A Hollow Victory

Most Iraqis will welcome the death sentence passed on Saddam, but it hardly justifies what has happened to their country since his fall.

No one was surprised by the sentence passed by the Iraqi supreme criminal court on Sunday morning, given how the court was formed, how conducted and under what pressures and influences it came throughout the trial. But most Iraqis will see the fact that they ended up with no answers to the most pressing questions they wanted addressed as another tragic loss incurred.

The common belief is that Saddam Hussein was tried and indicted for an incident which to most would not even appear on a top 20 list of most brutal crimes committed by his regime, so that embarrassing – possibly even damning – revelations concerning those who supported, aided and abetted his crimes for more than three decades, including Britain and the US, would not be disclosed.

As an Iraqi driven to live in exile as a child in 1970, I wanted to know who it was that supported him throughout his reign of terror against his own people. I wanted to know who supplied him with the elements to make up the deadly gas with which he reportedly killed thousands of Kurds. And I wanted to know who supported him with intelligence, as well as ammunition, in order to quash his people every time they rose in an attempt to topple his brutal regime.

It is beyond laughable that while he is now being unanimously condemned for waging war against Iraq in the 80s, not a whimper is heard of the respective roles of Britain and the US, among others, in supporting him – and, as later revealed, supporting the Iranians too – throughout the seven-year conflict that claimed more than 1.5 million lives on both sides and reduced the economies of both countries to rubble.

Iraqis still question the truth behind Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. They cite his meeting with US government delegate April Gillespie merely days before, in which she reportedly gave him the impression that the US would not interfere should he choose to invade his neighbour, as an indication that the whole fiasco was far from as simple as it appeared. They also question why the entire world, led by the US , then created an unprecedented coalition that would bomb the entire country, including its long-suffering people, back into the dark ages, during a merciless 40-day military campaign. They want to know why George Bush Sr then called on Iraqis to rise against their dictator only to leave them to face yet another massacre as US troops watched and observed passively.

They want to know what purpose the 12-year sanctions served – other than to kill more than 1.8 million Iraqis, including 650,000 children under the age of nine, and reduce a recently thriving and proud nation to one of the most impoverished in the world. Especially since the pretext for those sanctions – the supposed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction – turned out to be a figment of someone’s vivid imagination.

The conclusion of Saddam’s trial may have met most Iraqi people’s wishes, but the way in which that end was achieved has left them shortchanged once again.

The fact that this day – which should have been marked as a truly historic milestone – comes while virtually no Iraqi enjoys security, electricity, running water, a secure job, health care, proper education, a safe home or a future with any element of hope only underlines the disappointment. Ironically, even under the dictatorship of Saddam, the Iraqi people enjoyed these rights to varying degrees.

Reports of corruption on an unprecedented scale, the disgraceful incidents of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, the Government’s collaboration with militia factions who have been given free reign to abduct, torture, mutilate and kill at will, as well as the sectarian cleansing and displacement ongoing throughout the country, all make it difficult if not impossible for the ordinary Iraqi to be jubilant. Plans, now, are being put in place to break up the country into three, four or possibly even seven segments, in order to control the violence and the security problem.

It comes as no surprise that Boris Johnson, initially an ardent supporter of the war, has long come to see what we did in Iraq as a disaster. However, that the likes of Richard Perle, a neo-con heavyweight now all but renounces his position as a supporter and promoter of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, must serve as a wake-up call. Therefore, it is reprehensible for the foreign secretary and others in Parliament to state that now is not the time to ask questions of how and why the decision to invade and occupy Iraq was taken on the ludicrous premise that it would compromise the safety of British troops. If not now, when?

As pleased as most Iraqis will be with the sentence passed on Saddam, the overwhelming feeling is that since it was a puppet court that passed the sentence, it will be doubted forever. As a consequence, he will be seen by many as a victim of injustice rather than a perpetrator thereof. Most also feel that he should have been joined in the dock by a number of those who now conveniently call for his head and applaud the sentence as a remarkable event.

His era will go down in history as one the darkest any nation has ever seen, but we will be told also that what followed had even his victims regretting that his days were over. Such is the tragedy of the people of Iraq .

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