Urteil gegen Saddam Hussein: Auch ein Schuldspruch für Amerika / by Robert Fisk
Von Robert Fisk *
Wenn wir diesen schrecklichen Mann hängen, hoffen wir, besser auszusehen als er und die Iraker daran zu erinnern, ihr Leben sei jetzt besser als es unter Saddam war. Auch wenn die Katastrophe grauenhaft ist, die wir über den Irak gebracht haben. Denn die Iraker leben jetzt schlechter, der Tod sucht heute mehr Menschen heim - wir können nicht einmal moralische Überlegenheit beanspruchen.
Wenn Saddams Bosheit der Maßstab ist, um über Frevel und Verbrechen zu richten - was geschieht dann mit uns? Wir haben doch bloß Gefangene sexuell missbraucht und ein paar von ihnen getötet, und wir sind illegal in ein Land eingedrungen, was den Irak läppische 600.000 Leben gekostet hat. "Mehr oder weniger", wie George Bush meinte, als er erklärte, es seien nur 30.000. Saddam war viel schlimmer. Uns kann man nicht vor Gericht stellen. Uns kann man nicht hängen.
Erinnern Sie sich des Händedrucks? Vor Gericht war es Saddam verboten, seine Beziehung zum jetzigen Verteidigungsminister Rumsfeld zu beschreiben. Ebenso wenig durfte er über den Beistand durch George Bush senior reden. Kein Wunder, dass irakische Offizielle behaupten, die Amerikaner hätten sie genötigt, Saddam unbedingt vor den US-Kongresswahlen zu verurteilen. Tony Snow, Sprecher des Weißen Hauses, tat kund, das Urteil gegen Saddam - wohlgemerkt, er sprach nicht vom Prozess selbst - sei "gewissenhaft und fair".
Um so mehr eine kleine Auswahl der Themen, zu denen Saddam nichts sagen durfte: Am 25. Mai 1994 verfasste das "Komitee für Bankwesen, Wohnungswesen und Städtebau" des US-Senats einen Bericht mit dem Titel Mit der chemischen und biologischen Kriegsführung der Vereinigten Staaten verbundene Exporte in den Irak mit doppeltem Verwendungszweck und ihre möglichen Einflüsse auf die gesundheitlichen Folgen (sic) des Golfkrieges. Gemeint war der Krieg von 1991. Der Report informierte über von der US-Regierung bewilligte Verschiffungen von biologischen Wirkstoffen, die von US-Firmen seit 1985 oder früher in den Irak dirigiert wurden. Dazu gehörte der Bacillus anthracis, der Anthrax erzeugt. Auch wurde festgestellt, die USA versorgten Saddam mit Material, das für sein Chemie- und Biologie-Waffenprogramm sowie sein Raketensystem nützlich gewesen sei.
Es ist offensichtlich, warum der Angeklagte darüber nicht reden durfte. John Reid, Tony Blairs Innenminister, nannte das Saddam-Urteil "die souveräne Entscheidung einer souveränen Nation". Gott sei Dank erwähnte er nicht das Thiodiglycol - eine der zwei Senfgas-Komponenten -, das Großbritannien 1988 nach Bagdad exportierte. Dasselbe Großbritannien verbot acht Jahre später den Verkauf von Diphtherie-Impfstoffen an irakische Kinder mit der Begründung, damit ließen sich - Sie haben es erraten - "Massenvernichtungswaffen" herstellen.
Nun besteht theoretisch die Chance für die Kurden, Saddam in einem eigenen Prozess für die zu Tausenden Vergasten von Halabja zur Rechenschaft zu ziehen. Werden Amerikaner und Briten ein solches Verfahren wagen? Dort müsste man nicht nur beschreiben, wie Saddam sein dreckiges Gas bekam, sondern auch, warum die CIA unmittelbar nach dem Massaker von Halabja US-Diplomaten im Mittleren Osten erzählte, nicht die Iraker hätten Gas gegen die Kurden eingesetzt, sondern die Iraner. Damals firmierte Saddam noch als unser Lieblings-Verbündeter, nicht als unser Lieblings-Verbrecher.
Und nun schicken wir uns an, den Irakern Brot und Spiele zu bringen, Saddam soll hängen und sich langsam im Winde drehen. Wir haben Recht über den Mann gebracht, in dessen Land wir eindrangen, dessen Land wir ausweiden und zerbrechen lassen. Nein, es kann keine Sympathie für diesen Mann geben. Sonderbar bleibt nur, der Irak ist inzwischen überschwemmt mit Massenmördern, die nach unserer "Befreiung" Massaker und Folter verschuldet haben. Viele von ihnen arbeiten für die von uns hofierte Regierung. In einigen Fällen bezahlen wir diese Kriegsverbrecher über die Ministerien dieser Regierung. Sie wird man nicht verurteilen. Oder hängen. Wir brauchen sie schließlich, um das ganze Ausmaß unseres Zynismus zeigen zu können.
* Aus: Freitag 45, 11. November 2006
by Robert Fisk *
So America's one-time ally has been sentenced to death
for war crimes he committed when he was Washington's
best friend in the Arab world. America knew all about
his atrocities and even supplied the gas - along with
the British, of course - yet there we were yesterday
declaring it to be, in the White House's words, another
"great day for Iraq". That's what Tony Blair announced
when Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti was pulled from his hole
in the ground on 13 December 2003. And now we're going
to string him up, and it's another great day.
Of course, it couldn't happen to a better man. Nor a
worse. It couldn't be a more just verdict - nor a more
hypocritical one. It's difficult to think of a more
suitable monster for the gallows, preferably dispatched
by his executioner, the equally monstrous hangman of
Abu Ghraib prison, Abu Widad, who would strike his
victims on the head with an axe if they dared to
condemn the leader of the Iraqi Socialist Baath Party
before he hanged them. But Abu Widad was himself hanged
at Abu Ghraib in 1985 after accepting a bribe to put a
reprieved prisoner to death instead of the condemned
man. But we can't mention Abu Ghraib these days because
we have followed Saddam's trail of shame into the very
same institution. And so by hanging this awful man, we
hope - don't we? - to look better than him, to remind
Iraqis that life is better now than it was under
Saddam.
Only so ghastly is the hell-disaster that we have
inflicted upon Iraq that we cannot even say that. Life
is now worse. Or rather, death is now visited upon even
more Iraqis than Saddam was able to inflict on his
Shias and Kurds and - yes, in Fallujah of all places -
his Sunnis, too. So we cannot even claim moral
superiority. For if Saddam's immorality and wickedness
are to be the yardstick against which all our
iniquities are judged, what does that say about us? We
only sexually abused prisoners and killed a few of them
and murdered some suspects and carried out a few rapes
and illegally invaded a country which cost Iraq a mere
600,000 lives ("more or less", as George Bush Jnr said
when he claimed the figure to be only 30,000). Saddam
was much worse. We can't be put on trial. We can't be
hanged.
"Allahu Akbar," the awful man shouted - God is greater.
No surprise there. He it was who insisted these words
should be inscribed upon the Iraqi flag, the same flag
which now hangs over the palace of the government that
has condemned him after a trial at which the former
Iraqi mass murderer was formally forbidden from
describing his relationship with Donald Rumsfeld, now
George Bush's Secretary of Defence. Remember that
handshake? Nor, of course, was he permitted to talk
about the support he received from George Bush Snr, the
current US President's father. Little wonder, then,
that Iraqi officials claimed last week the Americans
had been urging them to sentence Saddam before the mid-
term US elections.
Anyone who said the verdict was designed to help the
Republicans, Tony Snow, the White House spokesman,
blurted out yesterday, must be "smoking rope". Well,
Tony, that rather depends on what kind of rope it might
be. Snow, after all, claimed yesterday that the Saddam
verdict - not the trial itself, please note - was
"scrupulous and fair". The judges will publish
"everything they used to come to their verdict."
No doubt. Because here are a few of the things that
Saddam was not allowed to comment upon: sales of
chemicals to his Nazi-style regime so blatant - so
appalling - that he has been sentenced to hang on a
localised massacre of Shias rather than the wholesale
gassing of Kurds over which George W Bush and Lord
Blair of Kut al-Amara were so exercised when they
decided to depose Saddam in 2003 - or was it in 2002?
Or 2001? Some of Saddam's pesticides came from Germany
(of course). But on 25 May 1994, the US Senate's
Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs
produced a report entitled "United States Chemical and
Biological Warfare-related Dual-use exports to Iraq and
their possible impact on the Health Consequences (sic)
of the Persian Gulf War".
This was the 1991 war which prompted our liberation of
Kuwait, and the report informed Congress about US
government-approved shipments of biological agents sent
by American companies to Iraq from 1985 or earlier.
These included Bacillus anthracis, which produces
anthrax; Clostridium botulinum; Histoplasma capsulatum;
Brucella melitensis; Clostridium perfringens and
Escherichia coli. The same report stated that the US
provided Saddam with "dual use" licensed materials
which assisted in the development of chemical,
biological and missile-system programmes, including
chemical warfare agent production facility plant and
technical drawings (provided as pesticide production
facility plans).
Yes, well I can well see why Saddam wasn't permitted to
talk about this. John Reid, the British Home Secretary,
said that Saddam's hanging "was a sovereign decision by
a sovereign nation". Thank heavens he didn't mention
the £200,000 worth of thiodiglycol, one of two
components of mustard gas we exported to Baghdad in
1988, and another £50,000 worth of the same vile
substances the following year.
We also sent thionyl chloride to Iraq in 1988 at a
price of only £26,000. Yes, I know these could be used
to make ballpoint ink and fabric dyes. But this was the
same country - Britain - that would, eight years later,
prohibit the sale of diphtheria vaccine to Iraqi
children on the grounds that it could be used for - you
guessed it - "weapons of mass destruction".
Now in theory, I know, the Kurds have a chance for
their own trial of Saddam, to hang him high for the
thousands of Kurds gassed at Halabja. This would
certainly keep him alive beyond the 30-day death
sentence review period. But would the Americans and
British dare touch a trial in which we would have not
only to describe how Saddam got his filthy gas but why
the CIA - in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war
crimes against Halabja - told US diplomats in the
Middle East to claim that the gas used on the Kurds was
dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis (Saddam
still being at the time our favourite ally rather than
our favourite war criminal). Just as we in the West
were silent when Saddam massacred 180,000 Kurds during
the great ethnic cleansing of 1987 and 1988.
And - dare we go so deep into this betrayal of the
Iraqis we loved so much that we invaded their country?
- then we would have to convict Saddam of murdering
countless thousands of Shia Muslims as well as Kurds
after they staged an uprising against the Baathist
regime at our specific request - thousands whom
webetrayed by leaving them to fight off Saddam's brutal
hordes on their own. "Rioting," is how Lord Blair's
meretricious "dodgy dossier" described these atrocities
in 2002 - because, of course, to call them an
"uprising" (which they were) would invite us to ask
ourselves who contrived to provoke this bloodbath.
Answer: us.
I and my colleagues watched this tragedy. I travelled
on the hospital trains that brought the Iranians back
> from the 1980-88 war front, their gas wounds bubbling
in giant blisters on their arms and faces, giving birth
to smaller blisters that wobbled on top of their
wounds. The British and Americans didn't want to know.
I talked to the victims of Halabja. The Americans
didn't want to know. My Associated Press colleague
Mohamed Salaam saw the Iranian dead lying gassed in
their thousands on the battlefields east of Basra. The
Americans and the British didn't care.
But now we are to give the Iraqi people bread and
circuses, the final hanging of Saddam, twisting,
twisting slowly in the wind. We have won. We have
inflicted justice upon the man whose country we invaded
and eviscerated and caused to break apart. No, there is
no sympathy for this man. "President Saddam Hussein has
no fear of being executed," Bouchra Khalil, a Lebanese
lawyer on his team, said in Beirut a few days ago. "He
will not come out of prison to count his days and years
in exile in Qatar or any other place. He will come out
of prison to go to the presidency or to his grave." It
looks like the grave. Keitel went there. Ceausescu went
there. Milosevic escaped sentence.
The odd thing is that Iraq is now swamped with mass
murderers, guilty of rape and massacre and throat-
slitting and torture in the years since our
"liberation" of Iraq. Many of them work for the Iraqi
government we are currently supporting, democratically
elected, of course. And these war criminals, in some
cases, are paid by us, through the ministries we set up
under this democratic government. And they will not be
tried. Or hanged. That is the extent of our cynicism.
And our shame. Have ever justice and hypocrisy been so
obscenely joined?
The Independent (UK)
Published: 06 November 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk
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