It certainly was strange footage to see Saddam appear before the Iraqi court. He was the man that we haven't seen since they pulled him out of the hole in the ground looking like hell.
This time, he did have moments of appearing nervous, but soon reverted to the same old Saddam, blaming the United States and Iran for the crimes for which he stands accused.
There are a couple of important questions about this trial. The first is whether, in the long process of gathering and presenting evidence against Saddam, it will bring a sense of justice to the Iraqi people. Will the ultimate conviction of Saddam under an Iraqi Court bring a sense of closure to nightmarish episode in the life of that nation?
Will Saddam be able to use the trial as a pulpit for his ideas and anger? Will he be able to use the trial to speak out against the American occupation and the legitimacy of the new government? Remember that when Adolf Hitler was convicted in the 1920's after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, he was able to use his trial as a springboard to public acceptance. Similarly, ex-Serbian President Slobodan Milosovic of Yugoslavia has dragged out his war crimes trial and blamed all of his political enemies for everything that has gone wrong in the Balkans in attempt to deflect attention from his own crimes.
Let's face it. Saddam can say a lot of things that will embarrass and implicate the CIA, the Reagan and Bush administrations, as well as Russia, France, and a host of others that aided his rise to power. We not only tolerated, but supported and sold arms to Saddam in the 1980's. Our actions in Iraq are only one example of the morally dubious actions of United States foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War. We have tolerated and supported many brutal regimes because it served our immediate purposes. We continue to this tradition by supporting the government of Pakistan because it is supposedly helping us track down bin Laden and his followers. (We can all see how well that is working out.)
The United States likes to celebrate the good it has done around the world (like liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam's rule) while ignoring the costs of our foreign policy (the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis, the destruction of their infrastructure and the creation of unstable and nearly ungovernable nations in Afghanistan and Iraq, all while destroying 60 years of support for international law).
What do you think? Will Saddam’s trial bring to light not only his crimes, but those of the United States, and other members of the international community that were often complicit in his crimes? Or will the trial be rigidly censored to eliminate any embarrassing evidence from reaching the American public?
Let me know what you think. For more on the CIA and Saddam, see the link on this posting.
Saturday, July 03, 2004
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Saddam has been a political pawn of both the American government and western oil industries since the early 1960s. The crimes committed against his people were atrocious malifice acts of indiscretion that served as mere side effects in our own nation's political and economic interests. To say that the capture of Saddam, the invation of Iraq, and the "War on Terror" are to defend the human rights of those under oppressive governments is completely asinine and only attempts to paint a moral coating around a corrupt and manipulating campaign to expand our economic interests and quiet political and social rebellion. Conviction is steadfast, not commercial. If we are so concerned with the human rights of citizens of other nations, why are we not in Africa, South America, and Asia? Furthermore, why are our own citizens unemployed due to foreign job leaks? Why are they undereducated from poor funding and an undertrained staff? Why are there individuals without proper medical care or even a place to call home? It is a crime to the American people to use our tax money and our military to fight and finance a war waged to protect corportate America, to protect the upper 1%, to protect a wealth and investment no average citizen working to support themselves could ever imagine. It is disgusing the level of poverty nearly half of our nation endures in comparison to the saturated wealth enjoyed by the aristocracy of American power. Saddam is nothing but a by-product of our own political interests and commerical investments. It is sad to see this man betrayed and whittled to nothing, shamed and degraded care of the old red, white, and blue.
Eron Napier
Check out:
http://www.bushflash.com/thanks.html
I agree with 99% of what you posted. However, regardless of our political and economic interests, Saddam is a shameful example of a human being who is unfit to lead a country or even his local PTA. While I agree that it is unfortunate that we are exploiting his appeal to angry conservative moralists, I do not feel sorry for him, and I feel we should separate his (very real) transgressions against humanity from ours.
Post a Comment