Judge Who Sentenced Saddam Hussein To Death Has Been Executed By ISIS, Local Media Reports

zero hedge ^ | 6/22/14 | tylker durden

[Nachum]

Back in 2006, after the second US invasion of Iraq culminated if not with the discovery of the WMDs (which were the pretext for the invasion in the first place), but the unearthing (literally) and kangaroo court trial of Saddam Hussein, the US was quick to announce "mission accomplished." Recent events have made a mockery of that claim, however what is truly the straw that broke the back of poetic justice, to mix metaphors, are reports from local media that as part of its blitz-campaign to take over northern Iraq, ISIS found and the promptly executed Rauf Rashid Abd al-Rahman, the judge who sentenced Saddam to death: a death which to many was the crowning moment of the second US invasion of Iraq, and the confirmation of successful US foreign policy.

It goes without saying that if true, the murder of the man who indirectly did the US bidding in slamming the book shut on the Saddam regime (and with it US claims of Iraqi "liberation") and was responsible for Saddam's death, means the last "Mission Accomplished" posted can now be safely taken down.

[Fiji Hill]

At some point even the staunchest apologists for the Bush family will probably admit that the U.S. was on the wrong side in the first Gulf War in 1990.

I'm hardly an apologist for the Bush family, but Bush did the right thing in 1990. Had he not intervened, Sadddam would not only have had Kuwait's oil, but he would have likely perpetrated further acts of aggression as he tortured to death tens of thousands of Kuwaitis. Bush's only mistake was in not using the occasion to take Saddam out.

[Fantasywriter]

‘You can’t judge societies this way.’

Who the bleeding hell are you to tell me what I can & can’t judge??? You have no idea what you’re talking about. Take it to a liberal site. They’re all about moral equivalence. I’m not.

[Alberta's Child]

I'm suggesting that the U.S. might be better off today if Saddam Hussein invaded Saudi Arabia and overthrew the Saudi royal family ... and then the U.S. cut a deal with him.

Bush's only mistake was in not using the occasion to take Saddam out.

Hardly a "mistake," as recent events in Iraq have shown. His own Secretary of Defense was advising against that. Unfortunately, that same guy became the Vice President in the second Bush administration and forgot everything he was saying back in the early 1990s.

[wetphoenix]

~Who the bleeding hell are you to tell me what I can & can’t judge??? You have no idea what you’re talking about. Take it to a liberal site. They’re all about moral equivalence. I’m not.~

Why won’t you go to Iraq to be their Jefferson then? It is not a liberalism to point at realities, some of which are unpleasant.

[ansel12]

Yep, be happy, Obama will have your strong men in place again soon, and then we can all go back to sleep.

[TheOldLady]

Bush’s low approval rating and track record were invented by the BDS media, whose constant drum-
beat of lies, contempt, and gossip about him never let up for his entire tenure.

I guess we can all see what side you’re on.

[Wallace T.]

Weren't the Hearst newspapers anti-Roosevelt? Also, it is hard to imagine conservative Southern Democrats, who were a major force at the time, sabotaging the American war effort. The South, after Appomattox, has strongly supported every war we have fought from the Spanish-American War to the Iraqi and Afghan wars post 9-11.

Had Willkie been in office when Pearl Harbor was attacked, the main difference would have been a greater emphasis on he the Pacific theater. Republicans were more strongly oriented toward the Far East since the annexation of Hawaii and the conquest of there Philippines in the 1890s. We would have helped the British save North Africa from the Nazis, but after Hitler attacked Russia while still trying to clean up the mess Mussolini made in Greece and the Balkans, his ability to invade Britain or conquer North Africa was gone. With a stronger emphasis on defeating Japan, that country mighty have been defeated much sooner and perhaps without using the atomic bomb. Were the war in the Pacific to have ended in 1944, perhaps the Nationalist regime would have survived in China. Also, Stalin and Hitler may have exhausted one another and called an armistice if the United States and Britain had not opened a second front.

[EBH]

The real dirty little secret is Saddam wasn’t going to live forever and no one knows what Iraq or even the Middle East would look like today if we had elected Romney or McCain.

Don’t let the hindsight blind you to far into the future or the past. Obama dissed a lot of the groundwork laid by Bush in these matters. And then Obama thought he could community organize an Arab Spring and play both ends against the middle.

[Digger]

Took out Gaddifi, now they’re after Assad....and for what? What was Gaddifi doing at the time - far as I knew he settled down. Is this for the caliphate? I think Egypt has a point about zero being in cahoots with Muslim Brotherhood.

I say follow the money. Saddam, Qaddafi & Assad wanted to go off of the dollar with their oil. As soon as that was released that is when they became enemies.

[Fantasywriter]

Your post is incoherent. But I will answer anyway. Fwiw.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRvaXySK4HE

Watch the whole thing. Start to finish. But pay special attention starting at the 11 minute mark. Note how the man was tortured nearly to death for info he didn’t have. Note how his wife was raped in front of him. He still couldn’t give info he didn’t have. Then pay especially close attention to how the infant son was smashed to death in front of the parents. Afterward the husband/father was finally killed. The raped mother was then let go to tell others what had happened, to put the fear of death in them.

Now that is but one of millions of similar incidents under Saddam Hussein. Just the tiniest snapshot of the hell on earth he created. So do this. Link me to a similar incident in current Iraq. Make sure it includes the brutal, sadistic murder of a small infant, preferably also the rape of the mother, & of course a pride in such doings big enough to *want* the horror to be widely disseminated. I’ll wait while you find the just the right link. When you do, I’ll up the ante. We’ll see how long you can stay in the pool.

[Alberta's Child]

I'm talking about his track record as an unapologetic big-government globalist -- mainly on issues where he was on the same side as "the BDS media."

How soon we forget: The Patriot Act ... Medicare prescription drugs ... a massive increase in the size and scope of the Federal government (a 45% increase in Federal spending in just eight years) ... a 75% increase in the national debt between 2001 and 2008 (from $5.7T to $10T), etc.

The list just goes on. Is that what we send Republicans to Washington for? Is it any wonder that Eric Cantor was fired a couple of weeks ago?

[Alberta's Child]

All legitimate points, though I don’t know why a military campaign to topple a government in a sh!t-hole like Iraq with serious religious/ethnic divisions would be considered “groundwork” for anything except chaos and dysfunction.

[Fantasywriter]

The media has a lot to answer for. I remember then LYING & claiming Bush only mentioned the torture & genocide in Iraq as afterthoughts—a belated attempt at justifying his take down of Saddam. Again, that is a TOTAL lie. He mentioned it up front, as one of the primary justifications to topple Saddam.

Later, even when the survivors began to describe the full extent of the horror, few people cared. So long as they weren’t the ones raped, mutilated, tortured & either killed or forced to watch the torture killing of their children, etc., it was fine with them. I even knew Christians who held that view. It was as if they saw Iraqis as some sort of subhuman, who didn’t really suffer when they had to watch their children tortured to death. It still astounds me.

May God bless Bush for putting an end to some of the worst state sponsored torture in the world. & shame, shame on the media for their vile, evil bias.

[varon]

Let’s be brutally honest here. The dirty little secret that nobody wants to talk about is that Saddam Hussein was far more effective at dealing with radical Muslims in Iraq than were the @ssholes in the U.S. government who invaded Iraq and toppled his government in 2003.

Agreed! Facts speak for themselves.

[what's up]

We should have allowed Saddam to take the oil fields in Kuwait?

You’re nuts.

[SgtHooper]

What facts?

[Alberta's Child]

What’s the problem? We don’t seem to have a problem with that bunch of radical Muslims known as the Saudi royal family holding all the oil fields in Saudi Arabia.

[what's up]

There’s a difference between holding fields and invading countries to get more.

[what's up]

Oh...and I didn’t bring up the ILA to point to Clinton as a paragon of good policy.

I brought it up to point out what liars the democraps are to say Bush acted unilaterally. Regime change was official policy set by Clinton.

[Clintonfatigued]

This is a tragedy as well as yet another indictment of Obama’s failed foreign policy.

We may see in Iraq a civil war between al Quaeda-linked Sunni radicals and ISIS, which is essentially a Shi’ite terror group with ties to Iran and Syria. Is there any significant pro-American faction in Iraq at this point? It looks dire.