Cool Bunny

“Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”  George Orwell

Despite the fine rhetoric from Mr. Bush about justice being done or how the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein demonstrates Iraq’s progress toward a free and fair society, the reality still appears quite different.   If anything, Saddam’s execution should leave us all feeling slightly queasy.   Instead of a dispassionate and fair carriage of justice, the unauthorized video of the execution show the guards of a vengeful Shia regime taunting the condemned dictator even as the trap opened and he was hung.   And rather than proclaiming that this was an important day for Iraq as a nation, it was clear that their sectarian loyalties were what mattered, not the Iraqi nation as a while.

Will Saddam’s execution make any difference in the situation in Iraq?  Not for the better.   Perhaps the Bush White House would have liked to spin this as an example of the new, democratic Iraq, but the reality is that the new Iraq is anything but democratic, and Saddam’s execution.....carried out in haste and in disregard even of the laws of the “new” Iraq.....has merely reinforced the widely held belief among Sunnis and much of the arab world that this was little more than victor’s justice.   It also seemed to demonstrate that the Shia dominated government has little interest in fairness toward the Sunni population, and even less concern for their sensitivities and concerns.   To be shouting the name of Moktada al-Sadr as Saddam died only served to convince Sunnis that they will have little place (or security) in the “new” Iraq.

If anything, the way this was handled will only further divide Iraq’s sectarian groups and push Iraq further down the path of sectarian violence and civil war.    To their credit, it does appear that the Bush administration tried to temper the Iraqi’s rush to execute, perhaps out of fear that the consequences would only be counter-productive in terms of bringing any semblance stability to Iraq.    And the complete refusal of the Maliki regime to heed the concerns of Washington simply shows how little leverage the United States now has in Iraq.   Our troops continue to fight and die over there, but our ability to actually influence events is fast approaching zero.

We should not expect that the flawed process by which Saddam was tried and executed will either reflect well on the United States, or contribute to improved circumstances in Iraq.   And any effort on the part of the Bush administration to spin it as yet another milestone in Iraq, as they’ve tried to spin every previous event such as elections, handing over of sovereignty, the death of Saddam’s despicable sons, or the capture of Saddam himself, should be seen for what it is.......whistling in the dark while desperate to avoid the truth of their misbegotten war.   This was no milestone, no mark of progress, no show of justice and legality at work.   It was a sad, pathetic, travesty of a legal process.    That a man who should be reviled and shown for what he was, a vicious mass murderer, could be turned into a martyr among the broader Sunni population only shows how badly wrong Mr. Bush’s crusade to bring democracy to the Middle East has gone.

dtf