The Daily Background
| Has “justice” really been served?
by Arlen Parsa
I was reminded last night of a post that I wrote back in early November right after Saddam Hussein was found guilty in the case that saw him sentenced to death just yesterday. Here’s the post in full, as I think it is perhaps more timely now than when I originally wrote it.
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Saddam Hussein, a terrible dictator, was sentenced on Sunday morning to death by hanging for crimes against humanity: ordering the murder of 148 Iraqi Shiites in 1982.
“Today, the victims of this regime have received a measure of the justice which many thought would never come,” President Bush proclaimed before boarding Air Force One to campaign for Republican candidates.
It is perhaps ironic that the White House heralds justice for Saddam Hussein today. After all, the White House did think twice about Saddam Hussein’s 1982 crimes against humanity when President Ronald Reagan sent Special Envoy Donald Rumsfeld to meet with Saddam Hussein. Christmas came early for Hussein that year- a full five days early, when Rumsfeld visited him on December 20th. The United States agreed to sell the dictator more than 20 million dollars worth of weapons the very next year.
In fact, Rumsfeld visited the following year as well, and more arms shipments were worked out, just as the United Nations was concluding that Iraq had illegally used chemical and biological weapons in its war against Iran (later it was discovered that the United States government was funelling weapons to Iran for use against Iraq as well, but that’s another story for another day).
Rumsfeld of course later became President Bush’s Secretary of Defense.
The very same year that Hussein committed the crime against humanity which he was convicted of Sunday, the United States removed Iraq from its official list of state terrorism sponsors.
Did the United States care about Saddam Hussein getting justice in the 1980s, while Republican White House Administrations sold $200 million worth of weaponry to Hussein’s regime? No, of course not. He was a good customer for a highly profitable export sector: the business of war.
The United States is once again invested in that business- but this time instead of brown people killing brown people- there are Americans involved. And Americans are dying.
105 American soldiers were killed in Iraq’s civil war over the course of October’s 31 days. Only 6 days into November, 16 American soldiers have already died.
President Bush said yesterday in a press conference which lasted all of two minutes that it was worth the 2,834 American lives spent in the Iraq war in order to have Saddam Hussein sentenced to death, saying “They’ve sacrificed for the security of the United States… Without their courage and skill, today’s verdict would not have happened.”
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When I wrote this post, 2,834 Americans had died in Iraq. Less thant two months later that number has increased to 2,995 Americans have dead in Bush’s war. Surely the Administration will will trumpet the news of Saddam Hussein’s death as yet another turning point in Iraq (Bush has already called it an “important milestone“). This is a landmark, they will say; justice has been served. The cable news networks will likely say much the same. Iraqi State TV broadcasted the news saying “Saddam’s execution marks the end of a dark period of Iraq’s history.” But has “justice” really been served?
The average Iraqi doesn’t care- polls consistently show that they’d rather have Hussein back in power and the streets relatively safe than be where they are right now with him dead and chaos spreading outward from Baghdad like wildfire (for a visual map of violence literally spreading from the center of Iraq into other areas, see this post).
On the larger point though, is this really justice? Sure, the cruel dictator was punished, but the people who supported him while he committed the crimes that he was punished for got off the hook without so much as casual mention of context from CNN or MSNBC. Ronald Reagan is one of the most popular Presidents in modern times, and people don’t exactly hate Bush Sr either.
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