In another chapter in our deepening, chaotic mess of a campaign in Iraq, we hurriedly pushed the execution of former dictator Saddam Hussein. What the hurry was, I'm still not sure, but it certainly managed to get the job done before Democrats took over control of Congress.

I'm sure there was much celebrating among those formerly oppressed by the man, as well as those neoconservative elements in our country who have long seen him as an obstacle to their idealized plans for the Middle East (all of which involve someone else's children fighting and dying).

But, no matter how many horrible things he's done or ordered others to do, when I saw him weep at the verdict of death in court, when I saw a photo of the execution scene itself--with him being roughly handled by masked thugs, taunted, and hanged in a dingy, dark room--I felt sick.

And I felt sadness for the suffering of this man--no matter how much of it he's caused, is it not the causing of suffering which is his crime, and yet we're doing it in turn to punish him? His crimes include killing thousands of innocent citizens, imprisoning opponents without just cause or trials, and torturing his enemies. Our country has done all of those things, on a grand scale, in the holy quest to unseat him. We've killed over 100,000 innocent civilians in Iraq during these almost four years of war. We've imprisoned thousands of men without any proof of cause, without any trials or due process. We've tortured many of these same men, for information or just for fun, humiliating them, defiling their religion, threatening or even harming their loved ones, sometimes in front of them.

In short, in an attempt to show the world how bad this man and his reign have been, we've done all the same things that made him a criminal in the first place.

But, unlike him, we're not forced to take any responsibility for it.

And let's not forget an equally important factor: that we created Saddam Hussein. I've detailed the sordid history already, but in a nutshell, we pulled Saddam out of relative obscurity as a young man, supported his ambitions to achieve our own ends, and then kept doing so all the way up to his fateful invasion of Kuwait. And that includes his infamous use of poison gas--we funded him and provided him with military intelligence, knowing full well that he would use the illegal chemical weapons against our enemies at the time, the Iranians. It's all true.

(And, in another nice touch, the Shiites we were so worried about back in the Iran-Iraq war days are in charge not only in Iran, but now also in Iraq, where they were elected democratically--replacing a secular dictator with a fundamentalist Islamic theocracy.)

So, in the end, the execution of Hussein is little more than a mafia hit--a boss taking out a loyal lackey who was getting out of hand, getting too violent. We pulled his strings right from the start, we helped build him up and shielded him from accountability. That infamous photo of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam? It's from one of two diplomatic visits in late 1983/early 1984, and the second one came after Saddam used his poison gas. That's right, after he committed that heinous crime, we declared the way open for diplomatic ties with Iraq.

It was his reward for doing our dirty work. And now, after his usefulness is ended, he's being cast off, as so many others were during his reign.

He's another casualty, like all our dead soldiers, like all the many times more dead civilians, in a game of power controlled by rich white men in expensive suits who never have to take responsibility, who never have to get their hands dirty, who never have to care.

So that's why, when I saw the pathetic figure of Saddam just before death, I cared.

Labels: Culture, Politics