Robert Fisk: A dictator created then destroyed by America

[DoYouEverWonder]

30 December 2006

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?

No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2112555.ece

[izzie]

1. It is how I think. This was a big error on our part.

And I do not think Saddam a good man.

[ixion]

2. yep, it was a big error, for sure... one in a series of errors

that is systematically destroying the US. The cognitive dissonance is created by the 'free' press not doing it's job, and in fact acting as enabler. If the MSM were being honest, rather than duplicitous, I think we would have averted many of these big errors.

Of course, if we had an honest MSM, * would never have been selected and none of this crap would have happened. :-(

[rman]

3. It is an error of the people to let the leadership get away

with selfishly supporting dictators.
From the perspective of the ruling class the only error was that they picked a dictator who later became defiant towards the US. But they are used to that (they call it blow-back), and they have ways of dealing with it - it was a calculated risk.