http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2129966.eceButchery was supposed to have been presented as a solemn execution
Published: 06 January 2007
The lynching of Saddam Hussein - for that is what we are talking about - will turn out to be one of the determining moments in the whole shameful crusade upon which the West embarked in March of 2003. Only the president-governor George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara could have devised a militia administration in Iraq so murderous and so immoral that the most ruthless mass murderer in the Middle East could end his days on the gallows as a figure of nobility, scalding his hooded killers for their lack of manhood and - in his last seconds - reminding the thug who told him to "go to hell" that the hell was now Iraq.
"Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it," Malcolm reported of the execution of the treacherous Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth. Or, as a good friend of mine in Ballymena said to me on the phone a few hours later, "The whole bloody thing was obscene." Quite so. On this occasion, I'll go along with the voice of Protestant Ulster.
Of course, Saddam gave his victims no trial; his enemies had no opportunity to hear the evidence against them; they were mown down into mass graves, not handed a black scarf to prevent the hangman's noose from burning their neck as it broke their spine. Justice was "done", even if a trifle cruelly. But this is not the point. Regime change was done in our name and Saddam's execution was a direct result of our crusade for a "new" Middle East. To watch a uniformed American general - despite the indiscipline of more and more US troops in Iraq - wheedling and whining at a press conference that his men were very courteous to Saddam until the very moment of handover to Muqtada al-Sadr's killers could only be appreciated with the blackest of humour.
Note how the best "our" Iraqi government's officials could do by way of reply was to order an "enquiry" to find out how mobile phones were taken into the execution room - not to identify the creatures who bawled abuse at Saddam Hussein in his last moments. How very Blairite of the al-Maliki government to search for the snitches rather than the criminals who abused their power. And somehow, they got away with it; acres of agency copy from the Green Zone reporters were expended on the Iraqi government's consternation, as if al- Maliki did not know what had transpired in the execution chamber. His own officials were present - and did nothing.
That's why the "official" videotape of the hanging was silent - and discreetly faded out - before Saddam was abused. It was cut at this point, not for reasons of good taste but because that democratically elected Iraqi government - whose election was such "great news for the people of Iraq" in the words of Lord Blair - knew all too well what the world would make of the terrible seconds that followed. Like the lies of Bush and Blair - that everything in Iraq was getting better when in fact it was getting worse - butchery was supposed to have been presented as a solemn judicial execution....
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