On Dec. 30, 2006, Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq, was hanged by a puppet court of the American occupation in Iraq. The execution was recorded on a cell phone camera and the grisly images were broadcast around the world. Millions of people throughout the world, including in Iraq, denounced the execution as an outrage and miscarriage of justice.
Hussein was a prisoner of war, captured by U.S. and British imperialism in a war of aggression. It is illegal to execute
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It might have worked for the Roman Empire, but it will not work now. Nor does it really function as a great act of intimidation to other leaders. If anything, it is a catalyst for more disgust, hatred and struggle against the U.S. occupation.
The entire trial of Hussein was riddled with legal improprieties and violence against both the defense team and defense witnesses. Three of Hussein’s defense attorneys were tortured and murdered during the trial. These murders were almost certainly carried out by the Iraqi government or armed groups collaborating with the government. Hussein and his co-defendants were charged and convicted of ordering the execution of 148 people after a 1982 attempt to assassinate Hussein, which occurred during Iraq’s war with Iran.
The 148 dead supposedly at issue in Hussein’s trial were members of the Dawa party, the party of current puppet prime minister, Nouri Al-Maliki.
Demonization and lies
Throughout the decades of imperialist intervention in Iraq, the media and the government have sought out to demonize Hussein and the Iraqi government led by the Arab Baath Socialist Party.
People living in the United States have been bombarded by stories detailing the crimes of Hussein, the “imminent threat” posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to the people of the United States, and Hussein’s alleged role as mastermind and financier of world terrorism.
Several years into the occupation, essential elements of the U.S. propaganda claims have proven to be crass lies. Iraq, for instance, had no weapons of mass destruction. During the bloodiest episodes of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88), when terrible losses occurred on both sides, the U.S. government was funneling arms and intelligence to both Iraq and Iran. As Henry Kissinger put it: The U.S. government was hoping that both sides would kill each other.
The United States was cynically playing the divide-and-conquer tactic to the hilt. Later, the U.S. government feigned concern about the loss of life in Kurdish villages and elsewhere. But that was because a strategic decision was made to bring down the Baathist government in Iraq.
As the Soviet Union was imploding in the late 1980s, the U.S. government felt it could topple the Iraqi government and other governments in the Third World that had long relied on Soviet diplomatic and military support against imperialism.
The U.S. shifted its policy toward the Saddam Hussein government. Instead of trying to manipulate the Iraqi government and encourage its rivalry with Iran, the White House and the Pentagon planners began a complicated reorientation aimed at militarily destroying Iraq.
The U.S. sensed an opportunity to create a proxy government in a country that possessed the second largest reserve of oil in the world.
Even prior to Iraq’s August 1990 military intervention in Kuwait, the U.S. military had undertaken a two-year-long reorganization of its military forces in the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Iraq was identified as the next major target for war in the region. The political and media blitz aimed at demonizing and delegitimizing the Iraqi government was part of the effort to prepare the population for endless war, endless economic sanctions, or both, as it turned out, against Iraq.
Under these circumstances, it is essential for Marxists living in the United States to expose the U.S. government’s sinister machinations. In the face of this aggression, it is a requirement to support Iraq in its quest to remain independent. That is the top priority and exists regardless of political differences that revolutionary Marxists had with the bourgeois nationalist Baathist ruling party.
The Iraqi Special Tribunal was not a real court. It was organized and financed by the U.S. occupation forces. In all ways the court was rigged. Click here to read more about the tribunal and the show trial of Hussein.
Imperialists, the real criminals
The imperialists are utterly incapable of handing out any real justice, and any trial under occupation is illegal. The
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The “trial” of Hussein made him out to be a villain, while his accusers have carried out one of the most monstrous crimes in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The United States attacked Iraq in 1991, completely destroyed the country’s infrastructure in 43 days of bombardment, and murdered hundreds of thousands of people in the bombing.
In the sanctions regime imposed on the entire Iraqi population from 1990 until the second war starting in 2003, more than 1.5 million people died from lack of clean water, medicine and food. The sanctions created a human catastrophe in Iraq. It was nothing less than genocide.
The capacity of the Hussein government to retain its hold on governmental authority in the face of the economic sanctions and endless destabilization schemes hatched in Washington, D.C., from 1990-2003 marked the government for escalating tactics aimed at “regime change.”
The events of Sept. 11, 2001, put in place the pretext for the second U.S. war and occupation. With the U.S. occupation, the nationalized oil and national policies of free healthcare, education, and other social rights were wiped out by the U.S. corporate and military takeover.
The U.S. occupation has reduced a country that was in many ways one of the most advanced and prosperous countries in the region to rubble and chaos.
Now, the occupiers’ black-hooded assassins have publicly lynched the former president.
We join in the worldwide denunciation of the execution of Hussein as another crime of imperialism itself, which continues to be the real source of violence and terrorism around the world today.
