Dictator oppressed Iraq for decades

Within days of taking power, Saddam Hussein summoned about 400 top officials and announced he had uncovered a plot against the ruling party. The conspirators, he said, were in that very room. As the 42-year-old Saddam coolly puffed on a cigar, names of the supposed plotters were read out. As each name was called, secret police led them away. Twenty-two people were executed. To make sure Iraqis got the word, Saddam videotaped the entire proceeding and distributed copies across the country.

The plot claim was a lie. But in a few terrifying minutes on July 22, 1979, Saddam eliminated his potential rivals, consolidating the power he wielded until the Americans and their allies drove him from office a generation later.

Saddam, who was hanged Saturday at age 69, ruled Iraq with singular ruthlessness. No one was safe. His two sons-in-law were killed on Saddam's orders after they defected to Jordan but returned in 1996 after receiving guarantees of safety.

Such brutality kept him in power through war with Iran, defeat in Kuwait, rebellions by northern Kurds and southern Shiite Muslims, international sanctions, plots and conspiracies.

In the end, however, brutality was his undoing. Trusting few except kin, Saddam surrounded himself with sycophants, selected for loyalty rather than intellect and ability.

And when he was forced out in April 2003, he left a country impoverished — despite vast oil wealth — and roiling with long suppressed ethnic and sectarian hatred.

He ended up dragged from a hole by American soldiers in December 2003, bearded, disheveled and with his arms in the air.

He sought to build an image as an all-wise, all-powerful champion of the Arab nation. His model was the great 12th century warrior Saladin. He promoted the illusion of a powerful Iraq — with the world's fourth largest army and weapons of terrible destruction.

Yet it was all hollow. His army crumbled when confronted by the Americans and their allies in Kuwait in 1991.

Saddam's weapons of mass destruction proved a bluff to keep the Iranians, the Syrians, the Israelis — and the Americans — at bay.

He squandered vast sums on opulent palaces — a universe from the harsh poverty into which he was born on April 28, 1937, in the village of Ouja near Tikrit. His father died or disappeared before he was born. His stepfather treated Saddam harshly.

The young Saddam ran away as a boy and lived with his maternal uncle, Khairallah Talfah, a stridently anti-British, anti-Semitic man whose daughter, Sajida, would become Saddam's wife.

Under his uncle's influence, Saddam joined the Baath Party, a radical, secular Arab nationalist organization, at age 20. A year later, he fled to Egypt after taking part in an attempt to assassinate the country's ruler, Gen. Abdul-Karim Qassim, and was sentenced to death in absentia.

Saddam returned four years later after Qassim was overthrown by the Baath. But the Baath leadership was itself ousted within eight months and Saddam was imprisoned. He escaped in 1967 and took charge of the underground Baath party's secret internal security organization.

He swore he would never tolerate the internal dissent that he blamed for the party losing power.

In July 1968, Baath returned to power under the leadership of Gen. Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who appointed Saddam, his cousin, as his deputy. Saddam systematically purged key party figures, deported thousands of Shiites of Iranian origin, supervised the state takeover of Iraq's oil industry, land reform and modernization.

Al-Bakr decided in 1979 to seek unity with neighboring Syria, whose president would become al-Bakr's deputy, and Saddam would be marginalized. Saddam forced his cousin to resign — and then purged his rivals. Hundreds in the party and army were executed.

Saddam then turned his attention to the country's Shiite majority, whose clerical leaders had long opposed his secular policies. Saddam's fears of a Shiite challenge rose after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power in Shiite-dominated Iran in 1979.

On Sept. 22, 1980, Iraqi troops crossed the Iranian border, launching a war that would last eight years, cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides, and devastate Saddam's plans to transform Iraq into a developed, prosperous country.

After the Iranians counterattacked, Saddam turned to the United States, France and Britain for weapons, which those countries gladly sold him to prevent an outright Iranian victory. They turned a blind eye when Saddam ruthlessly struck against Iraqi Kurds, who lived in the border area and were dealing secretly with the Iranians.

An estimated 5,000 Kurds died in a chemical weapons attack on the town of Halabja in March 1988. The United States suggested at the time that the Iranians might have been responsible.

Only two years after making peace with Iran, Saddam invaded Kuwait, whose rulers had refused to forgive Iraq's war debt and opposed increases in oil prices that Iraq desperately needed to recover from the conflict with Iran.

The United Nations imposed economic sanctions on Iraq and a U.S.-led coalition attacked. On Iraqi radio on Jan. 17, 1991, Saddam predicted "the mother of all battles."

But the Iraqis were driven out of Kuwait. The 1991 war triggered uprisings among Iraq's Shiites, brutally crushed by Saddam, and the Kurds, who carved out a self-ruled area under U.S. and British air cover.

In April 1990, Saddam hinted that he had secret super-weapons and declared: "By God, we will make the fire eat up half of Israel." During the Gulf War he fired Scud missiles into Israel, and during the Palestinian uprising a decade later he paid cash grants to families of suicide bombers.

The U.N. sanctions remained in effect until his regime collapsed in 2003, devastating Iraq's economy and impoverishing a people who had been among the most prosperous in the Middle East.

The Sept. 11 terror attack on the U.S. focused attention on Saddam as a sponsor of terrorism. His refusal to meet U.N. demands for full disclosure of his illegal weapons program provided a justification for war.

An American-led force invaded on March 20, 2003. Within three weeks, Iraq's army had collapsed. Saddam was captured the following December.

As he went on trial in October 2005, his country engulfed in an anti-American insurgency, Saddam tried to use the proceeding to rail against the U.S. presence in Iraq in hopes of winning the approval of history if not an acquittal. But as trial dragged on, his manner calmed as he realized the inevitability of conviction and the death sentence that followed.

Excellent synopsis. Cogent. And true.

He ended up dragged from a hole by American soldiers in December 2003, bearded, disheveled and with his arms in the air

In May 2004, a soldier pal showed me a photo album. He was there, snapping away; doing his job, when Saddam was found and removed from his hiding place. My soldier pal told me to merely whistle to him for these photos if the MSM began to lie about Saddam's capture. And I kept watch.

What the MSM did was not lie about his capture (although the mentally unwell did so) carefully realizing they could renew their agenda through showing the capture as it was, but then building a platform of denigrating all Presidential and Military and Iraqi government efforts to right the wrongs of Saddam, and building a networkwide theme of MSM coverage based on the notion that the Iraqis "didn't really want us there, they adored Saddam".

It was all carefully crafted and thought out. It was the grounds upon which their "Impeach Bush" agenda was lain.

Their chimera of metaphysically placing President Bush in that spider hole, and then declaring that he needed impeaching.

Saddam Hussein was one of the world's historic mass murderers and brutes. And had Dems been in power, they "might" have "impeached him". Saddam, IMHO, was always useful to Democrats for a ratings and fundraising increase.

And now, the Liberal Death culture, worldwide will use Saddam's death as if he were still alive to them.

This article, that you've posted, needs to be repeatedly shared, everywhere, and for a time.

The moral legitimacy of the execution of Saddam Hussein.

TYRANNICIDE AND THE CATHOLIC TEACHINGS

Excerpts from the Catholic Encyclopedia

Tyrannicide literally is the killing of a tyrant, and usually is taken to mean the killing of a tyrant by a private person for the common good. There are two classes of tyrants whose circumstances are widely apart -- tyrants by usurpation and tyrants by oppression. A tyrant by usurpation (tyrannus in titula) is one who unjustly displaces or attempts to displace the legitimate supreme ruler, and he can be considered in the act of usurpation or in subsequent peaceful possession of the supreme power. A tyrant by oppression (tyrannus in regimine) is a supreme ruler who uses his power arbitrarily and oppressively.

I. TYRANT BY USURPATION

While actually attacking the powers that be, a tyrant by usurpation is a traitor acting against the common weal, and, like any other criminal, may be put to death by legitimate authority. If possible, the legitimate authority must use the ordinary forms of law in condemning the tyrant to death, but if this is not possible, it can proceed informally and grant individuals a mandate to inflict the capital punishment. St. Thomas (In II Sent., d. XLIV, Q. ii, a. 2), Suarez (Def. fidei, VI, iv, 7), and the majority of authorized theologians say that private individuals have a tacit mandate from legitimate authority to kill the usurper when no other means of ridding the community of the tyrant are available.

II. TYRANT BY OPPRESSION

Looking on a tyrant by oppression as a public enemy, many authorities claimed for his subjects the right of putting him to death in defense of the common good. Amongst these were John of Salisbury in the twelfth century (Polycraticus III, 15; IV, 1; VIII, 17), and John Parvus (Jehan Petit) in the fifteenth century. The Council of Constance (1415) condemned as contrary to faith and morals the following proposition:

"Any vassal or subject can lawfully and meritoriously kill, and ought to kill, any tyrant. He may even, for this purpose, avail himself of ambushes, and wily expressions of affection or of adulation, notwithstanding any oath or pact imposed upon him by the tyrant, and without waiting for the sentence or order of any judge." (Session XV)

Subsequently a few Catholics defended, with many limitations and safeguards, the right of subjects to kill a tyrannical ruler. Foremost amongst these was the Spanish Jesuit Mariana. In his book, "De rege et regis institutione" (Toledo, 1599), he held that people ought to bear with a tyrant as long as possible, and to take action only when his oppression surpassed all bounds. They ought to come together and give him a warning; this being of no avail they ought to declare him a public enemy and put him to death. If no public judgment could be given, and if the people were unanimous, any subject might, if possible, kill him by open, but not by secret means. The book was dedicated to Philip III of Spain and was written at the request of his tutor Garcias de Loaysa, who afterwards became Bishop of Toledo. It was published at Toledo in the printing-office of Pedro Rodrigo, printer to the king, with the approbation of Pedro de Oñ, Provincial of the Mercedarians of Madrid, and with the permission of Stephen Hojeda, visitor of the Society of Jesus in the Province of Toledo (see JUAN MARIANA).

Great theologians of the Church like St. Thomas (II-II, Q. xlii, a.2), Suarez (Def. fidei, VI, iv, 15), and Bañez, O.P. (De justitia et jure, Q. lxiv, a. 3), permitted rebellion against oppressive rulers when the tyranny had become extreme and when no other means of safety were available. This merely carried to its logical conclusion the doctrine of the Middle Ages that the supreme ruling authority comes from God through the people for the public good. As the people immediately give sovereignty to the ruler, so the people can deprive him of his sovereignty when he has used his power oppressively.

Many authorities, e.g. Suarez (Def. fiedei, VI, iv, 18), held that the State, but not private persons, could, if necessary, condemn the tyrant to death. In recent times Catholic authors, for the most part, deny that subjects have the right to rebel against and depose an unjust ruler, except in the case when the ruler was appointed under the condition that he would lose his power if he abused it. In proof of this teaching they appeal to the Syllabus of Pius IX, in which this proposition is condemned: "It is lawful to refuse obedience to legitimate princes, and even to rebel" (prop. 63). While denying the right of rebellion in the strict sense whose direct object is the deposition of the tyrannical ruler, many Catholic writers, such as Crolly, Cathrein, de Bie, Zigliara, admit the right of subjects not only to adopt an attitude of passive resistance against unjust laws, but also in extreme cases to assume a state of active defensive resistance against the actual aggression of a legitimate, but oppressive ruler.

Many of the Reformers were more or less in favour of tyrannicide. Luther held that the whole community could condemn the tyrant to death (Sämmtliche Werke", LXII, Frankfort-on-the-Main and Erlangen, 1854, 201, 206). Melanchthon said that the killing of a tyrant is the most agreeable offering that man can make to God (Corp. Ref., III, Halle, 1836, 1076).

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