iraqi President. Tonight we hear why - according to Saddam - Iraq has no interest in war and possesses NO weapons of mass destruction. Here is the transcript:
Tony Benn: I come for one reason only - to see whether in a talk we can explore, or you can help me to see, what the paths to peace may be. My only reason, I remember the war because I lost a brother. I never want to see another war. There are millions of people all over the world who don't want a war, and by agreeing to this interview, which is very historic for all of us, I hope you will be able to help me, be able to say something to the world that is significant and positive.
Saddam Hussein: Welcome to Baghdad. You are conscious of the role that Iraqis have set out for themselves, inspired by their own culture, their civilisation and their role in human history. This role requires peace in order to prosper and progress. Having said that, the Iraqis are committed to their rights as much as they are committed to the rights of others. Without peace they will be faced with many obstacles that would stop them from fulfilling their human role.
Tony Benn: Mr President, may I ask you some questions. The first is, does Iraq have any weapons of mass destruction?
Saddam Hussein: Most Iraqi officials have been in power for over 34 years and have experience of dealing with the outside world. Every fair-minded person knows that when Iraqi officials say something, they are trustworthy. A few minutes ago when you asked me if I wanted to look at the questions beforehand I told you I didn't feel the need so that we don't waste time, and I gave you the freedom to ask me any question directly so that my reply would be direct. This is an opportunity to reach the British people and the forces of peace in the world. There is only one truth and therefore I tell you as I have said on many occasions before that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction whatsoever. We challenge anyone who claims that we have to bring forward any evidence and present it to public opinion.
Tony Benn: I have another which has been raised: do you have links with Al Qaeda?
Saddam Hussein: If we had a relationship with Al-Qaida and we believed in that relationship we wouldn't be ashamed to admit it. Therefore I would like to tell you directly and also through you to anyone who is interested to know that we have no relationship with Al Qaeda.
Tony Benn: In relation to the inspectors, there appears to be difficulties with inspectors, and I wonder whether there's anything you can tell me about these difficulties and whether you believe they will be cleared up before Mr Hans Blix and Mr Elbaradei come back to Baghdad?
Saddam Hussein: You are aware that every major event must encounter some difficulty. On the subject of the inspectors and the resolutions that deal with Iraq you must have been following it and you must have a view and a vision as to whether these resolutions have any basis in international law. Nevertheless the Security Council produced them. These resolutions - implemented or not - or the motivation behind these resolutions could lead the current situation to the path of peace or war. Therefore it's a critical situation. Let us also remember the unjust suffering of the Iraqi people. For the last thirteen years since the blockade was imposed, you must be aware of the amount of harm that it has caused the Iraqi people, particularly the children and the elderly as a result of the shortage of food and medicine and other aspects of their life. Therefore we are facing a critical situation. On that basis, it is not surprising that there might be complaints relating to the small details of the inspection which may be essential issues as far as we are concerned and the way we see the whole thing. It is possible that those Iraqis who are involved with the inspection might complain about the conduct of the inspectors and they complain indeed. It is also possible that some inspectors either for reasons of practical and detailed procedure, or for some other motives, may complain about the Iraqi conduct. Every fair-minded person knows that as far as resolution 1441 is concerned, the Iraqis have been fulfilling their obligations under the resolution. When Iraq objects to the conduct of those implementing the Security Council resolutions, that doesn't mean that Iraq wishes to push things to confrontation. Iraq has no interest in war. No Iraqi official or ordinary citizen has expressed a wish to go to war. The question should be directed at the other side. Are they looking for a pretext so they could justify war against Iraq? If the purpose was to make sure that Iraq is free of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons then they can do that. These weapons do not come in small pills that you can hide in your pocket. These are weapons of mass destruction and it is easy to work out if Iraq has them or not. We have said many times before and we say it again today that Iraq is free of such weapons. So when Iraq objects to the conduct of the inspection teams or others, that doesn't mean that Iraq is interested in putting obstacles before them which could hinder the efforts to get to the truth. It is in our interest to facilitate their mission to find the truth. The question is does the other side want to get to the same conclusion or are they looking for a pretext for aggression? If those concerned prefer aggression then it's within their reach. The super powers can create a pretext any day to claim that Iraq is not implementing resolution 1441. They have claimed before that Iraq did not implement the previous resolutions. However after many years it became clear that Iraq had complied with these resolutions. Otherwise, why are they focusing now on the latest resolution and not the previous ones?
Tony Benn: May I broaden the question out, Mr President, to the relations between Iraq and the UN, and the prospects for peace more broadly, and I wonder whether with all its weaknesses and all the difficulties, whether you see a way in which the UN can reach that objective for the benefit of humanity?
Saddam Hussein: The point you raised can be found in the United Nations charter. As you know Iraq is one of the founders and first signatories of the charter. If we look at the representatives of two super powers - America and Britain - and look at their conduct and their language, we would notice that they are more motivated by war than their responsibility for peace. And when they talk about peace all they do is accuse others they wish to destroy in the name of peace. They claim they are looking after the interests of their people. You know as well as I do that this is not the truth. Yes the world would respect this principle if it was genuinely applied. It's not about power but it is about right and wrong, about when we base our human relations on good, and respect this principle. So it becomes simple to adhere to this principle because anyone who violates it will be exposed to public opinion.
Tony Benn: There are people who believe this present conflict is about oil, and I wonder if you say something about how you see the enormous oil reserves of Iraq being developed, first for the benefit of the people of Iraq and secondly for the needs of mankind.
Saddam Hussein: When we speak about oil in this part of the world - we are an integral part of the world - we have to deal with others in all aspects of life, economic as well as social, technical, scientific and other areas. It seems that the authorities in the US are motivated by aggression that has been evident for more than a decade against the region. The first factor is the role of those influential people in the decision taken by the President of the US based on sympathy with the Zionist entity that was created at the expense of Palestine and its people and their humanity. These people force the hand of the American administration by claiming that the Arabs pose a danger to Israel, without remembering their obligation to God and how the Palestinian people were driven out of their homeland. The consecutive American administrations were led down a path of hostility against the people of this region, including our own nation and we are part of it. Those people and others have been telling the various US administrations, especially the current one, that if you want to control the world you need to control the oil. Therefore the destruction of Iraq is a pre-requisite to controlling oil. That means the destruction of the Iraqi national identity, since the Iraqis are committed to their principles and rights according to international law and the UN charter. It seems that this argument has appealed to some US administrations especially the current one that if they control the oil in the Middle East, they would be able to control the world. They could dictate to China the size of its economic growth and interfere in its education system and could do the same to Germany and France and perhaps to Russia and Japan. They might even tell the same to Britain if its oil doesn't satisfy its domestic consumption. It seems to me that this hostility is a trademark of the current US administration and is based on its wish to control the world and spread its hegemony. People have the right to say that if this aggression by the American administration continues, it would lead to widespread enmity and resistance. We won't be able to develop the oil fields or the oil industry and therefore create worldwide co-operation as members of the human family when there is war, destruction and death. Isn't it reasonable to question this approach and conclude that this road will not benefit anyone including America or its people? It may serve some short-term interests or the interests of some influential powers in the US but we can't claim that it serves the interest of the American people in the long run or other nations. Tony Benn: There are tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people in Britain and America, in Europe and worldwide, who want to see a peaceful outcome to this problem , and they are the real Americans in my opinion, the real British, the real French, the real Germans, because they think of the world in terms of their children. I have ten grandchildren and in my family there is English, Scottish, American, French, Irish, Jewish and Indian blood, and for me politics is about their future, their survival. And I wonder whether you could say something yourself directly through this interview to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind? Saddam Hussein: First of all we admire the development of the peace movement around the world in the last few years. We pray to God to empower all those working against war and for the cause of peace and security based on just peace for all. And through you we say to the British people that Iraqis do not hate the British people. Before 1991 Iraq and Britain had a normal relationship as well as normal relations with America. At that time the British governments had no reason to criticise Iraq as we hear some voices doing these days. We hope the British people would tell those who hate the Iraqis and wish them harm that there is no reason to justify this war and please tell them that I say to you because the British people are brave - tell them that the Iraqis are brave too. Tell the British people if the Iraqis are subjected to aggression or humiliation they would fight bravely. Just as the British people did in the Second World War and we will defend our country as they defended their country each in its own way. The Iraqis don't wish war but if war is imposed upon them - if they are attacked and insulted - they will defend themselves. They will defend their country, their sovereignty and their security.
Interview Tony Benn with Saddam Hussein, Feb 6th 2003
The Saddam Hussein Interview Iraq
Published: 04-Feb-2003 By: Channel 4 News
We present a world exclusive - Saddam Hussein in his own words. At the weekend, the veteran labour politican Tony Benn travelled to Baghdad to meet and interview the Iraqi President. Tonight we hear why - according to Saddam - Iraq has no interest in war and possesses NO weapons of mass destruction. Here is the transcript:
Tony Benn: I come for one reason only - to see whether in a talk we can explore, or you can help me to see, what the paths to peace may be. My only reason, I remember the war because I lost a brother. I never want to see another war. There are millions of people all over the world who don't want a war, and by agreeing to this interview, which is very historic for all of us, I hope you will be able to help me, be able to say something to the world that is significant and positive.
Saddam Hussein: Welcome to Baghdad. You are conscious of the role that Iraqis have set out for themselves, inspired by their own culture, their civilisation and their role in human history. This role requires peace in order to prosper and progress. Having said that, the Iraqis are committed to their rights as much as they are committed to the rights of others. Without peace they will be faced with many obstacles that would stop them from fulfilling their human role.
Tony Benn: Mr President, may I ask you some questions. The first is, does Iraq have any weapons of mass destruction?
Saddam Hussein: Most Iraqi officials have been in power for over 34 years and have experience of dealing with the outside world. Every fair-minded person knows that when Iraqi officials say something, they are trustworthy. A few minutes ago when you asked me if I wanted to look at the questions beforehand I told you I didn't feel the need so that we don't waste time, and I gave you the freedom to ask me any question directly so that my reply would be direct. This is an opportunity to reach the British people and the forces of peace in the world. There is only one truth and therefore I tell you as I have said on many occasions before that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction whatsoever. We challenge anyone who claims that we have to bring forward any evidence and present it to public opinion.
Tony Benn: I have another which has been raised: do you have links with Al Qaeda?
Saddam Hussein: If we had a relationship with Al-Qaida and we believed in that relationship we wouldn't be ashamed to admit it. Therefore I would like to tell you directly and also through you to anyone who is interested to know that we have no relationship with Al Qaeda.
Tony Benn: In relation to the inspectors, there appears to be difficulties with inspectors, and I wonder whether there's anything you can tell me about these difficulties and whether you believe they will be cleared up before Mr Hans Blix and Mr Elbaradei come back to Baghdad?
Saddam Hussein: You are aware that every major event must encounter some difficulty. On the subject of the inspectors and the resolutions that deal with Iraq you must have been following it and you must have a view and a vision as to whether these resolutions have any basis in international law. Nevertheless the Security Council produced them. These resolutions - implemented or not - or the motivation behind these resolutions could lead the current situation to the path of peace or war. Therefore it's a critical situation. Let us also remember the unjust suffering of the Iraqi people. For the last thirteen years since the blockade was imposed, you must be aware of the amount of harm that it has caused the Iraqi people, particularly the children and the elderly as a result of the shortage of food and medicine and other aspects of their life. Therefore we are facing a critical situation. On that basis, it is not surprising that there might be complaints relating to the small details of the inspection which may be essential issues as far as we are concerned and the way we see the whole thing. It is possible that those Iraqis who are involved with the inspection might complain about the conduct of the inspectors and they complain indeed. It is also possible that some inspectors either for reasons of practical and detailed procedure, or for some other motives, may complain about the Iraqi conduct. Every fair-minded person knows that as far as resolution 1441 is concerned, the Iraqis have been fulfilling their obligations under the resolution. When Iraq objects to the conduct of those implementing the Security Council resolutions, that doesn't mean that Iraq wishes to push things to confrontation. Iraq has no interest in war. No Iraqi official or ordinary citizen has expressed a wish to go to war. The question should be directed at the other side. Are they looking for a pretext so they could justify war against Iraq? If the purpose was to make sure that Iraq is free of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons then they can do that. These weapons do not come in small pills that you can hide in your pocket. These are weapons of mass destruction and it is easy to work out if Iraq has them or not. We have said many times before and we say it again today that Iraq is free of such weapons. So when Iraq objects to the conduct of the inspection teams or others, that doesn't mean that Iraq is interested in putting obstacles before them which could hinder the efforts to get to the truth. It is in our interest to facilitate their mission to find the truth. The question is does the other side want to get to the same conclusion or are they looking for a pretext for aggression? If those concerned prefer aggression then it's within their reach. The super powers can create a pretext any day to claim that Iraq is not implementing resolution 1441. They have claimed before that Iraq did not implement the previous resolutions. However after many years it became clear that Iraq had complied with these resolutions. Otherwise, why are they focusing now on the latest resolution and not the previous ones?
Tony Benn: May I broaden the question out, Mr President, to the relations between Iraq and the UN, and the prospects for peace more broadly, and I wonder whether with all its weaknesses and all the difficulties, whether you see a way in which the UN can reach that objective for the benefit of humanity?
Saddam Hussein: The point you raised can be found in the United Nations charter. As you know Iraq is one of the founders and first signatories of the charter. If we look at the representatives of two super powers - America and Britain - and look at their conduct and their language, we would notice that they are more motivated by war than their responsibility for peace. And when they talk about peace all they do is accuse others they wish to destroy in the name of peace. They claim they are looking after the interests of their people. You know as well as I do that this is not the truth. Yes the world would respect this principle if it was genuinely applied. It's not about power but it is about right and wrong, about when we base our human relations on good, and respect this principle. So it becomes simple to adhere to this principle because anyone who violates it will be exposed to public opinion.
Tony Benn: There are people who believe this present conflict is about oil, and I wonder if you say something about how you see the enormous oil reserves of Iraq being developed, first for the benefit of the people of Iraq and secondly for the needs of mankind.
Saddam Hussein: When we speak about oil in this part of the world - we are an integral part of the world - we have to deal with others in all aspects of life, economic as well as social, technical, scientific and other areas. It seems that the authorities in the US are motivated by aggression that has been evident for more than a decade against the region. The first factor is the role of those influential people in the decision taken by the President of the US based on sympathy with the Zionist entity that was created at the expense of Palestine and its people and their humanity. These people force the hand of the American administration by claiming that the Arabs pose a danger to Israel, without remembering their obligation to God and how the Palestinian people were driven out of their homeland. The consecutive American administrations were led down a path of hostility against the people of this region, including our own nation and we are part of it. Those people and others have been telling the various US administrations, especially the current one, that if you want to control the world you need to control the oil. Therefore the destruction of Iraq is a pre-requisite to controlling oil. That means the destruction of the Iraqi national identity, since the Iraqis are committed to their principles and rights according to international law and the UN charter. It seems that this argument has appealed to some US administrations especially the current one that if they control the oil in the Middle East, they would be able to control the world. They could dictate to China the size of its economic growth and interfere in its education system and could do the same to Germany and France and perhaps to Russia and Japan. They might even tell the same to Britain if its oil doesn't satisfy its domestic consumption. It seems to me that this hostility is a trademark of the current US administration and is based on its wish to control the world and spread its hegemony. People have the right to say that if this aggression by the American administration continues, it would lead to widespread enmity and resistance. We won't be able to develop the oil fields or the oil industry and therefore create worldwide co-operation as members of the human family when there is war, destruction and death. Isn't it reasonable to question this approach and conclude that this road will not benefit anyone including America or its people? It may serve some short-term interests or the interests of some influential powers in the US but we can't claim that it serves the interest of the American people in the long run or other nations. Tony Benn: There are tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people in Britain and America, in Europe and worldwide, who want to see a peaceful outcome to this problem , and they are the real Americans in my opinion, the real British, the real French, the real Germans, because they think of the world in terms of their children. I have ten grandchildren and in my family there is English, Scottish, American, French, Irish, Jewish and Indian blood, and for me politics is about their future, their survival. And I wonder whether you could say something yourself directly through this interview to the peace movement of the world that might help to advance the cause they have in mind? Saddam Hussein: First of all we admire the development of the peace movement around the world in the last few years. We pray to God to empower all those working against war and for the cause of peace and security based on just peace for all. And through you we say to the British people that Iraqis do not hate the British people. Before 1991 Iraq and Britain had a normal relationship as well as normal relations with America. At that time the British governments had no reason to criticise Iraq as we hear some voices doing these days. We hope the British people would tell those who hate the Iraqis and wish them harm that there is no reason to justify this war and please tell them that I say to you because the British people are brave - tell them that the Iraqis are brave too. Tell the British people if the Iraqis are subjected to aggression or humiliation they would fight bravely. Just as the British people did in the Second World War and we will defend our country as they defended their country each in its own way. The Iraqis don't wish war but if war is imposed upon them - if they are attacked and insulted - they will defend themselves. They will defend their country, their sovereignty and their security.
Interview Tony Benn with Saddam Hussein, Feb 6th 2003
Wall Street Journal
"A Self-Defeating War"
By George Soros By George Soros --
The war on terror is a false metaphor that has led to counterproductive and self-defeating policies. Five years after 9/11, a misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts -- Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia -- a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world. Yet al Qaeda has not been subdued; a plot that could have claimed more victims than 9/11 has just been foiled by the vigilance of British intelligence. Unfortunately, the "war on terror" metaphor was uncritically accepted by the American public as the obvious response to 9/11. It is now widely admitted that the invasion of Iraq was a blunder. But the war on terror remains the frame into which American policy has to fit. Most Democratic politicians subscribe to it for fear of being tagged as weak on defense. What makes the war on terror self-defeating?
* First, war by its very nature creates innocent victims. A war waged against terrorists is even more likely to claim innocent victims because terrorists tend to keep their whereabouts hidden. The deaths, injuries and humiliation of civilians generate rage and resentment among their families and communities that in turn serves to build support for terrorists.
* Second, terrorism is an abstraction. It lumps together all political movements that use terrorist tactics. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Sunni insurrection and the Mahdi army in Iraq are very different forces, but President Bush's global war on terror prevents us from differentiating between them and dealing with them accordingly. It inhibits much-needed negotiations with Iran and Syria because they are states that support terrorist groups.
* Third, the war on terror emphasizes military action while most territorial conflicts require political solutions. And, as the British have shown, al Qaeda is best dealt with by good intelligence. The war on terror increases the terrorist threat and makes the task of the intelligence agencies more difficult. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still at large; we need to focus on finding them, and preventing attacks like the one foiled in England.
* Fourth, the war on terror drives a wedge between "us" and "them." We are innocent victims. They are perpetrators. But we fail to notice that we also become perpetrators in the process; the rest of the world, however, does notice. That is how such a wide gap has arisen between America and much of the world. Taken together, these four factors ensure that the war on terror cannot be won. An endless war waged against an unseen enemy is doing great damage to our power and prestige abroad and to our open society at home. It has led to a dangerous extension of executive powers; it has tarnished our adherence to universal human rights; it has inhibited the critical process that is at the heart of an open society; and it has cost a lot of money. Most importantly, it has diverted attention from other urgent tasks that require American leadership, such as finishing the job we so correctly began in Afghanistan, addressing the looming global energy crisis, and dealing with nuclear proliferation. With American influence at low ebb, the world is in danger of sliding into a vicious circle of escalating violence. We can escape it only if we Americans repudiate the war on terror as a false metaphor. If we persevere on the wrong course, the situation will continue to deteriorate. It is not our will that is being tested, but our understanding of reality. It is painful to admit that our current predicaments are brought about by our own misconceptions. However, not admitting it is bound to prove even more painful in the long run. The strength of an open society lies in its ability to recognize and correct its mistakes.
This is the test that confronts us. Mr. Soros, a financier, is author of "The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror" (Public Affairs, 2006).
You will be hearing from us on national and global issues that affect us all.
Best Regards,
The George Soros Team
GeorgeSoros.com
888 7th Avenue
New York City New York
10106 United States
"A Self-Defeating War"
By George Soros By George Soros --
The war on terror is a false metaphor that has led to counterproductive and self-defeating policies. Five years after 9/11, a misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war fought on several fronts -- Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia -- a war that has killed thousands of innocent civilians and enraged millions around the world. Yet al Qaeda has not been subdued; a plot that could have claimed more victims than 9/11 has just been foiled by the vigilance of British intelligence. Unfortunately, the "war on terror" metaphor was uncritically accepted by the American public as the obvious response to 9/11. It is now widely admitted that the invasion of Iraq was a blunder. But the war on terror remains the frame into which American policy has to fit. Most Democratic politicians subscribe to it for fear of being tagged as weak on defense. What makes the war on terror self-defeating?
* First, war by its very nature creates innocent victims. A war waged against terrorists is even more likely to claim innocent victims because terrorists tend to keep their whereabouts hidden. The deaths, injuries and humiliation of civilians generate rage and resentment among their families and communities that in turn serves to build support for terrorists.
* Second, terrorism is an abstraction. It lumps together all political movements that use terrorist tactics. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Sunni insurrection and the Mahdi army in Iraq are very different forces, but President Bush's global war on terror prevents us from differentiating between them and dealing with them accordingly. It inhibits much-needed negotiations with Iran and Syria because they are states that support terrorist groups.
* Third, the war on terror emphasizes military action while most territorial conflicts require political solutions. And, as the British have shown, al Qaeda is best dealt with by good intelligence. The war on terror increases the terrorist threat and makes the task of the intelligence agencies more difficult. Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are still at large; we need to focus on finding them, and preventing attacks like the one foiled in England.
* Fourth, the war on terror drives a wedge between "us" and "them." We are innocent victims. They are perpetrators. But we fail to notice that we also become perpetrators in the process; the rest of the world, however, does notice. That is how such a wide gap has arisen between America and much of the world. Taken together, these four factors ensure that the war on terror cannot be won. An endless war waged against an unseen enemy is doing great damage to our power and prestige abroad and to our open society at home. It has led to a dangerous extension of executive powers; it has tarnished our adherence to universal human rights; it has inhibited the critical process that is at the heart of an open society; and it has cost a lot of money. Most importantly, it has diverted attention from other urgent tasks that require American leadership, such as finishing the job we so correctly began in Afghanistan, addressing the looming global energy crisis, and dealing with nuclear proliferation. With American influence at low ebb, the world is in danger of sliding into a vicious circle of escalating violence. We can escape it only if we Americans repudiate the war on terror as a false metaphor. If we persevere on the wrong course, the situation will continue to deteriorate. It is not our will that is being tested, but our understanding of reality. It is painful to admit that our current predicaments are brought about by our own misconceptions. However, not admitting it is bound to prove even more painful in the long run. The strength of an open society lies in its ability to recognize and correct its mistakes.
This is the test that confronts us. Mr. Soros, a financier, is author of "The Age of Fallibility: Consequences of the War on Terror" (Public Affairs, 2006).
You will be hearing from us on national and global issues that affect us all.
Best Regards,
The George Soros Team
GeorgeSoros.com
888 7th Avenue
New York City New York
10106 United States
Dead and Buried What could have been done with Saddam's body.
by Victorino Matus 01/04/2007
RELATIVELY SPEAKING, Saddam got off easy. The execution of the former Iraqi dictator was carried out with little fanfare. He was defiant to the end, saying, "Iraq without me is nothing," though he did look frightened. He refused a hood, which was then wrapped around his neck like a scarf. There were taunts and jeers from the small crowd (mostly in support of Moktada al-Sadr). And while Saddam was in mid-sentence, probably answering back to his executors, the trapdoor opened beneath him. He went down with a loud bang. Death seems to have come swiftly for Hussein, whose neck was probably snapped in an instant (as proper hangings are meant to do). Not long after, the corpse of the dictator was sent back to his family for a proper burial in Tikrit, alongside his sons, Uday and Qusay. In an essay for Policy Review published a year ago, I speculated on how Saddam's inevitable demise would compare with the executions of other dictators and their ilk throughout history. Most notable were the hangings of Nazi war criminals in October 1946 following the Nuremberg trials, carefully documented by Whitney R. Harris in Tyranny on Trial: "At eleven minutes past one o-clock in the morning . . . [Former Third Reich foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop] stepped through the door into the execution chamber and faced the gallows on which he and the others . . . were to be hanged. His hands were unmanacled and bound behind him with a leather thong. Ribbentrop walked to the foot of the thirteen stairs leading to the gallows platform. He was asked to state his name, and answered weakly, 'Joachim von Ribbentrop.' Flanked by two guards and followed by the chaplain, he slowly mounted the stairs. On the platform he saw the hangman with the noose of thirteen coils and the hangman's assistant with the black hood [Saddam's noose had seven coils]. He stood on the trap, and his feet were bound with a webbed army belt." His final words were, "God protect Germany, God have mercy on my soul. My last wish is that German unity be maintained, that understanding between East and West be realized and there be peace for the world." Unlike Saddam, Ribbentrop dangled for some 20 minutes before expiring. The bodies of Ribbentrop and the others, however, were not simply returned to their families for burial. Instead, as Anthony Read reported in The Devil's Disciples, "a container holding all the ashes was driven away into the Bavarian countryside, in the rain. It stopped in a quiet lane about an hour later, and the ashes were poured into a muddy ditch." For Nazi sympathizers, there was little left that was tangible. On the other hand, Saddam's burial plot is quite tangible. Located in his hometown of Tikrit, the grave could well become a shrine, a place to venerate the dictator. Saddam's supporters will be vigilant against acts of vengeance by the aggrieved, especially Shiites and Kurds who wanted the dictator tried for numerous other crimes. Historically, the aggrieved have not stopped seeking vengeance after the death of a foe.
In 1661, following the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, the corpse of Oliver Cromwell was dragged out of its tomb and posthumously executed. That's right: Cromwell's body was hanged, then decapitated, with his head impaled on a pike above Westminster Hall. Will tourists be able to visit Hussein's final resting place years from now as they do Mussolini's in Predappio, Italy (where you can even sign the guest book!), or Lenin's in Moscow? (Stalin once shared the same mausoleum with Lenin but was later re-interred below the Kremlin Wall. A large statue and shrines to Stalin can still be found in the late dictator's hometown of Gori, Georgia.) In Becoming Eichmann, author David Cesarini provides an explicit account of the final moments of Adolf Eichmann, the former SS lieutenant colonel kidnapped, tried, and sentenced to death in Jerusalem in 1962: "[The observers] watched as the execution team placed the rubber-lined rope in two loops over Eichmann's head. He was offered a hood, but refused. The two executioners then took up their stations at the mechanism that operated the trapdoor under Eichmann's feet. Only one of the buttons would actually operate the door and neither man would know if he had perpetrated the final act . . . . His last words were: 'Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family and my friends. I am ready. We'll meet again soon, so is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.' With a click the trapdoor opened, Eichmann fell ten feet and the rope jerked. There was stillness and silence broken only by the swaying of the rope . . . ." Eichmann's remains were cremated and emptied into the Mediterranean Sea. Under Islamic law, however, the body of a Muslim cannot be cremated. Instead, it must be buried within 24 hours--regardless of how monstrous that person may have been. And despite the fact that Saddam spent most of his career as a secular Baathist thug, his family has been accorded the same respect as would be given a devout, peaceable Muslim. Because of this, Saddam could, in death, continue to cast his dark shadow over Iraq. Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard
Thus All Too Seldom to Tyrants Saddam's punishment was a rare instance of just deserts.
by David Gelernter 01/15/2007
Increase Font Size | Printer-Friendly | Email a Friend | Respond to this article "Rejoice not when thy enemy falleth"--that is the Bible's advice (Proverbs 24:17), and the classical rabbinic tradition cites this verse in urging us never to celebrate the death of an enemy no matter how evil. But Americans have plenty to celebrate in the trial and punishment of Saddam Hussein by his own nation, which America and her allies made possible. The trial of Saddam was a triumph for one of the noblest of all causes: the sanctity of justice no matter how powerful the criminal, no matter how poor or powerless the victim. May the same thing happen to terrorist tyrants everywhere. But it isn't likely to. For a nation to pass sentence on its own deposed dictator is a rare event. In the days following Saddam's execution we heard often about how the Iraqis (and by implication their American protectors) had botched it. Saddam was taunted on the gallows, and his last moments were videotaped by witnesses who should not have been collecting souvenirs. Those infractions of execution etiquette ought not to have been allowed, but don't kid yourself: No execution is ever pretty. And in this squeamish, fastidious nation it is easy to forget the significance of a hanging; a British royal commission once spelled it out. Hanging is "a peculiarly grim and derogatory form of execution, suitable for sordid criminals and crimes." In any case, those who criticize the manner of Saddam's execution invite the world to contemplate the ways in which the convict himself did the deed. How much dignity did his thug henchmen allow Iraqis who were about to be fed into industrial shredders or to have nails driven into their skulls? "Execution with dignity" is virtually a contradiction in terms, but many believe that a noose and a swift broken neck were too good for a man who had murdered so many and created so much misery and agony in this sad, suffering world. All things considered, the trial of Saddam Hussein was a moral bull's-eye in a field where bull's-eyes are rare. The last hundred years have seen many of the most vicious murderers the world has ever known. Some were tried; plenty were not. The bestial cruelty with which the Japanese army treated captive soldiers and whole Asian peoples in World War II will be a reproach to Japan forever. Some of the foulest, highest-ranked criminals were tried at the Tokyo war crimes trial. Eleven nations, Western and Asian, sent judges. Sixteen defendants were sentenced to life, seven to death. And countless small-fry torturers, gang rapists, and cold-blooded murderers were never tried at all. After the war, the French tried Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, chief authors of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Both were sentenced to death. (Pétain's sentence was commuted on account of age, and he died in prison.) But the fates of leading Nazi gangsters were a mixed bag. Some were tried at Nuremberg. Some were executed. But Himmler committed suicide before he was tried, Goebbels and Hitler himself before they were even captured. A concerted, high-priority effort might perhaps have taken Hitler alive in the last weeks of the war, as Berlin disintegrated. But it never happened. And we'll never know how much this failure has cost. Mankind may never have another chance to put the devil himself in the dock.
Stalin was a mass murderer on Hitler's own scale. He never ran the smallest risk of facing trial and died (in 1953) in his bed. His totalitarian grip on the Soviet Empire made it impossible for his terrorized people to rise against him. Once again we will never know the cost to mankind of this failure of justice. That communism means Stalin as surely as Nazism means Hitler is a fact that (evidently) many people do not know; meanwhile, Russia coasts downhill towards a resurrected pseudo-Communist dictatorship. Mao died in his bed. Castro is on his way. Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge, who slaughtered perhaps three million Cambodians, died in the Cambodian jungle in 1998--admittedly under house arrest, but held by his own Khmer Rouge, not any national or international authority. Idi Amin, butcher of Uganda, died four years ago in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The mass-murderer Radovan Karadzic has evaded capture and is apparently a hero to (at least some) Bosnian Serbs. Justice wins occasionally. Slobodan Milosevic died last year in his cell during his long-running trial by international tribunal for mass murder in the former Yugoslavia. The Greek colonels who ran a brutal regime during the late 1960s and early '70s were brought to trial after democracy was restored; Georgios Papadopoulos, the most prominent, died of cancer in prison. Today's Europeans seem enthusiastic about war crimes trials. But they see themselves as the only trustworthy judges. Britain was unwilling to leave Augusto Pinochet to the justice of his own Chilean nation. During a 1998 trip to London, the Chilean ex-dictator (who ran a brutal regime that also--inconveniently--turned the nation's economy around and made it the strongest and freest in South America) was placed under house arrest, on the orders of a Spanish judge. He was freed in 2000 after being pronounced too ill to stand trial. (He has since died.) Belgium defined the height of arrogance for all time in 2001, when the Belgian Prosecutor's Office tried to indict Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, for war crimes. Anyone with half a brain is aware that no nation in the world is more self-critical--more apt to investigate its own crimes and try its own actual criminals--than Israel, except for the United States. The idea of Europe sitting in moral judgment on Israel would be funny, except that no joke can be amusing forever--and this one has been done to death. Perhaps Europe would consider composing a new joke. What do we gain in the end by trying a broken, humiliated dictator and then putting him to death or locking him away? We comfort the survivors and the victims' families--but not much; justice for the man who tore your universe apart can't repair the universe. An execution makes it impossible for the former strongman to rally his supporters and return to power--which is important to a struggling young democracy like Iraq. And doing justice accomplishes other things that are even more important. By pinning a criminal's crimes on his back, we give evil a local habitation and a name; we make it concrete; we make plain that it can and will be defeated in the end. Most important, the trial and punishment of a despot makes a loud-and-clear proclamation to the world: The strong may not terrorize the weak, not now and not ever. The Bible tells us not to rejoice over fallen enemies, and has another message also (Deut 16:20): "Justice, justice shalt thou pursue!" David Gelernter is a national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Al Qaeda TV A new 24-hour insurgent station reveals al Qaeda's increasing sophistication, and our continuing confusion. by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Nick Grace 01/03/2007
Respond to this article AL QAEDA AND its allies now have their own 24-hour television station. Based at a secret studio in Syria, its signal is broadcast to the entire Arab world from a satellite owned by the Egyptian government. This development highlights al Qaeda's increasingly sophisticated propaganda efforts. Al Qaeda placed great emphasis on communicating its message effectively throughout 2006. Osama bin Laden and deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri issued more tapes in 2006 than in any year since the 9/11 attacks. In the past, al Qaeda tapes were generally released to Al Jazeera, but 2006 saw more Internet releases: the terrorist group's message was thus more quickly disseminated. Al-Zawraa TV, the 24-hour insurgent station, is an extension of this trend. Al-Zawraa hit the airwaves on November 14. According to Middle East-based media monitor Marwan Soliman and military analyst Bill Roggio, it was set up by the Islamic Army of Iraq, an insurgent group comprised of former Baathists who were loyal to Saddam Hussein and now profess their conversion to a bin Laden-like ideology. The Islamic Army of Iraq is subordinate to the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of Sunni insurgent groups, including al Qaeda in Iraq. The Al-Zawraa channel is not only viewed as credible by users of established jihadist Internet forums, but as a strategically important information outlet as well. Moreover, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, is delighted by the station. A U.S. military intelligence officer told us that al-Masri "has long-term and big plans for this thing." Al Qaeda's previous attempts at setting up propaganda outlets have been limited to satellite radio and the Internet. Al-Zawraa, however, appears to be well financed and may find a much broader audience. The channel is broadcast on Nilesat, a powerful satellite administered by the Egyptian government. Through Nilesat, Al-Zawraa's signal blankets the Middle East and North Africa, thus ensuring that the insurgents' message reaches every corner of the Arab world. Al-Zawraa's content is heavy with insurgent propaganda, including audio messages from Islamic Army of Iraq spokesman Dr. Ali al-Na'ami and footage of the group's operations. The station calls for violence against both Shia Iraqis and the Iraqi government. According to Marwan Soliman, the station's anchors appear in military fatigues to rail against the Iraqi government while news crawls urge viewers to support the Islamic Army of Iraq and "help liberate Iraq from the occupying U.S. and Iranian forces." In Fallujah's Government Center, military analyst Bill Roggio, who was embedded with the Military Transition Team, watched Al-Zawraa with a team of Army translators. Roggio reported on his blog that the station broadcast songs mourning Iraqi victims of the "U.S. occupiers," and that images featured on Al-Zawraa included "destroyed mosques, dead women and children, women weeping of the death of their family, bloodstained floors, the destruction of U.S. humvees and armored vehicles, and insurgents firing mortars, RPGs, rockets and AK-47s." Roggio told us that the station's strategic role for insurgent and al Qaeda information operations is clear: "Al-Zawraa is designed to recruit for and prolong the insurgency in Iraq. It openly espouses violence, particularly against the Shia, but also against the Iraqi government and security forces and Coalition troops."
Al Qaeda TV A new 24-hour insurgent station reveals al Qaeda's increasing sophistication, and our continuing confusion. by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Nick Grace 01/03/2007 12:00:00 AM Increase Font Size | Printer-Friendly | Email a Friend | Respond to this article AL QAEDA AND its allies now have their own 24-hour television station. Based at a secret studio in Syria, its signal is broadcast to the entire Arab world from a satellite owned by the Egyptian government. This development highlights al Qaeda's increasingly sophisticated propaganda efforts. Al Qaeda placed great emphasis on communicating its message effectively throughout 2006. Osama bin Laden and deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri issued more tapes in 2006 than in any year since the 9/11 attacks. In the past, al Qaeda tapes were generally released to Al Jazeera, but 2006 saw more Internet releases: the terrorist group's message was thus more quickly disseminated. Al-Zawraa TV, the 24-hour insurgent station, is an extension of this trend. Al-Zawraa hit the airwaves on November 14. According to Middle East-based media monitor Marwan Soliman and military analyst Bill Roggio, it was set up by the Islamic Army of Iraq, an insurgent group comprised of former Baathists who were loyal to Saddam Hussein and now profess their conversion to a bin Laden-like ideology. The Islamic Army of Iraq is subordinate to the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of Sunni insurgent groups, including al Qaeda in Iraq. The Al-Zawraa channel is not only viewed as credible by users of established jihadist Internet forums, but as a strategically important information outlet as well. Moreover, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, is delighted by the station. A U.S. military intelligence officer told us that al-Masri "has long-term and big plans for this thing." Al Qaeda's previous attempts at setting up propaganda outlets have been limited to satellite radio and the Internet. Al-Zawraa, however, appears to be well financed and may find a much broader audience. The channel is broadcast on Nilesat, a powerful satellite administered by the Egyptian government. Through Nilesat, Al-Zawraa's signal blankets the Middle East and North Africa, thus ensuring that the insurgents' message reaches every corner of the Arab world. Al-Zawraa's content is heavy with insurgent propaganda, including audio messages from Islamic Army of Iraq spokesman Dr. Ali al-Na'ami and footage of the group's operations. The station calls for violence against both Shia Iraqis and the Iraqi government. According to Marwan Soliman, the station's anchors appear in military fatigues to rail against the Iraqi government while news crawls urge viewers to support the Islamic Army of Iraq and "help liberate Iraq from the occupying U.S. and Iranian forces." In Fallujah's Government Center, military analyst Bill Roggio, who was embedded with the Military Transition Team, watched Al-Zawraa with a team of Army translators. Roggio reported on his blog that the station broadcast songs mourning Iraqi victims of the "U.S. occupiers," and that images featured on Al-Zawraa included "destroyed mosques, dead women and children, women weeping of the death of their family, bloodstained floors, the destruction of U.S. humvees and armored vehicles, and insurgents firing mortars, RPGs, rockets and AK-47s." Roggio told us that the station's strategic role for insurgent and al Qaeda information operations is clear: "Al-Zawraa is designed to recruit for and prolong the insurgency in Iraq. It openly espouses violence, particularly against the Shia, but also against the Iraqi government and security forces and Coalition troops."
by Victorino Matus 01/04/2007
RELATIVELY SPEAKING, Saddam got off easy. The execution of the former Iraqi dictator was carried out with little fanfare. He was defiant to the end, saying, "Iraq without me is nothing," though he did look frightened. He refused a hood, which was then wrapped around his neck like a scarf. There were taunts and jeers from the small crowd (mostly in support of Moktada al-Sadr). And while Saddam was in mid-sentence, probably answering back to his executors, the trapdoor opened beneath him. He went down with a loud bang. Death seems to have come swiftly for Hussein, whose neck was probably snapped in an instant (as proper hangings are meant to do). Not long after, the corpse of the dictator was sent back to his family for a proper burial in Tikrit, alongside his sons, Uday and Qusay. In an essay for Policy Review published a year ago, I speculated on how Saddam's inevitable demise would compare with the executions of other dictators and their ilk throughout history. Most notable were the hangings of Nazi war criminals in October 1946 following the Nuremberg trials, carefully documented by Whitney R. Harris in Tyranny on Trial: "At eleven minutes past one o-clock in the morning . . . [Former Third Reich foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop] stepped through the door into the execution chamber and faced the gallows on which he and the others . . . were to be hanged. His hands were unmanacled and bound behind him with a leather thong. Ribbentrop walked to the foot of the thirteen stairs leading to the gallows platform. He was asked to state his name, and answered weakly, 'Joachim von Ribbentrop.' Flanked by two guards and followed by the chaplain, he slowly mounted the stairs. On the platform he saw the hangman with the noose of thirteen coils and the hangman's assistant with the black hood [Saddam's noose had seven coils]. He stood on the trap, and his feet were bound with a webbed army belt." His final words were, "God protect Germany, God have mercy on my soul. My last wish is that German unity be maintained, that understanding between East and West be realized and there be peace for the world." Unlike Saddam, Ribbentrop dangled for some 20 minutes before expiring. The bodies of Ribbentrop and the others, however, were not simply returned to their families for burial. Instead, as Anthony Read reported in The Devil's Disciples, "a container holding all the ashes was driven away into the Bavarian countryside, in the rain. It stopped in a quiet lane about an hour later, and the ashes were poured into a muddy ditch." For Nazi sympathizers, there was little left that was tangible. On the other hand, Saddam's burial plot is quite tangible. Located in his hometown of Tikrit, the grave could well become a shrine, a place to venerate the dictator. Saddam's supporters will be vigilant against acts of vengeance by the aggrieved, especially Shiites and Kurds who wanted the dictator tried for numerous other crimes. Historically, the aggrieved have not stopped seeking vengeance after the death of a foe.
In 1661, following the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, the corpse of Oliver Cromwell was dragged out of its tomb and posthumously executed. That's right: Cromwell's body was hanged, then decapitated, with his head impaled on a pike above Westminster Hall. Will tourists be able to visit Hussein's final resting place years from now as they do Mussolini's in Predappio, Italy (where you can even sign the guest book!), or Lenin's in Moscow? (Stalin once shared the same mausoleum with Lenin but was later re-interred below the Kremlin Wall. A large statue and shrines to Stalin can still be found in the late dictator's hometown of Gori, Georgia.) In Becoming Eichmann, author David Cesarini provides an explicit account of the final moments of Adolf Eichmann, the former SS lieutenant colonel kidnapped, tried, and sentenced to death in Jerusalem in 1962: "[The observers] watched as the execution team placed the rubber-lined rope in two loops over Eichmann's head. He was offered a hood, but refused. The two executioners then took up their stations at the mechanism that operated the trapdoor under Eichmann's feet. Only one of the buttons would actually operate the door and neither man would know if he had perpetrated the final act . . . . His last words were: 'Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family and my friends. I am ready. We'll meet again soon, so is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.' With a click the trapdoor opened, Eichmann fell ten feet and the rope jerked. There was stillness and silence broken only by the swaying of the rope . . . ." Eichmann's remains were cremated and emptied into the Mediterranean Sea. Under Islamic law, however, the body of a Muslim cannot be cremated. Instead, it must be buried within 24 hours--regardless of how monstrous that person may have been. And despite the fact that Saddam spent most of his career as a secular Baathist thug, his family has been accorded the same respect as would be given a devout, peaceable Muslim. Because of this, Saddam could, in death, continue to cast his dark shadow over Iraq. Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard
Thus All Too Seldom to Tyrants Saddam's punishment was a rare instance of just deserts.
by David Gelernter 01/15/2007
Increase Font Size | Printer-Friendly | Email a Friend | Respond to this article "Rejoice not when thy enemy falleth"--that is the Bible's advice (Proverbs 24:17), and the classical rabbinic tradition cites this verse in urging us never to celebrate the death of an enemy no matter how evil. But Americans have plenty to celebrate in the trial and punishment of Saddam Hussein by his own nation, which America and her allies made possible. The trial of Saddam was a triumph for one of the noblest of all causes: the sanctity of justice no matter how powerful the criminal, no matter how poor or powerless the victim. May the same thing happen to terrorist tyrants everywhere. But it isn't likely to. For a nation to pass sentence on its own deposed dictator is a rare event. In the days following Saddam's execution we heard often about how the Iraqis (and by implication their American protectors) had botched it. Saddam was taunted on the gallows, and his last moments were videotaped by witnesses who should not have been collecting souvenirs. Those infractions of execution etiquette ought not to have been allowed, but don't kid yourself: No execution is ever pretty. And in this squeamish, fastidious nation it is easy to forget the significance of a hanging; a British royal commission once spelled it out. Hanging is "a peculiarly grim and derogatory form of execution, suitable for sordid criminals and crimes." In any case, those who criticize the manner of Saddam's execution invite the world to contemplate the ways in which the convict himself did the deed. How much dignity did his thug henchmen allow Iraqis who were about to be fed into industrial shredders or to have nails driven into their skulls? "Execution with dignity" is virtually a contradiction in terms, but many believe that a noose and a swift broken neck were too good for a man who had murdered so many and created so much misery and agony in this sad, suffering world. All things considered, the trial of Saddam Hussein was a moral bull's-eye in a field where bull's-eyes are rare. The last hundred years have seen many of the most vicious murderers the world has ever known. Some were tried; plenty were not. The bestial cruelty with which the Japanese army treated captive soldiers and whole Asian peoples in World War II will be a reproach to Japan forever. Some of the foulest, highest-ranked criminals were tried at the Tokyo war crimes trial. Eleven nations, Western and Asian, sent judges. Sixteen defendants were sentenced to life, seven to death. And countless small-fry torturers, gang rapists, and cold-blooded murderers were never tried at all. After the war, the French tried Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, chief authors of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Both were sentenced to death. (Pétain's sentence was commuted on account of age, and he died in prison.) But the fates of leading Nazi gangsters were a mixed bag. Some were tried at Nuremberg. Some were executed. But Himmler committed suicide before he was tried, Goebbels and Hitler himself before they were even captured. A concerted, high-priority effort might perhaps have taken Hitler alive in the last weeks of the war, as Berlin disintegrated. But it never happened. And we'll never know how much this failure has cost. Mankind may never have another chance to put the devil himself in the dock.
Stalin was a mass murderer on Hitler's own scale. He never ran the smallest risk of facing trial and died (in 1953) in his bed. His totalitarian grip on the Soviet Empire made it impossible for his terrorized people to rise against him. Once again we will never know the cost to mankind of this failure of justice. That communism means Stalin as surely as Nazism means Hitler is a fact that (evidently) many people do not know; meanwhile, Russia coasts downhill towards a resurrected pseudo-Communist dictatorship. Mao died in his bed. Castro is on his way. Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge, who slaughtered perhaps three million Cambodians, died in the Cambodian jungle in 1998--admittedly under house arrest, but held by his own Khmer Rouge, not any national or international authority. Idi Amin, butcher of Uganda, died four years ago in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The mass-murderer Radovan Karadzic has evaded capture and is apparently a hero to (at least some) Bosnian Serbs. Justice wins occasionally. Slobodan Milosevic died last year in his cell during his long-running trial by international tribunal for mass murder in the former Yugoslavia. The Greek colonels who ran a brutal regime during the late 1960s and early '70s were brought to trial after democracy was restored; Georgios Papadopoulos, the most prominent, died of cancer in prison. Today's Europeans seem enthusiastic about war crimes trials. But they see themselves as the only trustworthy judges. Britain was unwilling to leave Augusto Pinochet to the justice of his own Chilean nation. During a 1998 trip to London, the Chilean ex-dictator (who ran a brutal regime that also--inconveniently--turned the nation's economy around and made it the strongest and freest in South America) was placed under house arrest, on the orders of a Spanish judge. He was freed in 2000 after being pronounced too ill to stand trial. (He has since died.) Belgium defined the height of arrogance for all time in 2001, when the Belgian Prosecutor's Office tried to indict Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, for war crimes. Anyone with half a brain is aware that no nation in the world is more self-critical--more apt to investigate its own crimes and try its own actual criminals--than Israel, except for the United States. The idea of Europe sitting in moral judgment on Israel would be funny, except that no joke can be amusing forever--and this one has been done to death. Perhaps Europe would consider composing a new joke. What do we gain in the end by trying a broken, humiliated dictator and then putting him to death or locking him away? We comfort the survivors and the victims' families--but not much; justice for the man who tore your universe apart can't repair the universe. An execution makes it impossible for the former strongman to rally his supporters and return to power--which is important to a struggling young democracy like Iraq. And doing justice accomplishes other things that are even more important. By pinning a criminal's crimes on his back, we give evil a local habitation and a name; we make it concrete; we make plain that it can and will be defeated in the end. Most important, the trial and punishment of a despot makes a loud-and-clear proclamation to the world: The strong may not terrorize the weak, not now and not ever. The Bible tells us not to rejoice over fallen enemies, and has another message also (Deut 16:20): "Justice, justice shalt thou pursue!" David Gelernter is a national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Al Qaeda TV A new 24-hour insurgent station reveals al Qaeda's increasing sophistication, and our continuing confusion. by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Nick Grace 01/03/2007
Respond to this article AL QAEDA AND its allies now have their own 24-hour television station. Based at a secret studio in Syria, its signal is broadcast to the entire Arab world from a satellite owned by the Egyptian government. This development highlights al Qaeda's increasingly sophisticated propaganda efforts. Al Qaeda placed great emphasis on communicating its message effectively throughout 2006. Osama bin Laden and deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri issued more tapes in 2006 than in any year since the 9/11 attacks. In the past, al Qaeda tapes were generally released to Al Jazeera, but 2006 saw more Internet releases: the terrorist group's message was thus more quickly disseminated. Al-Zawraa TV, the 24-hour insurgent station, is an extension of this trend. Al-Zawraa hit the airwaves on November 14. According to Middle East-based media monitor Marwan Soliman and military analyst Bill Roggio, it was set up by the Islamic Army of Iraq, an insurgent group comprised of former Baathists who were loyal to Saddam Hussein and now profess their conversion to a bin Laden-like ideology. The Islamic Army of Iraq is subordinate to the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of Sunni insurgent groups, including al Qaeda in Iraq. The Al-Zawraa channel is not only viewed as credible by users of established jihadist Internet forums, but as a strategically important information outlet as well. Moreover, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, is delighted by the station. A U.S. military intelligence officer told us that al-Masri "has long-term and big plans for this thing." Al Qaeda's previous attempts at setting up propaganda outlets have been limited to satellite radio and the Internet. Al-Zawraa, however, appears to be well financed and may find a much broader audience. The channel is broadcast on Nilesat, a powerful satellite administered by the Egyptian government. Through Nilesat, Al-Zawraa's signal blankets the Middle East and North Africa, thus ensuring that the insurgents' message reaches every corner of the Arab world. Al-Zawraa's content is heavy with insurgent propaganda, including audio messages from Islamic Army of Iraq spokesman Dr. Ali al-Na'ami and footage of the group's operations. The station calls for violence against both Shia Iraqis and the Iraqi government. According to Marwan Soliman, the station's anchors appear in military fatigues to rail against the Iraqi government while news crawls urge viewers to support the Islamic Army of Iraq and "help liberate Iraq from the occupying U.S. and Iranian forces." In Fallujah's Government Center, military analyst Bill Roggio, who was embedded with the Military Transition Team, watched Al-Zawraa with a team of Army translators. Roggio reported on his blog that the station broadcast songs mourning Iraqi victims of the "U.S. occupiers," and that images featured on Al-Zawraa included "destroyed mosques, dead women and children, women weeping of the death of their family, bloodstained floors, the destruction of U.S. humvees and armored vehicles, and insurgents firing mortars, RPGs, rockets and AK-47s." Roggio told us that the station's strategic role for insurgent and al Qaeda information operations is clear: "Al-Zawraa is designed to recruit for and prolong the insurgency in Iraq. It openly espouses violence, particularly against the Shia, but also against the Iraqi government and security forces and Coalition troops."
Al Qaeda TV A new 24-hour insurgent station reveals al Qaeda's increasing sophistication, and our continuing confusion. by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Nick Grace 01/03/2007 12:00:00 AM Increase Font Size | Printer-Friendly | Email a Friend | Respond to this article AL QAEDA AND its allies now have their own 24-hour television station. Based at a secret studio in Syria, its signal is broadcast to the entire Arab world from a satellite owned by the Egyptian government. This development highlights al Qaeda's increasingly sophisticated propaganda efforts. Al Qaeda placed great emphasis on communicating its message effectively throughout 2006. Osama bin Laden and deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri issued more tapes in 2006 than in any year since the 9/11 attacks. In the past, al Qaeda tapes were generally released to Al Jazeera, but 2006 saw more Internet releases: the terrorist group's message was thus more quickly disseminated. Al-Zawraa TV, the 24-hour insurgent station, is an extension of this trend. Al-Zawraa hit the airwaves on November 14. According to Middle East-based media monitor Marwan Soliman and military analyst Bill Roggio, it was set up by the Islamic Army of Iraq, an insurgent group comprised of former Baathists who were loyal to Saddam Hussein and now profess their conversion to a bin Laden-like ideology. The Islamic Army of Iraq is subordinate to the Mujahideen Shura Council, an umbrella organization of Sunni insurgent groups, including al Qaeda in Iraq. The Al-Zawraa channel is not only viewed as credible by users of established jihadist Internet forums, but as a strategically important information outlet as well. Moreover, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, is delighted by the station. A U.S. military intelligence officer told us that al-Masri "has long-term and big plans for this thing." Al Qaeda's previous attempts at setting up propaganda outlets have been limited to satellite radio and the Internet. Al-Zawraa, however, appears to be well financed and may find a much broader audience. The channel is broadcast on Nilesat, a powerful satellite administered by the Egyptian government. Through Nilesat, Al-Zawraa's signal blankets the Middle East and North Africa, thus ensuring that the insurgents' message reaches every corner of the Arab world. Al-Zawraa's content is heavy with insurgent propaganda, including audio messages from Islamic Army of Iraq spokesman Dr. Ali al-Na'ami and footage of the group's operations. The station calls for violence against both Shia Iraqis and the Iraqi government. According to Marwan Soliman, the station's anchors appear in military fatigues to rail against the Iraqi government while news crawls urge viewers to support the Islamic Army of Iraq and "help liberate Iraq from the occupying U.S. and Iranian forces." In Fallujah's Government Center, military analyst Bill Roggio, who was embedded with the Military Transition Team, watched Al-Zawraa with a team of Army translators. Roggio reported on his blog that the station broadcast songs mourning Iraqi victims of the "U.S. occupiers," and that images featured on Al-Zawraa included "destroyed mosques, dead women and children, women weeping of the death of their family, bloodstained floors, the destruction of U.S. humvees and armored vehicles, and insurgents firing mortars, RPGs, rockets and AK-47s." Roggio told us that the station's strategic role for insurgent and al Qaeda information operations is clear: "Al-Zawraa is designed to recruit for and prolong the insurgency in Iraq. It openly espouses violence, particularly against the Shia, but also against the Iraqi government and security forces and Coalition troops."
The Consequences of Failure in Iraq They would be awful. But failure can still be averted.
by Reuel Marc Gerecht 01/15/2007
Respond to this article What would be the consequences of an American withdrawal from Iraq? Trying to wrap one's mind around theWhat would be the consequences of an American withdrawal from Iraq? Trying to wrap one's mind around the ramifications of a failed Iraq--of an enormous, quite possibly genocidal, Sunni-Shiite clash exploding around American convoys fleeing south--is daunting. In part, this is why few have spent much time talking about what might happen to Iraq, the region, and the United States if the government in Baghdad and its army collapsed into Sunni and Shiite militias waging a battle to the death. Among its many omissions, the Iraq Study Group's stillborn report lacked any sustained description of the probable and possible consequences of a shattered Iraq. Before embarking on such an inquiry, a few remarks are in order about American attitudes and about the continuing reasons for hope in Iraq. Americans, for whom foreign policy has always been loaded with moral imperatives and ethical restraints, don't like staring into a bloody moral abyss that we largely dug. The growing bipartisan endeavor to blame the mess in Iraq on the Iraqis is, among other things, a human reaction to screen out all ugly incoming data. For most of Washington, if not the country, Iraq is already Vietnam--no possibility of success, thousands of wasted lives, a grim conviction that it would be best to let the ungrateful, pitiless foreigners take their country back. As the pro-war New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote recently: "Adding more troops makes sense only if it's to buy more time for positive trends that have already begun to appear on the horizon. I don't see them." In other words, if one can't envision victory--a political solution where Sunni and Shiite Arabs in Iraq live peacefully with each other--then trying to forestall the ghastly consequences of an American flight from Iraq isn't necessary. If we don't have a workable definition of "success," then we don't have a moral obligation to prevent a catastrophe, even one that is largely our fault. The morality of this reasoning is precarious: Should we never try to stop massive slaughters, or try to stop them only when we didn't provoke them, or try to stop them only when we can't get hurt in the effort? Seeing positive trends is difficult when physical security in Baghdad has been declining, primarily because then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his generals John Abizaid and George Casey didn't see this elementary duty of an occupying power as their mission. But the quintessential American pragmatism of Friedman's reasoning is beyond doubt. And the Bush administration has been remiss in neglecting to describe what's probably over the horizon if we win, and if we lose. Senior administration officials have remained largely quiet about the good, the bad, and the truly calamitous possibilities, allowing the president almost alone to sally forth in Churchillian speeches. And those speeches have usually lacked what Churchill's had in spades: acute appreciation of the hardships and vivid descriptions of what failure would mean. Rhetorically, Iraq has become too difficult to handle. Iraq overwhelms. Yet it shouldn't. Even a pessimist can still look at the place and believe it isn't beyond hope. The counterinsurgency plan proffered by retired four-star General Jack Keane and the military historian Frederick Kagan offers a decent chance of success--probably the last one the Bush administration will have before Iraq cracks up. If the president commits the necessary resources along the lines recommended by Keane-Kagan, the radicalization of Iraq can likely be reversed. The political and democratic possibilities in Mesopotamia remain greater than most in Washington's foreign policy establishment imagine. Post-Saddam Iraq was never going to be a liberal democratic country dominated by Westernized, secular Iraqis. The great Iraqi accomplishment will not be the establishment of a model for peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy. That possibility died in the autumn of 2003. But the odds of Iraq's becoming a profoundly imperfect yet functioning democracy, where power changes hands through elections, remain at least as good as those favoring the birth of a Shiite dictatorship--provided the United States adopts the right tactics.
Post-Saddam Iraq has become for us and the Iraqis an act of tenacity. It is overwhelmingly the story of one community, the Shia, endeavoring to adopt a democratic political arrangement while being bombarded by Sunni Arab insurgents and holy warriors, and dismissed as disloyal Arab Muslims by the Middle East's Sunni Arab intellectual and religious classes. The Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera has its virtues--watching Arab religious fundamentalists and pan-Arab nationalists scream at each other is an unalloyed good in the Middle East--but its coverage and commentary on the Iraqi Shia have been on the whole disgraceful, a nonstop apologia for murderous anti-Shiite bigotry. With little American appreciation, Iraq's Shiite leadership, particularly the traditional clergy behind Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has endeavored to keep its own from imploding into hostile, warring militias. A Shiite dictatorship, the only other possible outcome in Iraq, is still a verboten subject among the Shia. By comparison, it's not hard to find Sunni Arabs pining for the return of a Sunni strongman; since its early love affair with Ayad Allawi, much of Washington would have gladly compromised democratic principle for dictatorial strength. The Iraqi Shia still seem to know that they cannot go down the dictatorial road without provoking internecine strife. As Sistani and his followers have tried to point out, democracy for the Shia is first a matter of communal survival. And as long as this conviction holds, the compromises necessary to keep the Shiites together offer Iraq's Sunni Arabs a way out of insurgency and holy war. This will be neither easy nor pretty. Even in the best of circumstances--even if a successful American-led counterinsurgency takes hold and Iraqi politics slowly becomes more normal--Shiites wanting revenge for Sunni atrocities, and Sunnis wanting revenge against Shiite death squads, will seek opportunities to strike. If Westerners reflected on the violence of their own democratic evolution, they might be more appreciative of the distance the Iraqis have come under ghastly circumstances. The miracle in Iraq is that the Iraqi government, feeble and sectarian as it is, hasn't given up trying to play by the rules and hasn't forsaken completely its imperfect constitution. The presence and power of Americans is undoubtedly the primary reason the worst hasn't happened. But only the blind, deaf, dumb, or politically malicious cannot see that the Iraqis themselves, especially the Shia, are still trying desperately to avoid the abyss. Having seen, then, that there is still sufficient political hope on the Iraqi horizon, let us return to the matter of what will likely happen in Mesopotamia and the Middle East if the United States departs. Certainly the most damning consequence of failure in Iraq is the likelihood that an American withdrawal would provoke a take-no-prisoners civil war between the Sunni and Shiite Arabs, which could easily reach genocidal intensity. The historical parallel to have in mind is the battle between subcontinent Hindus and Muslims that came with the independence of India. Although of differing faiths, the pre-1947 Hindus and Muslims were often indistinguishable culturally, linguistically, and physically. Yet they "ethnically cleansed" their respective new nations, India and Pakistan, with exuberance. Somewhere between 500,000 and one million Muslims and Hindus perished, tens of thousands of women were raped, and more than ten million people were forced to flee their homes. This level of barbarism, scaled down to Iraq's population, could quickly happen in Mesopotamia, long before American forces could withdraw from the country. (And it's worth recalling that few British officials anticipated the communal ferocity that came with the end of the Raj.) Certain Western observers of Iraq, and many Arab commentators, have suggested that it is the American presence in Mesopotamia that aggravates the differences between Shiite and Sunni. If the Americans were to leave, then a modus vivendi would be reached before massive slaughter ensued. Shared Arabism and the Prophet's faith would helpfully reassert themselves. Yet, this seems unlikely. Iraq since 2003 strongly suggests a different outcome. Violence in both the Shiite and Sunni zones has gone up, not down, whenever American and British forces have decreased their physical presence in the streets and their intrusion in government affairs. Sunnis and Shiites who see no Americans are killing each other in greater numbers than Sunnis and Shiites who do see Yanks patrolling their neighborhoods. Although it would be very difficult for either Sunni or Shiite Baghdadis to say so, they probably both look back nostalgically to those days in 2004 when anxious, trigger-happy American military convoys posed the greatest risk to life and property on the roads. There are, fortunately, still many places in Iraq where Shiite and Sunni Arabs are not killing each other. In Baghdad, this is less the case precisely because Baghdad is the center of power. The Iraqi Sunni identity as it has developed since the fall of the Ottoman Empire is in many ways all about Baghdad. The centripetal eminence of the city for them is far greater than for the Shiites--even for the Shiites of the "Sadr City" ghetto, who have provided the manpower for the worst of the capital's Shiite militias. The Sunni insurgency and holy war have always been more about maintaining Sunni power than about repelling infidel invaders. They stand in sharp contrast to the great Shiite rebellion of 1920, which was a reaction against the religiously intolerable dominion of the British in Mesopotamia, not a Shiite assertion of power among the Arab denizens of what soon became Iraq. Breaking the back of the Sunni insurgency has always meant denying the rejectionist Sunni Arab camp (possibly a pretty large slice of the city's Sunni population) any hope of dominating Baghdad and thus the country. If the Americans undertake this task, the Sunni Arab population, especially those who don't back the insurgents and the holy warriors, will sustain relatively little damage. We know how to clear Sunni neighborhoods in the capital--we've just never had the American manpower to hold what we've cleared. However, if the Shiites end up doing this (and it will be the Shiite militias that do it, not the Iraqi army, which would likely fall apart pretty quickly once U.S. military forces started withdrawing from the capital), the Sunni Arab population of Baghdad is going to get pulverized. The Sunni and Shiite migration we've so far seen from Baghdad is just a trickle compared with the exodus when these two communities battle en masse for the city and the country's new identity. If we leave Iraq any time soon, the battle for Baghdad will probably lead to a conflagration that consumes all of Arab Iraq, and quite possibly Kurdistan, too. Once the Shia become both badly bloodied and victorious, raw nationalist and religious passions will grow. A horrific fight with the Sunni Arabs will inevitably draw in support from the ferociously anti-Shiite Sunni religious establishments in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and on the Shiite side from Iran. It will probably destroy most of central Iraq and whet the appetite of Shiite Arab warlords, who will by then dominate their community, for a conflict with the Kurds. If the Americans stabilize Arab Iraq, which means occupying the Sunni triangle, this won't happen. A strong, aggressive American military presence in Iraq can probably halt the radicalization of the Shiite community. Imagine an Iraq modeled on the Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. The worst elements in the Iranian regime are heavily concentrated in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence, the two organizations most active inside Iraq. The Lebanese Hezbollah is also present giving tutorials. These forces need increasing strife to prosper. Imagine Iraqi Shiites, battle-hardened in a vicious war with Iraq's Arab Sunnis, spiritually and operationally linking up with a revitalized and aggressive clerical dictatorship in Iran. Imagine the Iraqi Sunni Islamic militants, driven from Iraq, joining up with groups like al Qaeda, living to die killing Americans. Imagine the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Sunni Arab refugees. The Hashemites have been lucky and clever since World War II. They've escaped extinction several times. Does anyone want to take bets that the monarchy can survive the implantation of an army of militant, angry Iraqi Sunni Arabs? For those who believe that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is the epicenter of the Middle East, the mass migration of Iraq's Sunni Arabs into Jordan will bury what small chances remain that the Israelis and Palestinians will find an accommodation. With Jordan in trouble, overflowing with viciously anti-American and anti-Israeli Iraqis, peaceful Palestinian evolution on the West Bank of the Jordan river is about as likely as the discovery of the Holy Grail. The repercussions throughout the Middle East of the Sunni-Shiite clash in Iraq are potentially so large it's difficult to digest. Sunni Arabs in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia will certainly view a hard-won and bloody Shiite triumph in Iraq as an enormous Iranian victory. The Egyptians or the Saudis or both will go for their own nukes. What little chance remains for the Americans and the Europeans to corral peacefully the clerical regime's nuclear-weapons aspirations will end with a Shiite-Sunni death struggle in Mesopotamia, which the Shia will inevitably win. The Israelis, who are increasingly likely to strike preemptively the major Iranian nuclear sites before the end of George Bush's presidency, will feel even more threatened, especially when the Iranian regime underscores its struggle against the Zionist enemy as a means of compensating for its support to the bloody Shiite conquest in Iraq. With America in full retreat from Iraq, the clerical regime, which has often viewed terrorism as a tool of statecraft, could well revert to the mentality and tactics that produced the bombing of Khobar Towers in 1996. If the Americans are retreating, hit them. That would not be just a radical Shiite view; it was the learned estimation of Osama bin Laden and his kind before 9/11. It's questionable to argue that the war in Iraq has advanced the radical Sunni holy war against the United States. There should be no question, however, that an American defeat in Mesopotamia would be the greatest psychological triumph ever for anti-American jihadists. Al Qaeda and its militant Iraqi allies could dominate western Iraq for years--it could take awhile for the Shiites to drive them out. How in the world could the United States destroy these devils when it no longer had forces on the ground in Anbar? Air power? Would we helicopter Special Forces from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf into a distant war zone when our intelligence information on this desert region was--as it would surely be--somewhere between poor and nonexistent? Images of Desert One in 1980 come to mind. Neither Jordan nor Kuwait may be eager to lend its airfields for American operations that intend to kill Sunnis who are killing Shiites. What successes we've had in both Iraq and Afghanistan have come from our having boots on the ground. There is simply no way in hell the CIA or military intelligence will have reliable collection programs once the United States significantly draws down. Are we going to reinvade Western Iraq? Senators John Kerry and Barack Obama say they would've been tougher on al Qaeda than the Bush administration. One wonders how they would prove that in Iraq after the Americans leave. Give weaponry to a radicalized Shiite army slaughtering Sunnis on its western march toward the Jordanian border? All of this may be too abstract for most Democrats and many Republicans. Americans are particularly weak when it comes to understanding and empathizing with folks who express their love of God through death. But these things matter to Islamic holy warriors and those who have the psychological profile of would-be martyrs. We had better hope that America's counterterrorist measures are sufficient to block the likely substantial increase in jihadist recruits. Rest assured that with America in retreat, and the Iraqi Shia slowly grinding the Sunni Arabs into the dust, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are unlikely to be helpful in the war on terrorism. The Egyptian and Saudi reflex to support militant fundamentalists in times of stress (even as they also repress them) will surely shift into hyperdrive as Cairo and Riyadh grow ever more fearful of an Iranian-led Shiite offensive. The Egyptians and the Saudis, the two intellectual powerhouses for Arab jihadism against the United States, are likely to view a Shiite conquest of Iraq that creates hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Sunni Arab refugees in the same light as Iran's Islamic revolution. More than any other event, that revolution provoked a global Wahhabi and Salafi missionary movement to counter the spread of Iranian-led radical Islam, which in turn set the stage for the rise of bin Ladenism. Combine a Shiite triumph in Iraq with a resurgent hard core in Iran who may soon acquire nuclear weaponry, and the provocative possibilities of a shattered Iraq could be even greater than those of the Islamic revolution in 1979. And with a U.S. defeat in Mesopotamia, the reborn Taliban movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan, too, will gain ground. It is hard to imagine any event that could give the virulently anti-American Islamists in these two countries more inspiration and hope. Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf is already cutting deals with al Qaeda-supporting tribes along the border with Afghanistan. Is it really reasonable to imagine, as many Democrats apparently do, that the United States, its European allies, and the Afghans and Pakistanis who like us will become stauncher in the defense of Afghanistan after the Americans abandon Iraq? Isn't it much more likely that the Taliban, al Qaeda, and General Musharraf will see things just the other way round? Will the Russians and Chinese, who increasingly are engaging in nefarious practices in the Middle East and elsewhere, be so gracious as to not exploit America's flight from Iraq? Russia has already become an assassination-happy rogue state that sells antiaircraft missiles, which could only be used against the United States and Israel, to Tehran. Soviet patterns in the Middle East are returning. It is in our power to prevent these awful scenarios. We should have taken great hope in the recent refusal of Grand Ayatollah Sistani to bless a "unity" government that might well have led to violent strife among the Shia--a surefire recipe for destroying the country. Sistani's refusal to endorse this plan effectively killed it. The good and indispensable news: Sistani's power isn't dead. Even Sadr's men are still making pilgrimages to see the old man. Almost politically neutered after Sunni militants blew up the Golden Shrine at Samarra in February 2006, the cleric and the peaceful Shiite consensus he represents are still alive. On the Shiite side, men of moderation still have the power of moral suasion and tradition. No one on the Shiite side has publicly challenged Sistani's support for democracy. There are certainly many men in the dominant Shiite political parties who would privately prefer some kind of religiously oriented dictatorship. But as Thomas Friedman once insightfully remarked, it's what people say publicly in the Muslim Middle East that matters. In public, Shiite support for democratic government appears as strong today as it was before the attack on the Golden Shrine, the event that caused Shiite forbearance against Sunni Arab depredations to run out. By contrast, the question that remains open is whether the United States can take the pounding from the Sunni insurgents and holy warriors and stay true to its original mission. Despite his mistakes and his poor choices in personnel, President Bush has kept faith with the Iraqi people. He has fought the good and honorable fight. He has clearly seen the future if we falter. We can only hope that in America's coming great battle for Baghdad, both he and Sistani prove victorious. Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. He served on an expert working group of the Baker Hamilton Commission.
An Iraqi shopkeeper shows his secret stash of souvenir watches depicting former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein at a shop in Baghdad. Photograph: Sabah Arar/AFP/Getty Images Saddam Hussein's chief lawyer implored world leaders today to prevent the US from handing over the ousted leader to Iraqi authorities for execution, saying the former dictator should enjoy protection from his enemies as a "prisoner of war". Iraq's highest court on Tuesday rejected Saddam's appeal against his conviction and death sentence for the killing of 148 Shias in the northern city of Dujail in 1982. The court said the former president should be hanged within 30 days. "According to the international conventions it is forbidden to hand a prisoner of war to his adversary," said Saddam's lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi. "I urge all the international and legal organisations, the United Nations secretary-general, the Arab League and all the leaders of the world to rapidly prevent the American administration from handing the president to the Iraqi authorities," he said. An official close to the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, said that Saddam would remain in a US military prison until he is handed over to authorities in Baghdad on the day of his execution. Mr al-Dulaimi warned that turning over Saddam to the Iraqis would increase the sectarian violence that already is tearing the country apart. "If the American administration insists in handing the president to the Iraqis, it would commit a great strategic mistake which would lead to the escalation of the violence in Iraq and the eruption of a destructive civil war," he said. Saddam is in the midst of another trial, charged with genocide and other crimes during a 1987-88 military crackdown on Kurds in northern Iraq. That trial was adjourned until Jan. 8, but experts have said the trial of Saddam's co-defendants is likely to continue even if he is executed. Attacks today killed at least 28 Iraqis, while the US military announced the deaths of four American soldiers and a marine. With 100 American troops dead so far this month, December is the second-deadliest month of 2006 for US military personnel. At least 105 troops died in October. Meanwhile, the US embassy said it believes four American security contractors and an Austrian are still being held captive after being kidnapped in southern Iraq six weeks ago. The men went missing November 16 when a large convoy of trucks being escorted by the Crescent Security Group was hijacked on a highway near Safwan, a city on the border with Kuwait. Suspected militiamen dressed in Iraqi police uniforms ambushed the convoy, taking 14 hostages, including the five security guards, and nine truck drivers who were later released. "At this time, US officials believe the American citizens are still being held by their captors," embassy spokesman Lou Fintor said, without elaborating. A video of the kidnapped Americans reportedly surfaced this week, showing them to be alive and in good condition. The reported footage was believed to have been made about a month ago. If authentic, it would be the first proof that all five men survived the ambush
by Reuel Marc Gerecht 01/15/2007
Respond to this article What would be the consequences of an American withdrawal from Iraq? Trying to wrap one's mind around theWhat would be the consequences of an American withdrawal from Iraq? Trying to wrap one's mind around the ramifications of a failed Iraq--of an enormous, quite possibly genocidal, Sunni-Shiite clash exploding around American convoys fleeing south--is daunting. In part, this is why few have spent much time talking about what might happen to Iraq, the region, and the United States if the government in Baghdad and its army collapsed into Sunni and Shiite militias waging a battle to the death. Among its many omissions, the Iraq Study Group's stillborn report lacked any sustained description of the probable and possible consequences of a shattered Iraq. Before embarking on such an inquiry, a few remarks are in order about American attitudes and about the continuing reasons for hope in Iraq. Americans, for whom foreign policy has always been loaded with moral imperatives and ethical restraints, don't like staring into a bloody moral abyss that we largely dug. The growing bipartisan endeavor to blame the mess in Iraq on the Iraqis is, among other things, a human reaction to screen out all ugly incoming data. For most of Washington, if not the country, Iraq is already Vietnam--no possibility of success, thousands of wasted lives, a grim conviction that it would be best to let the ungrateful, pitiless foreigners take their country back. As the pro-war New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote recently: "Adding more troops makes sense only if it's to buy more time for positive trends that have already begun to appear on the horizon. I don't see them." In other words, if one can't envision victory--a political solution where Sunni and Shiite Arabs in Iraq live peacefully with each other--then trying to forestall the ghastly consequences of an American flight from Iraq isn't necessary. If we don't have a workable definition of "success," then we don't have a moral obligation to prevent a catastrophe, even one that is largely our fault. The morality of this reasoning is precarious: Should we never try to stop massive slaughters, or try to stop them only when we didn't provoke them, or try to stop them only when we can't get hurt in the effort? Seeing positive trends is difficult when physical security in Baghdad has been declining, primarily because then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his generals John Abizaid and George Casey didn't see this elementary duty of an occupying power as their mission. But the quintessential American pragmatism of Friedman's reasoning is beyond doubt. And the Bush administration has been remiss in neglecting to describe what's probably over the horizon if we win, and if we lose. Senior administration officials have remained largely quiet about the good, the bad, and the truly calamitous possibilities, allowing the president almost alone to sally forth in Churchillian speeches. And those speeches have usually lacked what Churchill's had in spades: acute appreciation of the hardships and vivid descriptions of what failure would mean. Rhetorically, Iraq has become too difficult to handle. Iraq overwhelms. Yet it shouldn't. Even a pessimist can still look at the place and believe it isn't beyond hope. The counterinsurgency plan proffered by retired four-star General Jack Keane and the military historian Frederick Kagan offers a decent chance of success--probably the last one the Bush administration will have before Iraq cracks up. If the president commits the necessary resources along the lines recommended by Keane-Kagan, the radicalization of Iraq can likely be reversed. The political and democratic possibilities in Mesopotamia remain greater than most in Washington's foreign policy establishment imagine. Post-Saddam Iraq was never going to be a liberal democratic country dominated by Westernized, secular Iraqis. The great Iraqi accomplishment will not be the establishment of a model for peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy. That possibility died in the autumn of 2003. But the odds of Iraq's becoming a profoundly imperfect yet functioning democracy, where power changes hands through elections, remain at least as good as those favoring the birth of a Shiite dictatorship--provided the United States adopts the right tactics.
Post-Saddam Iraq has become for us and the Iraqis an act of tenacity. It is overwhelmingly the story of one community, the Shia, endeavoring to adopt a democratic political arrangement while being bombarded by Sunni Arab insurgents and holy warriors, and dismissed as disloyal Arab Muslims by the Middle East's Sunni Arab intellectual and religious classes. The Arabic satellite channel Al Jazeera has its virtues--watching Arab religious fundamentalists and pan-Arab nationalists scream at each other is an unalloyed good in the Middle East--but its coverage and commentary on the Iraqi Shia have been on the whole disgraceful, a nonstop apologia for murderous anti-Shiite bigotry. With little American appreciation, Iraq's Shiite leadership, particularly the traditional clergy behind Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has endeavored to keep its own from imploding into hostile, warring militias. A Shiite dictatorship, the only other possible outcome in Iraq, is still a verboten subject among the Shia. By comparison, it's not hard to find Sunni Arabs pining for the return of a Sunni strongman; since its early love affair with Ayad Allawi, much of Washington would have gladly compromised democratic principle for dictatorial strength. The Iraqi Shia still seem to know that they cannot go down the dictatorial road without provoking internecine strife. As Sistani and his followers have tried to point out, democracy for the Shia is first a matter of communal survival. And as long as this conviction holds, the compromises necessary to keep the Shiites together offer Iraq's Sunni Arabs a way out of insurgency and holy war. This will be neither easy nor pretty. Even in the best of circumstances--even if a successful American-led counterinsurgency takes hold and Iraqi politics slowly becomes more normal--Shiites wanting revenge for Sunni atrocities, and Sunnis wanting revenge against Shiite death squads, will seek opportunities to strike. If Westerners reflected on the violence of their own democratic evolution, they might be more appreciative of the distance the Iraqis have come under ghastly circumstances. The miracle in Iraq is that the Iraqi government, feeble and sectarian as it is, hasn't given up trying to play by the rules and hasn't forsaken completely its imperfect constitution. The presence and power of Americans is undoubtedly the primary reason the worst hasn't happened. But only the blind, deaf, dumb, or politically malicious cannot see that the Iraqis themselves, especially the Shia, are still trying desperately to avoid the abyss. Having seen, then, that there is still sufficient political hope on the Iraqi horizon, let us return to the matter of what will likely happen in Mesopotamia and the Middle East if the United States departs. Certainly the most damning consequence of failure in Iraq is the likelihood that an American withdrawal would provoke a take-no-prisoners civil war between the Sunni and Shiite Arabs, which could easily reach genocidal intensity. The historical parallel to have in mind is the battle between subcontinent Hindus and Muslims that came with the independence of India. Although of differing faiths, the pre-1947 Hindus and Muslims were often indistinguishable culturally, linguistically, and physically. Yet they "ethnically cleansed" their respective new nations, India and Pakistan, with exuberance. Somewhere between 500,000 and one million Muslims and Hindus perished, tens of thousands of women were raped, and more than ten million people were forced to flee their homes. This level of barbarism, scaled down to Iraq's population, could quickly happen in Mesopotamia, long before American forces could withdraw from the country. (And it's worth recalling that few British officials anticipated the communal ferocity that came with the end of the Raj.) Certain Western observers of Iraq, and many Arab commentators, have suggested that it is the American presence in Mesopotamia that aggravates the differences between Shiite and Sunni. If the Americans were to leave, then a modus vivendi would be reached before massive slaughter ensued. Shared Arabism and the Prophet's faith would helpfully reassert themselves. Yet, this seems unlikely. Iraq since 2003 strongly suggests a different outcome. Violence in both the Shiite and Sunni zones has gone up, not down, whenever American and British forces have decreased their physical presence in the streets and their intrusion in government affairs. Sunnis and Shiites who see no Americans are killing each other in greater numbers than Sunnis and Shiites who do see Yanks patrolling their neighborhoods. Although it would be very difficult for either Sunni or Shiite Baghdadis to say so, they probably both look back nostalgically to those days in 2004 when anxious, trigger-happy American military convoys posed the greatest risk to life and property on the roads. There are, fortunately, still many places in Iraq where Shiite and Sunni Arabs are not killing each other. In Baghdad, this is less the case precisely because Baghdad is the center of power. The Iraqi Sunni identity as it has developed since the fall of the Ottoman Empire is in many ways all about Baghdad. The centripetal eminence of the city for them is far greater than for the Shiites--even for the Shiites of the "Sadr City" ghetto, who have provided the manpower for the worst of the capital's Shiite militias. The Sunni insurgency and holy war have always been more about maintaining Sunni power than about repelling infidel invaders. They stand in sharp contrast to the great Shiite rebellion of 1920, which was a reaction against the religiously intolerable dominion of the British in Mesopotamia, not a Shiite assertion of power among the Arab denizens of what soon became Iraq. Breaking the back of the Sunni insurgency has always meant denying the rejectionist Sunni Arab camp (possibly a pretty large slice of the city's Sunni population) any hope of dominating Baghdad and thus the country. If the Americans undertake this task, the Sunni Arab population, especially those who don't back the insurgents and the holy warriors, will sustain relatively little damage. We know how to clear Sunni neighborhoods in the capital--we've just never had the American manpower to hold what we've cleared. However, if the Shiites end up doing this (and it will be the Shiite militias that do it, not the Iraqi army, which would likely fall apart pretty quickly once U.S. military forces started withdrawing from the capital), the Sunni Arab population of Baghdad is going to get pulverized. The Sunni and Shiite migration we've so far seen from Baghdad is just a trickle compared with the exodus when these two communities battle en masse for the city and the country's new identity. If we leave Iraq any time soon, the battle for Baghdad will probably lead to a conflagration that consumes all of Arab Iraq, and quite possibly Kurdistan, too. Once the Shia become both badly bloodied and victorious, raw nationalist and religious passions will grow. A horrific fight with the Sunni Arabs will inevitably draw in support from the ferociously anti-Shiite Sunni religious establishments in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and on the Shiite side from Iran. It will probably destroy most of central Iraq and whet the appetite of Shiite Arab warlords, who will by then dominate their community, for a conflict with the Kurds. If the Americans stabilize Arab Iraq, which means occupying the Sunni triangle, this won't happen. A strong, aggressive American military presence in Iraq can probably halt the radicalization of the Shiite community. Imagine an Iraq modeled on the Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. The worst elements in the Iranian regime are heavily concentrated in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and the Ministry of Intelligence, the two organizations most active inside Iraq. The Lebanese Hezbollah is also present giving tutorials. These forces need increasing strife to prosper. Imagine Iraqi Shiites, battle-hardened in a vicious war with Iraq's Arab Sunnis, spiritually and operationally linking up with a revitalized and aggressive clerical dictatorship in Iran. Imagine the Iraqi Sunni Islamic militants, driven from Iraq, joining up with groups like al Qaeda, living to die killing Americans. Imagine the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan overwhelmed with hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Sunni Arab refugees. The Hashemites have been lucky and clever since World War II. They've escaped extinction several times. Does anyone want to take bets that the monarchy can survive the implantation of an army of militant, angry Iraqi Sunni Arabs? For those who believe that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is the epicenter of the Middle East, the mass migration of Iraq's Sunni Arabs into Jordan will bury what small chances remain that the Israelis and Palestinians will find an accommodation. With Jordan in trouble, overflowing with viciously anti-American and anti-Israeli Iraqis, peaceful Palestinian evolution on the West Bank of the Jordan river is about as likely as the discovery of the Holy Grail. The repercussions throughout the Middle East of the Sunni-Shiite clash in Iraq are potentially so large it's difficult to digest. Sunni Arabs in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia will certainly view a hard-won and bloody Shiite triumph in Iraq as an enormous Iranian victory. The Egyptians or the Saudis or both will go for their own nukes. What little chance remains for the Americans and the Europeans to corral peacefully the clerical regime's nuclear-weapons aspirations will end with a Shiite-Sunni death struggle in Mesopotamia, which the Shia will inevitably win. The Israelis, who are increasingly likely to strike preemptively the major Iranian nuclear sites before the end of George Bush's presidency, will feel even more threatened, especially when the Iranian regime underscores its struggle against the Zionist enemy as a means of compensating for its support to the bloody Shiite conquest in Iraq. With America in full retreat from Iraq, the clerical regime, which has often viewed terrorism as a tool of statecraft, could well revert to the mentality and tactics that produced the bombing of Khobar Towers in 1996. If the Americans are retreating, hit them. That would not be just a radical Shiite view; it was the learned estimation of Osama bin Laden and his kind before 9/11. It's questionable to argue that the war in Iraq has advanced the radical Sunni holy war against the United States. There should be no question, however, that an American defeat in Mesopotamia would be the greatest psychological triumph ever for anti-American jihadists. Al Qaeda and its militant Iraqi allies could dominate western Iraq for years--it could take awhile for the Shiites to drive them out. How in the world could the United States destroy these devils when it no longer had forces on the ground in Anbar? Air power? Would we helicopter Special Forces from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf into a distant war zone when our intelligence information on this desert region was--as it would surely be--somewhere between poor and nonexistent? Images of Desert One in 1980 come to mind. Neither Jordan nor Kuwait may be eager to lend its airfields for American operations that intend to kill Sunnis who are killing Shiites. What successes we've had in both Iraq and Afghanistan have come from our having boots on the ground. There is simply no way in hell the CIA or military intelligence will have reliable collection programs once the United States significantly draws down. Are we going to reinvade Western Iraq? Senators John Kerry and Barack Obama say they would've been tougher on al Qaeda than the Bush administration. One wonders how they would prove that in Iraq after the Americans leave. Give weaponry to a radicalized Shiite army slaughtering Sunnis on its western march toward the Jordanian border? All of this may be too abstract for most Democrats and many Republicans. Americans are particularly weak when it comes to understanding and empathizing with folks who express their love of God through death. But these things matter to Islamic holy warriors and those who have the psychological profile of would-be martyrs. We had better hope that America's counterterrorist measures are sufficient to block the likely substantial increase in jihadist recruits. Rest assured that with America in retreat, and the Iraqi Shia slowly grinding the Sunni Arabs into the dust, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are unlikely to be helpful in the war on terrorism. The Egyptian and Saudi reflex to support militant fundamentalists in times of stress (even as they also repress them) will surely shift into hyperdrive as Cairo and Riyadh grow ever more fearful of an Iranian-led Shiite offensive. The Egyptians and the Saudis, the two intellectual powerhouses for Arab jihadism against the United States, are likely to view a Shiite conquest of Iraq that creates hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Sunni Arab refugees in the same light as Iran's Islamic revolution. More than any other event, that revolution provoked a global Wahhabi and Salafi missionary movement to counter the spread of Iranian-led radical Islam, which in turn set the stage for the rise of bin Ladenism. Combine a Shiite triumph in Iraq with a resurgent hard core in Iran who may soon acquire nuclear weaponry, and the provocative possibilities of a shattered Iraq could be even greater than those of the Islamic revolution in 1979. And with a U.S. defeat in Mesopotamia, the reborn Taliban movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan, too, will gain ground. It is hard to imagine any event that could give the virulently anti-American Islamists in these two countries more inspiration and hope. Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf is already cutting deals with al Qaeda-supporting tribes along the border with Afghanistan. Is it really reasonable to imagine, as many Democrats apparently do, that the United States, its European allies, and the Afghans and Pakistanis who like us will become stauncher in the defense of Afghanistan after the Americans abandon Iraq? Isn't it much more likely that the Taliban, al Qaeda, and General Musharraf will see things just the other way round? Will the Russians and Chinese, who increasingly are engaging in nefarious practices in the Middle East and elsewhere, be so gracious as to not exploit America's flight from Iraq? Russia has already become an assassination-happy rogue state that sells antiaircraft missiles, which could only be used against the United States and Israel, to Tehran. Soviet patterns in the Middle East are returning. It is in our power to prevent these awful scenarios. We should have taken great hope in the recent refusal of Grand Ayatollah Sistani to bless a "unity" government that might well have led to violent strife among the Shia--a surefire recipe for destroying the country. Sistani's refusal to endorse this plan effectively killed it. The good and indispensable news: Sistani's power isn't dead. Even Sadr's men are still making pilgrimages to see the old man. Almost politically neutered after Sunni militants blew up the Golden Shrine at Samarra in February 2006, the cleric and the peaceful Shiite consensus he represents are still alive. On the Shiite side, men of moderation still have the power of moral suasion and tradition. No one on the Shiite side has publicly challenged Sistani's support for democracy. There are certainly many men in the dominant Shiite political parties who would privately prefer some kind of religiously oriented dictatorship. But as Thomas Friedman once insightfully remarked, it's what people say publicly in the Muslim Middle East that matters. In public, Shiite support for democratic government appears as strong today as it was before the attack on the Golden Shrine, the event that caused Shiite forbearance against Sunni Arab depredations to run out. By contrast, the question that remains open is whether the United States can take the pounding from the Sunni insurgents and holy warriors and stay true to its original mission. Despite his mistakes and his poor choices in personnel, President Bush has kept faith with the Iraqi people. He has fought the good and honorable fight. He has clearly seen the future if we falter. We can only hope that in America's coming great battle for Baghdad, both he and Sistani prove victorious. Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. He served on an expert working group of the Baker Hamilton Commission.
An Iraqi shopkeeper shows his secret stash of souvenir watches depicting former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein at a shop in Baghdad. Photograph: Sabah Arar/AFP/Getty Images Saddam Hussein's chief lawyer implored world leaders today to prevent the US from handing over the ousted leader to Iraqi authorities for execution, saying the former dictator should enjoy protection from his enemies as a "prisoner of war". Iraq's highest court on Tuesday rejected Saddam's appeal against his conviction and death sentence for the killing of 148 Shias in the northern city of Dujail in 1982. The court said the former president should be hanged within 30 days. "According to the international conventions it is forbidden to hand a prisoner of war to his adversary," said Saddam's lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi. "I urge all the international and legal organisations, the United Nations secretary-general, the Arab League and all the leaders of the world to rapidly prevent the American administration from handing the president to the Iraqi authorities," he said. An official close to the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, said that Saddam would remain in a US military prison until he is handed over to authorities in Baghdad on the day of his execution. Mr al-Dulaimi warned that turning over Saddam to the Iraqis would increase the sectarian violence that already is tearing the country apart. "If the American administration insists in handing the president to the Iraqis, it would commit a great strategic mistake which would lead to the escalation of the violence in Iraq and the eruption of a destructive civil war," he said. Saddam is in the midst of another trial, charged with genocide and other crimes during a 1987-88 military crackdown on Kurds in northern Iraq. That trial was adjourned until Jan. 8, but experts have said the trial of Saddam's co-defendants is likely to continue even if he is executed. Attacks today killed at least 28 Iraqis, while the US military announced the deaths of four American soldiers and a marine. With 100 American troops dead so far this month, December is the second-deadliest month of 2006 for US military personnel. At least 105 troops died in October. Meanwhile, the US embassy said it believes four American security contractors and an Austrian are still being held captive after being kidnapped in southern Iraq six weeks ago. The men went missing November 16 when a large convoy of trucks being escorted by the Crescent Security Group was hijacked on a highway near Safwan, a city on the border with Kuwait. Suspected militiamen dressed in Iraqi police uniforms ambushed the convoy, taking 14 hostages, including the five security guards, and nine truck drivers who were later released. "At this time, US officials believe the American citizens are still being held by their captors," embassy spokesman Lou Fintor said, without elaborating. A video of the kidnapped Americans reportedly surfaced this week, showing them to be alive and in good condition. The reported footage was believed to have been made about a month ago. If authentic, it would be the first proof that all five men survived the ambush
