Saddam Hanged! Hail Bush! the new global dictator!

 

 

That’s Bush’s way of celebrating the New Year. He thought his obvious personal vendetta was the gift that the world was waiting for in this New Year. And as has happened often with many ill-educated fools like him in the past, Bush too gave it to the world with a shameless pretence of righteousness, thinking what he personally thought to be right was indeed what was right and worthy of celebration. In previous such hangings, I remember how the pernicious Pakistani dictator Zia-ul-Haq had taken personal revenge in a similar way and blatantly used his country’s judicial machinery to get Zulfi qar Ali Bhutto hanged. But then, that was imaginable – Bhutto, aft er all, was a key political opponent he wanted to get rid of. Plus, Zia was manipulating his own country’s judicial system for the same. But what has happened with Saddam is unimaginable! It’s the fi rst time perhaps that a country has interfered directly in another nation’s political process, arrested a leader it wanted to get rid of (clearly without UN sanctions), then set up a farce trial process and got the enemy hanged… and ironically, by the other nation’s very own courts! Th at too probably on a date which looked manipulated and very symbolic – so that people who support him look upon it as their New Year’s gift , from the Great Dictator himself, through their television sets straight into their drawing rooms!

As the world saw the video images, the Great Dictator – Bush – called it a triumph of democracy; of course, manipulated and dictated by him! One is forced to wonder if this hanging too has a personal feudal revenge motive with Bush Jr. taking revenge for his father, Bush Sr. From the beginning of the Iraq war, Bush has been feeding lies to the world about Iraq and its possession of weapons of mass destruction – his only valid excuse to enter Iraq and wage the war. While Bush used weapons of – quite a – mass destruction in Iraq, the same could not be located inside Iraq; and Bush’s pathetic and shameless lie got completely exposed. He immediately shift ed stance and said the war was to bring back democracy in Iraq. Again, a blatant lie! Had Iraq been an apple producing country, Bush wouldn’t have ever bothered about bringing back democracy there or anything close to that. It’s, of course, a known fact that the entire war was fought to secure Iraqi oil reserves. Th e irony of it all is that by now more Americans have already been killed in the war than the number of people killed by the collapse of the twin towers, not to mention the number of Iraqis – men, women and children – killed; though no one, I’m wildly guessing, can try Bush for this crime and have him hanged, can they?

You might be wondering about the reasons for my saying all this; and whether I am defending Saddam. Well, no! I would have had no problems, if a democratically elected ‘Iraqi’ government would have tried Saddam in its own courts and had him hanged. My contention is with the interference of America in Iraq – from the bombing of Iraq to the Stone Age, to manipulating Iraq’s oil for America’s own profi ts and trying to impose on the world a lie – with the fact that Saddam was hanged in a US fortifi ed area, and carried to his birth place for burial in US military vehicles, with the US military supervising the whole episode, from the start to the end. And as for Saddam, as reported by American controlled and dictated media, we do know that he was quite a tyrant and a dictator. He must have been wicked and surely deserved punishment; but he surely deserved a fair trial as the ex- President of his country… and not a trial whose verdict was known to all from day one. And the crime for which he was hanged – of killing 148 people who tried to stage a rebellion against him – is a crime for sure; but then, very oft en, when there is a rebellion, the government orders a crackdown where a few hundreds are killed to protect the larger interests. Do we really know whether the 148, whom Saddam was accused of killing, were not anti-nationals? Anyway, this debate is futile when in the fi rst place, the entire show was manipulated on behalf of a country known for its opportunism. Th is was the same country that had funded the rise of the dictator Saddam and fi nanced his war against Iran; much like the way it still supports Musharraf, and much like the way it had fi nanced the entire concept called Osama bin Laden. And as for America’s concern for democracy and genocides, one look at the horrible plight of people in Darfur will tell you that a very convenient ‘easy oil/no oil, no concern’ is the only policy followed by the US. As US foreign policy is driven by the oil companies. It’s, in fact, a bigger shame that Darfur, which requires immediate UN intervention and military support, is being neglected completely by the UN, as well as the media, while genocide continues to take hundreds of thousands of lives – 4,00,000 have been killed there just because of their ethnicity, untold thousands raped and tortured, 2.5 million have been driven away from homes and now face death out of malnutrition and disease. Th e UN peace keeping forces have not been able to stop the slaughter because they are not serious about stopping it. And the man behind it is Omal-al-Bashir. And he deserves the death sentence perhaps today before anyone else. And is Bush concerned even a mite? Oh no Sir!

Th e bigger issue in hand that bothers me is that ever since the end of the Cold War era, wars and America’s naked aggression have increased all over the world, simply for the sake of America’s profi ts. Th e Cold War era rarely saw such acts; and sadly, it seems today Russia and China have decided to become shameless and mute spectators to America’s imperialist dance of ‘demonocracy’. Th e United Nations, in any case, has been reduced to a deaf, dumb and blind organisation, which has no powers to control the US. But the Russians even today could, if they wanted to; and so could the Chinese! Th ey are both nuclear and economic superpowers and still have an important role to play in world politics. The entire Iraq and Afghanistan war issues seem to prove that both Russia and China have become least bothered about what America does, as long as they are not directly hurt. One does wonder if a return to the era of Cold War is the only way to stop Bush and his allies from fi ghting wars and killing people for the sake of oil and related profi ts. If that’s the only answer, I would say, so be it!