Posted on 01/06/2007 7:52:12 AM PST by pissant
As Saddam Hussein fell through the trap door at the end of a hangman's noose his death was deservingly just, and ironically merciful.
Saddam Hussein, for instance, escaped the fate of Nuri as-Said, the prime minister to Iraq's kings, summarily shot after being captured while attempting to flee the capital disguised as a woman after the overthrow of the monarchy in July 1958. Nuri as-Said's body was disinterred, mutilated, burned and dragged through the streets of Baghdad before being disposed.
But once Saddam was pulled out of a spider's hole in December 2003 by American soldiers, the tyrant knew fate had dealt him a not unkindly hand in sparing him the sort of savage death to which he had consigned countless numbers of Iraqis.
The hanging of Saddam Hussein after a trial by an Iraqi court -- let us contemptuously dismiss all the nonsense of victor's justice administered under questionable arrangements -- was a fitting end to a horrendously evil period in the history of a country over-burdened with a cruel past.
In the land between two rivers -- Mesopotamia -- tyranny has been the norm for the longest while, and tyrants have sought to exceed each other in the provision of harsh rule. The pattern was set by the brutal murder of the prophet of Islam's grandson, Husayn, in 680 and his severed head carried to the presence of the Caliph in Damascus.
The sectarian mayhem that has gripped Iraq since Saddam Hussein's fall has a history reaching back to that horrible deed of beheading Husayn by the Caliph's army. This history could be kept buried only by the continuing brutality of tyrants -- Saddam being in a category of his own -- and at a price ever-mounting paid by Iraqis.
But the liberation of Iraq from Saddam's tyranny by American support -- and it could only have been the U.S. prepared to bear the costs in blood and treasure in liberating another people as it has done on innumerable occasions -- holds out the promise, however remote it might seem presently, for Iraqis to leave behind them the demons of tyrants and build a country that might incrementally, warts and all, mature into a democracy.
Iraq's pathology in display is not exclusively Iraqi. It is the pathology of the Arab-Muslim world. But in Iraq under Saddam Hussein this pathology of tribal and sectarian politics hardened into the sort of absolute power possessed by a tyrant to torture and kill people unquestioningly at any and all times.
Much has been made by the critics of U.S. intervention in Iraq of the criminality of those American soldiers who stained their country's honour in Abu Ghraib, the notorious prison run by Saddam Hussein's regime. The fact is Iraqis have known that their entire country was one sick Abu Ghraib under Saddam's tyranny, and its neighbours so many other Abu Ghraibs in varying degrees of notoriety.
An external power was needed to lance the rotting boil of Iraq as an Abu Ghraib, and let the diseased puss flow out of the wound for the rest of the body hopefully to heal in time.
Saddam Hussein's trial and execution will stand as a milestone in Iraqi and Arab history. A tyrant was confronted with his crimes, and then justice was done by a people crippled by the long years of the tyrant's rule.
It is now for Iraqis to awaken, as they must, to the new reality of their country and the world after their tyrant's demise that they are authors of their own history for better or worse, and blaming others for their woes will merely be a pathetic admission of their own inadequacy
This is one muslim that gets it.
On FR a while ago was an article about two teenage boys being hung in Iran because they had a homosexual experience.
They did not get to drop. Hanging in Iran is done by slow strangulation that takes several minutes, so that the criminal may be fully "punished".
I have no patience with anyone who criticizes Saddam's hanging.
Sic semper tyranis!
Hopefully, it will not be too long before the mullahs are swinging by the lamposts. Of course if Bush has a hand in toppling those tyrants, he will be criticised.
Does he get the Sahara?
He'll be spread over the Sahara as buzzard dropping.
Nuri was staunchly pro-Western and made Iraq a formal US ally when he signed the Baghdad Pact in 1955, which set up teh Middle East Treaty Organization. When he was overthrown on July 14, 1958, iraq instantly switched from US ally to US foe.
Interestingly, Nuri's successor, leftist dictator Abdul Karim al-Qassim, escaped an assassination attempt in 1959 by a 22-year-old radical named Saddam Hussein.
Thanks for filling me in. It's been several years since I read about the pre-saddam Iraq.
PING!
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