Saddam Hussein was rushed to the gallows as 2006 ended — a former dictator put to death under instructions from his one-time supporters in the US government.
US President George Bush predictably declared it yet another "milestone" on "Iraq's course to becoming a democracy". But Hussein's hanging exposed — yet again — the corrupt, hypocritical and criminal character of the US war on Iraq.
For years, the US and other Western governments propped up Saddam Hussein. They supported his wars against neighbouring countries, and they supported his war on any and all Iraqis who dared to oppose him. Then, Hussein stepped out of line — and he suddenly became reviled in the West as a "modern-day Hitler", bent on violence and responsible for terrible repression.
Little of this squalid history made it into the mainstream media's accounts of Hussein's life. Neither did the question that looms most obviously over the execution: If Saddam Hussein deserved to be hung, then what about the leaders of the US government who ordered two barbaric onslaughts on Iraq, linked by more than a decade of the strictest economic blockade in history?
With a contempt typical of the US occupation of Iraq, Hussein was sent to the gallows at the start of the Muslim festival of Eid al Adha — on what is considered a day of forgiveness and feasting in the Islamic world. Even the Saudi Arabian regime, staunch allies of the US, condemned the timing.
The verdict against Hussein came in November, his appeal was rejected in December, and in less than a week he was dead. But Washington had its reasons for rushing. It avoided further trials in which Hussein would have to answer for crimes committed with tacit or open US support — specifically, the gassing of the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988, killing thousands.
"Given a chance to defend himself", wrote left-wing Iraq expert Michael Schwartz, "Saddam made it clear that his defense would include fully documenting American complicity in his use of chemical weapons, the tacit (or maybe explicit) endorsement by the Bush senior administration of his invasion of Kuwait, and the general complicity of all manner of foreign governments in his various crimes."
When Hussein's Baath Party came to power in 1968, the CIA showed its support by fingering Iraqi Communist Party members and other dissidents, who were rounded up, tortured and killed.
A decade later, Hussein launched a war on Iran that would last most of the 1980s. The US claimed to be neutral, but quietly backed Iraq with money, intelligence and weapons, seeing an opportunity to recover — at a cost of more than 1 million Iraqi and Iranian lives — the influence it lost over the Persian Gulf region after its strongman, the Shah of Iran, was toppled in 1979.
One of George Bush junior's favourite accusations against Hussein is that he used "chemical weapons against his own people". Those weapons were first used against Iran, and the components for them came straight from the stockpiles of the US and other Western nations.
US support for Saddam Hussein continued after the war ended — up to the eve of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 — at which point, overnight, he went from being an ally to a "modern-day Hitler". But Hussein hadn't changed. The US government's assessment of his reliability had, so he became an enemy.
After Hussein's execution, the Bush administration warned darkly of stepped-up attacks in Iraq. But the horrible reality is that the violence stoked by the US occupation has reached such an intensity that any of it directly related to the execution will make little difference.
Some—though not all—groups of the Hussein regime's former victims celebrated his hanging. But the execution doesn't change the stark fact that almost every Iraqi feels they were better off under Hussein's government, before the US invaded.
According to interviews conducted by the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies, only 5% of Iraqis believe the country is better off today than in 2003. Some 89% said the political situation had deteriorated, 79% said economic conditions had declined, and 95% said the security situation was worse.
Hussein was a hated dictator, and many Iraqis certainly wished to see him brought to justice. But instead of being held accountable by Iraqis for his real crimes, he was put to death by a US puppet government — for nothing more than the fact that he stopped obeying the orders of his masters in Washington, DC.
[Abridged from Socialist Worker, weekly paper of the US International Socialist Organization. Visit .]