Bush on the event:

We are reminded today of how far the Iraqi people have come since the end of Saddam Hussein’s rule

There were conflicting media reports during the day yesterday about whether Saddam was in U.S. custody or had been handed over to the Iraqis. I was thinking some of the confusion stemmed from the fact that the distinction is contrived.

I can only reflect that G.W. Bush has presided over a term of the profound emergence of a politics of sado-masochistic tyranny in our foreign relations. Consider the persistence of the black hood, the de facto suspension of international civil rights at Guantanomo and in extraordinary rendition and the unending deceit and pretext in the message e.g. wmd and the promise of transparency in getting to the bottom of Abu Ghraib practices. Makes one long for the days of good old market place theivery. Where is hope?

Oops, I meant Jim DeRosa, not SaltinWound!

I tried to watch video of the hanging on CBS’s website this morning. When they reached for the noose I found that I don’t have the stomach for it.

Maybe I would have if they’d hanged the right man.

US State Department document â€Decade of Deception and Defiance†(1999)reported something like 5000 people dead or missing under Saddam’s regime in the 1990s.

How many Iraqi civilians by US military intervention in Iraq (4yrs)?

It is empircally safe to say many, many times more.

So who is the greater war crimes culprit?

Technically, it would be Bush.

Got it, thanks, OtherWA. In this case, I meant Iran (using CW on the Kurds came later).

I read on Daily Kos that in the larger picture (this one is cropped), the man next to Donald Rumsfeld is Joe Wilson. Is that true?

Regardless, here is a good quote from Wilson (via the WaPo)
â€Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam,†said Joe Wilson, Glaspie’s former deputy at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the last U.S. official to meet with Hussein. â€Everybody in the Arab world told us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of moderating his behavior. History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation.â€

Somehow over the last couple of weeks I was in hopes that Joe Wilson would have offered the Iraqi’s his home fashioned noose from back in 1990. In our efforts to critique Bush, I think we have lost sight of the vast evidence pre-1991 regarding Saddam’s mode of governing. (Joe’s was a little bit smaller actually.)

Back in 1986 I worked my way into some archeological tours in Pakistan that were being run by Australians from the Museum in Melbourne. One of my mates during this tour had just come out of Iraq from working on an Aussie-Iraqi sponsored dig that had been going on for years, and she had horrible tales to tell about what she had witnessed and heard from fellow archeologists. Apparently when one Iraqi archeologist had excaped, and made contact with Australian counterparts for help, nearly all the team that had worked with the Aussies had been killed off. Since we were carefully visiting Indus River sites, and later Buddhist sites in the North West Frontier Province, and it was in the midst of the Afghani War and every second person we met was somehow connected with that (our translator for visiting the sites had just finished translating for Dan Rather on one of his trips into Afghanistan) — we were careful what we said — taking our evening cup of â€bed tea†out into the parking area to supposedly look at the stars and talk political matters.

You know a little exposure as a traveler can lead to the intrigue of reading all the stuff that eventually came out…and while I have not actually organized my books that relate to each other on one shelf so I can measure them, I think it is a couple of yards. It was in my mind a delight to see Saddam to finally be knocked off — just gone — and I really don’t care for what. (I suppose I would like to have seen it as a conviction for knocking off Archeologists, but then that is my taste.)

Between 1984-85 and 1986 I read up a little on Iraq, and then was introduced to the scam that was being pulled by the E. Germans and both the Iraq and Iran governments. E. Germany needed foreign currency badly, and so they were selling seats on their flights to E. Berlin from both Teheran and Baghdad to those who had the western cash to pay, and that included a transit visa and a ferry ticket to Denmark, during which passage papers would be destroyed so that one could land as a true refugee. Most of the takers for this deal were upper middle class families who wanted to keep their sons out of combat, so the migration was by family. While in Denmark in 1986, the Danish Folketing was debating how to stop this scam by the E. Germans who were paying off the governments (in minor figures) of both Iraq and Iran. Remember, the E. Germans thought selling their own dissenters to W. Germany for between 75 and 125 thousand dollars each (Kopfkauf) was perfectly fine. So why not make a little money soaking the Iraqi and Iranian Middle Class who did not want their son’s to fight, for passage to Liberal and Humanitarian Denmark by selling these one way tickets? My Danish Friends (in Government) told me the Iraqi share went directly to Saddam and his sons. By 1986 the Danes were fed up with this scam, and they were about debating new exclusionary laws.

I got invited to a shelter for Iranian and Iraqi asylum seekers by another friend who was a social worker and worked there part time. The idea, I think, was to demonstrate that even an American could speak Danish if you worked on it a bit, but since many of these immigrants demanded that they be allowed to speak English in Denmark, my real job was to tell them they had to learn Danish in American English, and then demonstrate that it was possible. (one may go back in the archives and consult my response to the Danish Cartoons of last year — part of my response was born in this setting.) My position is that if Danes want to draw cartoons about stuff they experience, go right ahead. Free speech means insult anyone you think needs insulting.

No, I don’t exactly celebrate this execution — I would have rather welcomed the trial about the Kurds murders and some others in addition — but in the context of beheadings and 80-90 daily dead from Black and Decker drills into the bones and then a shot to the skull or the â€justice†of being a random in a marketplace bombing, I find myself saying over and over again (remembering the folk I talked to in Denmark in summer 1986), look, learning some Danish is a hell of a little price to pay for avoiding the hell of now.

So when I watched the noose thrown over Saddam’s neck (silk scarf on offer) I thought about all those folk he sent adrift because the E. Germans had organized Kopfkauf for him given their resources.

You know it is a British Elite Privilege to be hung with a silk rope, or the silk scarf treatment. William Joyce, (Lord Haw Haw) afterall got the black scarf treatment. Why have no commentaries noted this? Have they not read Rebecca West? (Hemp Rope is likely to slice off the head — a silk rope or silk choaker will avoid this quite unfortunate problem, given the difficult circumstances.) It is only on offer to the titled. Saddam was hung as a titled.

So much to see — so much to comment around.

Oh and Sara-
I thought what you wrote was really interesting. I didn’t mean anything in my brevity, just that you might find that tidbit interesting since you noticed few had discussed the scarf.
Happy New Year.

ew-
I don’t think the quote suggests anything one way or the other about the date he arrived in Bagdhad, and I didn’t mean it to. The quote I included because it has to do with why we see Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam- it was considered best to deal with him. There are many in the US that wanted to continue to deal with him, even in 2003.
You know, Assad is no angel and may yet do worse than he already has, yet several senators were willing to meet with him and have their picture taken by the lovely Syrian fireplace just last month.

Anyway, I saw a rec’d comment at dailykos which nobody disputed, so I thought I’d ask about it here.