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November
6, 2006
The Goose and the Gander
Is
Bush Next?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The show trial of Saddam Hussein was
drawn out until two days before the midterm US elections. The
death sentence imposed on the former Iraqi president may help
the deluded band of Bush supporters find victory in the defeat
that Bush has met in Iraq and motivate them to support the beleaguered
Republicans on November 7.
But Saddam's sentence will
do nothing for reconciliation and peace among Iraq's Kurds, Sunnis,
and Shiites. In Iraq the sentence is seen by all parties as revenge
for the years of Sunni rule. Saddam's sentence is perfectly
timed to drive the rising sectarian conflict, which is already
causing 100 or more Iraqi deaths per day, over the brink into
full scale civil war. Indeed, one could conclude that the real
purpose of the sentence is to achieve the neoconservative goal
of a dismembered and impotent Iraq.
Saddam was sentenced to death
because 148 Shiites were killed in 1982 in the Iraqi government's
response to an attempted assassination of Saddam. We have no
way of knowing how many, if any, of the 148 were involved in
the assassination attempt, or whether the botched attempt was
a "black ops" event to enable the police to settle
local scores or to take out potential trouble-makers. The killings,
however, do not fit the propaganda picture of Saddam gratuitously
killing people for the fun of it.
Now that the Bush administration
has adopted the torture and detention practices of Saddam's regime,
one wonders what would be the fate of Americans accused of an
assassination plot against a US president?
Saddam's trial itself is suspect.
The most qualified lawyer in the courtroom, former U.S. Attorney
General Ramsey Clark, was ejected from the trial for handing
Judge Abdul-Rahman a memo in which he said the trial was a "travesty"
of law. I am confident that Ramsey Clark has more integrity
than Abdul-Rahman.
But, to get to the main point,
let us assume that Saddam is guilty as charged and that his death
so serves the cause of justice that it is worth heightened sectarian
conflict and even full-fledged civil war.
What did Saddam do that Bush, and Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and Blair
have not done?
If Saddam can be sentenced
to death for his responsibility in the killing of 148 Shiites,
what about Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Blair's responsibility for the
tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians slaughtered by Bush's invasion
of Iraq? This massive carnage is the direct consequence of an
illegal invasion--a war crime in itself for which Nazi leaders
were sentenced to death--that was based on lies and deception.
Bush himself admits that 30,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed.
Iraq Body Count puts the civilian deaths at between 45,000 and
50,000. The recent Johns Hopkins University study published in
the peer-reviewed British medical journal, The Lancet (11 Oct,
2006), puts the Iraqi civilian deaths caused by Bush's invasion
as high as 655,000.
What does the world think of
American hypocrisy when the US government, drowning in the blood
of tens of thousands of its innocent victims, cries "justice"
as the president of Iraq is sentenced to death for killing 148
people for trying to assassinate him?
The verdict against Saddam
was influenced by the propaganda of mass graves uncovered by
the US-led invasion and seized upon as justification for that
illegal invasion. However, as various experts have pointed out,
the graves are those of war dead from the Iraq-Iran war. The
US government has responsibility for these deaths also, as Washington
gave aid to both sides in the bloody conflict that is believed
to have claimed as many as one million lives.
Now that Saddam Hussein has
been held accountable for his crimes, can we look forward to
accountability for George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Richard Cheney,
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith,
Lewis "Scooter" Libby, John Bolton, Kenneth Adelman,
Michael Rubin, Eliot Cohen, and their propagandists in the media,
such as Billy Kristol, Victor Davis Hanson, Robert Kagan, David
Frum, the Wall St Journal editorial writers, the editors of National
Review and the New York Times, and the Fox "News" talking
heads?
Will accountability be extended
to the conservative foundations and think tanks that financed
the neoconservative takeover of the Republican Party and Bush
administration?
Now that the American invasions
of Iraq and Afghanistan have ended in defeat, those most responsible
for the destruction of those two countries, tens of thousands
of deaths, and a bill for US taxpayers in excess of $2 trillion
(according to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz)
are running from any responsibility.
Richard Perle, the principle
instigator of the illegal invasions, declared to Vanity Fair
(Nov. 3, 2006): "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to
be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives,
who had almost no voice in what happened." "At the
end of the day," Perle told ABC News' Karen Mooney (Nov.
4, 2006), "you have to hold the president responsible."
Kenneth Adelman, who promised
us a "cakewalk war," now puts all the blame on Rumsfeld:
"He certainly fooled me" (Vanity Fair, Nov. 3).
The neoconservatives, of course,
are trying to escape blame for the defeat of their strategy by
accusing Bush and Rumsfeld of incompetent implementation. Will
the neoconservatives escape responsibility for launching the
wars that have turned the United States into a war criminal abroad
and a police state at home?
Paul Craig Roberts wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was
Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and
Contributing Editor of National Review. He is author or coauthor
of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolutin (Harvard
University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments,
including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center
for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University
and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
He has contributed to numerous scholar journals and testified
before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S.
Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of
Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy
under editor Robert Mundell. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
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