THE decision to hang the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, and also the Iraqi Vice-President, Taha Yasin Ramadan – whose sentence was increased from life imprisonment on appeal – was made in Washington and London, and not by the US-UK run puppets in Baghdad.
The State Department has welcomed Saddam’s approaching execution, stating: ‘Today marks an important milestone in the Iraqi people’s efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law.’
The British Foreign office statement on the execution is typical concentrated hypocrisy in the manner of a modern Pontius Pilate: ‘As the prime minister has made clear, it is entirely a matter for the independent Iraqi tribunal. Our position is unchanged. We are opposed to the death penalty as a matter of principle but the decision is one for the Iraqi authorities.’
These are the same ‘authorities’ whose mandate does not run outside the US ‘Green Zone’ fortress and whose lives depend on the protection of the occupation armies.
The mass murderers of Iraqis in the last 16 years have been the US and the UK and the UN Security Council, not Saddam Hussein.
It is a fact that the sanctions clamped on Iraq by the UN Security Council, between 1990 and 2003, killed 1.5 million Iraqis, the majority children under the age of five.
The carnage was so great because of the ‘success’ of the massive US-UK bombing campaign in the 1991 war. Its object was to destroy the entire Iraqi infrastructure and bomb the country and its people back into the stone age. They were to have no clean water, no electricity, and no functioning hospitals.
President Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, when challenged about the chilling statistics for child murder, replied that the deaths of Iraq’s children were a ‘price worth paying’ to create the conditions to remove Saddam Hussein.
After the Al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, the first thought of the Bush leadership, after it emerged from its hiding places, was that the perfect opportunity had been created for attacking Iraq and removing the Iraqi government.
Bush’s chief supporter was Blair. It was the Blair government that saw to it that the intelligence was provided in dodgy dossiers to ‘prove’ that Iraq had wmds that could be on their way to target in 24 hours, and that British troops in Cyprus, and Saddam’s neighbours, were at risk.
Was the suicide of Doctor David Kelly, the whistle blower, another price worth paying in the struggle to remove Saddam and grab Iraq’s oil?
It was US Secretary of State Powell who took lying British ‘evidence’ that Saddam had sought to get uranium from Niger to make a nuclear bomb to the UN. He waved it in front of the Security Council, unaware that it was another dodgy British dossier.
Bush and Blair lied their way to war. The only leader telling the truth about wmds was Saddam.
Now, after installing a puppet regime in the Green Zone, and 650,000 corpses later, with the ‘police forces’ and the ‘serious crimes squads’ that they have trained doubling as death squads, they face defeat at the hands of the Iraqi insurgency and being run out of Iraq, losing all prospect of grabbing its oil wealth for ever.
They therefore have little alternative but to hang Saddam, Iraq’s legitimate president, as they contemplate their one last big military push to try and prevent themselves from being run out of Iraq and the Middle East.
Those who have sown the wind will reap the whirlwind. There will be a massive response to Saddam’s murder. He will die a hero, an inspiration to millions of youth in the Arab world who will take his place in the struggle to smash imperialism, and drive the occupiers out of Iraq in record time.
The lesson for the British workers is clear. Now is the time to bring down the Blair government, and to replace it with a workers’ government.
The first action of this government will be to put Blair and his cabinet on trial for mass murder in Iraq.
They must be made to pay for their crimes and the system that they represent, capitalism and imperialism, must be replaced by socialism. Capitalism and imperialism must be consigned to a historical chamber of horrors.
