The Burial of the Beast and the Hero.
Dec 30 '06
The Bottom Line Two men lie in coffins tonight: One, "The Beast of Baghdad." The other, "The Hero of Michigan." The death of each will be used to cover peculiar, malodorous political practices.
Just off the wire, within the last two hours:
"Saddam was manoeuvred forward firmly but not aggressively by the guards wearing black balaclava-style hoods, the grey-bearded prisoner looking thin inside a dark overcoat over a pressed white shirt but no tie.
"He said he was not afraid of anyone," said Judge Moneer Haddad, a member of the panel of appeal court judges who had confirmed Saddam's conviction for crimes against humanity and who attended the pre-dawn execution.
"It was a terrifying scene. Saddam was in self-control. I was not expecting him to be like that," Haddad told AFP.
"One of the attendants asked him 'are you afraid?' He said 'I have never been afraid as long as I lived. I lived as a mujahedeen and expected death any moment,'" he described.
"We heard the cracks of his neck. It was a horrendous scene," he added. After the execution an ambulance took the body to the heavily fortified Green Zone, the seat of the Iraqi government and US embassy, Haddad said.
With that Saddam -- the swaggering sadist who slaughtered Iraq's Kurdish minority, invaded Iran and Kuwait and fought two disastrous wars with the United States -- stepped off Iraq's political stage for good."
-- David Clark, AT&T Yahoo! News, December 30, 2006.
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I would not bet that the vicious Saddam Hussein has swaggered off "Iraq's political stage for good."
An observer of sixty years of media manipulation, I cannot quite shake the notion that Saddam was dropped into the pit so swiftly because 1) Our Administration wanted him out of the way when they come up with a rather weird prescription for our future Middle Eastern Foreign Policy, early in 2007; 2) this day was a target of opportunity, in which we might juxtapose the ignominious end of the "Beast of Baghdad" with that of "Good Gerald Ford, The Hero of Michigan," a company man from the start, the man who employed most of the people recently in power, the only appointed Vice-President, the only appointed President, the only President to pardon a President, and one who oversaw as many crimes as Saddam Hussein did, including the covert operation which caused the deaths of 200,000 innocents in East Timor, causing unrest which extends to this day, over 30 years later.
[Vice President Chaney has just eulogized President Ford for "the many wounds" he saved us by not allowing the prosecution of President Richard Nixon. Within two years, we shall hear that sentiment expressed in defense of our present Vice President and others: "We must heal the wounds. We must move on." I can hear it now.]
The one thing we can say in favor of Iraqi Justice is that it was amazingly quick, compared to our own, which takes ten years to gas an ignorant street thug or a red-dirt chip kicker, and often lets off the wealthy and/or the bright middle class murderer.
But as to the consequences of hanging Saddam and eulogizing Jerry Ford, stay tuned friends.
Saddam's body was to be taken for burial with his family in his hometown of Tikrit, where he will be seen as a martyr, and the inspiration for many a new assassin.
Jerry will have a library built to him, and be forgotten -- until his example is needed to save the necks of the next gang of homegrown American political crooks and murderers.
Let's hope it was worth the deaths of over 3000 American service people, the wounding or maiming of tens of thousands more, the death and wounding of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, and the expenditure of 550 billion dollars (an estimated two trillion, in two years or so), and the fraudulent graft of tens of billions in war profiteering. Not to mention making us a laughing stock, branding us intellectually stupid and dishonest, and holding us up to hatred where often we were genuinely liked, admired and loved before! All for what appears to have been a fantasy, in terms of foreign policy terms, in terms of human decency -- in terms of hard, cold facts . . . even factoids.
We are left with unctuous prattle about Creating Democracy, Encouraging Globalism, Arming the World against Terrorism, Making the World Safe for Halliburton. Increasingly, that prattle does little to cover our naked moral bankruptcy, our almost revolting hypocrisy. Is there nothing for the average American to do but hold his/her nose and, eyes wide shut, buy, Buy, BUY?
Take heart, patriots, the Congressional oversight hearings and investigations will begin in earnest within a few days.
Happy Hogmanay!
[Macresarf1]
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