Iraqi tribunal sentences Saddam to hang
Just in time to apparently have no impact on the US mid-term elections.
So, that's done. One less murderous madman in the world. What's interesting to me is what Saddam Hussein has actually been convicted of:
Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced Sunday to hang for crimes against humanity in the 1982 killings of 148 people in a single Shiite town, as the ousted leader, trembling and defiant, shouted "God is great!"
As he, his half brother and another senior official in his regime were convicted and sentenced to death by the Iraqi High Tribunal, Saddam yelled out, "Long live the people and death to their enemies. Long live the glorious nation, and death to its enemies!" Later, his lawyer said the former dictator had called on Iraqis to reject sectarian violence and refrain from revenge against U.S. forces.
The trial brought Saddam and his co-defendants before their accusers in what was one of the most highly publicized and heavily reported trials of its kind since the Nuremberg tribunals for members of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime and its slaughter of 6 million Jews in the World War II Holocaust
"The verdict placed on the heads of the former regime does not represent a verdict for any one person. It is a verdict on a whole dark era that has was unmatched in Iraq's history," said Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq's Shiite prime minister.
I'm not going to compare numbers here -
2,831 US servicemembers have died as of 05NOV06,
20,687 US wounded,
44,779 total US casualties,
somewhere between 45,354 and 50,321 Iraqi civilian deaths -
yeah, let's not get into specific numbers here.
What I'm most concerned about is, what were US relations with Iraq like during this time, the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988)?
From GWU's National Security Archive:
By mid-1982, Iraq was on the defensive against Iranian human-wave attacks. The U.S., having decided that an Iranian victory would not serve its interests, began supporting Iraq: measures already underway to upgrade U.S.-Iraq relations were accelerated, high-level officials exchanged visits, and in February 1982 the State Department removed Iraq from its list of states supporting international terrorism. (It had been included several years earlier because of ties with several Palestinian nationalist groups, not Islamicists sharing the worldview of al-Qaeda. Activism by Iraq's main Shiite Islamicist opposition group, al-Dawa, was a major factor precipitating the war -- stirred by Iran's Islamic revolution, its endeavors included the attempted assassination of Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz.)
Prolonging the war was phenomenally expensive. Iraq received massive external financial support from the Gulf states, and assistance through loan programs from the U.S. The White House and State Department pressured the Export-Import Bank to provide Iraq with financing, to enhance its credit standing and enable it to obtain loans from other international financial institutions. The U.S. Agriculture Department provided taxpayer-guaranteed loans for purchases of American commodities, to the satisfaction of U.S. grain exporters.
The U.S. restored formal relations with Iraq in November 1984, but the U.S. had begun, several years earlier, to provide it with intelligence and military support (in secret and contrary to this country's official neutrality) in accordance with policy directives from President Ronald Reagan. These were prepared pursuant to his March 1982 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM 4-82) asking for a review of U.S. policy toward the Middle East.
If some of that was lost on you, let me stress a major point:
By mid-1982...The U.S., having decided that an Iranian victory would not serve its interests, began supporting Iraq...and in February 1982 the State Department removed Iraq from its list of states supporting international terrorism.
During this period of time, The US was normalizing relations with Iraq, throwing its support toward Iraq. So, if Saddam Hussein is guilty of crimes against humanity in 1982, what does that make this guy? The one shaking hands with Saddam in 1983:
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