What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
Blood Diamonds:
the Inside Story
An amazing
expose by T.R. Naylor: How the "Blood" or "Conflict
Diamonds" Myth peddled by NGOs Helped a Vicious Mining Company
Shore Up Its Monopoly, Made a Pile of Money for A Washington
Post Reporter and Leonardo di Caprio, Served As A Propaganda
Myth in the "War on Terror" and had Nothing to Do With
Osama Bin Laden. Pinochet
is gone, and the world is a cleaner place. JoAnn Wypijewski recalls
1988 in Santiago, when Chile lost its fear. And yes, here they
are in charge of Congress again, ready to facilitate a troop
hike in Iraq. Alexander
Cockburn re-introduces an old acquaintance: the Democrats--Party
of War. Remember, we are funded solely
by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this
website by buying a
subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you
won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the
cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
Had Saddam Hussein never lived, the
world would be a different place. But he changed the world more
by his defeats than his victories.
For all his nationalist rhetoric,
Iraqis never wanted to fight or die for him. After he invaded
Iran in 1980, Iraqi troops surrendered en masse until Iran in
turn invaded Iraq. In Kuwait in 1991, the Iraqi army again hardly
fought against the US-led coalition. In 2003, the American and
British armies suffered few casualties on the road to Baghdad.
Only after Saddam fled did serious guerrilla warfare begin.
His nationalism was genuine:
he identified Iraq wholly with himself. At his trial he presented
himself as the symbol of Iraqi unity and independence, berating
his judges as pawns of the US. When told he was to die this weekend,
he remarked philosophically to one lawyer: "What do you
expect from occupiers?"
As the standard-bearer of Arab
nationalism and the opponent of Western imperialism, he was more
popular outside Iraq than within. Every office, restaurant and
street in Iraq bore his image. I once counted nine photographs
of him in the office of a Baghdad newspaper editor. But for all
that, he was liked by few Iraqis. The next time I saw the editor,
he was in exile in London.
The reverence was more genuine
elsewhere. Taxi drivers from Jordan to Sudan and Yemen to Bangladesh
pinned up his picture in their cabs. It was only as his army fled without
firing a shot, and the Sunni and Shia rose in rebellion, that
they realized they had chosen an ineffective champion.
His regime was a police state,
but a peculiar one. It had all the repressive apparatus of East
Germany or Chile. Saddam's response to any form of dissent was
repression, usually far in excess of what was needed to achieve
his ends. He was executed yesterday for killing 148 people from
the village of Dujail because of an attempt to kill him there
in 1982, but the assassination bid was only a scattering of shots
in the direction of his motorcade. The savagery of the retaliation
aimed, very successfully, to spread terror.
There have been other states
ruled by fear - most Middle East countries are controlled by
corrupt and parasitic ruling élites, backed by ferocious
security services - but Saddam's grip on power was also sustained
by kinship and tribal links. In so far as he ever trusted anybody,
it was relatives. He came from the al-Bejat clan, part of the
Albu Nasir tribe from around the city of Tikrit on the Tigris
river. "Do you want to know how we run Iraq?" said
one of his lieutenants in the 1990s. "Exactly the same way
as we used to run Tikrit."
Saddam had highly educated
advisers to balance Ba'ath party loyalists and tribal allies.
But there was always something archaic about his regime - for
all the trouble he had taken to invade and hold Kuwait, the Iraqi
occupiers behaved as if they were on a Bedouin raid, looting
everything from bulldozers to museum artefacts.
Saddam was a man of intelligence,
but also arrogance so great that it led to catastrophic blunders.
Iraq was a growing power in 1980, but to wage war on revolutionary
Iran, a country with three times Iraq's population, was the height
of foolishness. Ten years later Saddam once again miscalculated
his strength in invading Kuwait. Tragically for Iraqis, these
blunders were matched by great skill on Saddam's part in retaining
power. A natural-born conspirator himself, he had a secret policeman's
instinct for smelling out conspiracies against his regime.
His appeal was always to Iraqi
unity. Iraqi nationalism can be a powerful force, but it is also
true that Iraq was historically far more divided between Sunni,
Shia and Kurd than most Iraqis admit. Although Iraq is a country
created by the state, this is not so peculiar as some who see
Iraq as "an artificial state" suppose, since the same
is true of the United Kingdom. But under Saddam the state had
been overstrained by war and 13 years of economic sanctions,
until it dissolved at the time of the capture of Baghdad in 2003.
For the division of Iraq, Saddam
bears some, but not all, the responsibility. He was part of the
Sunni community, as were his senior lieutenants. Towards the
Kurds he never adopted any policy but repression. He made war
on the Shia religious parties, but tried to conciliate ordinary
Shia during the war with Iran. After the Shia uprising in 1991,
however, he viewed them - 60 per cent of the population - as
potential rebels.
Saddam was a convenient enemy,
as the US and Britain found. Few opponents could have been as
easy to demonize, because in many ways he was a real demon. His
physical appearance was threatening, and so was his rhetoric.
In 1990 he appeared with a young British hostage sitting on his
knee, like the wicked king in a fairy tale.
Doubly convenient for Washington
and London, his menacing rhetoric was far from reality. The "Mother
of all Battles" he promised foreign invaders in 1990 never
happened. Instead, there was an embarrassing rout. The allies
later boasted of destroying 2,000 Iraqi tanks, but most of them
were empty, their crews having sensibly fled before they were
hit.
If Iraqis had really identified
with Saddam - as so many Germans identified with Hitler - then
the task of the US and Britain in Iraq might have been easier.
But to the surprise of the invaders, the serious fighting began
after his flight. When he was captured by US troops in December
2003, it had no dampening effect on the insurgency, which grew
steadily in strength.
This was hardly surprising. No Iraqis, not even the Sunni community
from which he came, wanted Saddam back in power. Only the US
generals, at their ludicrous press conferences in Baghdad's Green
Zone, pretended that he played a central role in the war against
the occupation. As his lieutenants pictured on the US Army's
notorious pack of cards were killed or captured, it became increasingly
evident that none was at the centre of the war of resistance.
The US made every effort to
portray the trial of Saddam as an Iraqi-run affair, but the former
leader was right in seeing it as orchestrated by Washington.
If confirmation of this were needed, it came when the date for
announcing his death sentence was moved to November 5, so it
could be the leading item on the news the day before the US midterm
elections. In the event, the reality of 25,000 US soldiers killed
and wounded in Iraq made more impression on American voters.
Many Iraqis will rejoice at
the death of Saddam. While some will accept his estimate of himself
as a symbol of his country, making the final patriotic sacrifice,
he is only one of 4,000 Iraqis who will die violently this month.
The war has its own momentum, and Iraqis are too worried about
staying alive themselves to lament or rejoice very long at the
execution of the man who ruled them for a quarter of a century.
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
