The official US response to the capture of Saddam Hussein: a degrading
spectacle

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/dec2003/huss-d16.shtml

By David Walsh

16 December 2003

The official American response to the capture of former Iraqi president
Saddam Hussein must provoke feelings of deep disgust. It requires a
political and media establishment from whom all traces of democratic or
humane instinct have been eradicated to react with a display of such
ignorance, vindictiveness and sadism.

There is irony in the fact that only a regime as depraved as the current
one in Washington could create by its actions a degree of sympathy for
Hussein, a right-wing nationalist thug and former ally of the US.

Banner headlines screaming “We’ve got him!,” the innumerable and tedious
variations on the “rat” caught in his “hole,” countless news items citing
the event as George W. Bush’s “ultimate Christmas present”—what does this
all add up to? Victor’s justice, with an unspeakably backward and
repellent quality to it.

The capture of Hussein, an inevitable event given the current disposition
of military forces and the free hand that American forces have to bribe,
bully and torture, is only the latest and most dramatic in a series of
such episodes. Since the re-eruption of naked American colonialism in the
1980s, the US has demonized a long list of foreign leaders and “brought to
justice” figures like Manuel Noriega of Panama in 1989 and Slobodan
Milosevic of the former Yugoslavia in 2001. The process is thoroughly
stereotyped by now. A thread connecting between these individuals and
others, including Osama bin Laden, is their former association with the US
government, military or CIA.

The stupidity and hypocrisy of the American media knows few bounds. After
years of pontificating about Hussein’s palaces—and this coming from
multimillionaires—the media pundits now point to his inglorious end in “a
mud-caked hole in the ground,” as though the undignified condition were of
his own choosing. The New York Post of Rupert Murdoch, as is generally the
case, offered the foulest example of gutter journalism, commenting that
Hussein looked “every bit like a subway panhandler while a medic checked
his scalp for lice.... Even after he’d been cleaned and shaved, it was
obvious that he’d lost the will to fight: His eyes were blank, his face a
mask of submission.”

This is pretty rich. Hussein was hiding for months from the most lethal
military force on the planet. His sons have been murdered. What sort of
condition was Hussein likely to be found in? And as for his comportment,
can it be truly said that he behaved with less fortitude than an American
president would under similar conditions? American politicians regularly
burst into tears when they lose a primary election. The scene of Richard
Nixon’s resignation, in the East Room of the White House in August 1974,
prompted this comment from one journalist: “Sometimes one wished that his
agonized wife would take this wretched slobbering, spluttering man away by
the arm and propel him into some windowless vehicle for transport to
obscurity.”


Kill or torture Hussein?

Journalists are now pressing Bush and his cohorts with questions about the
possibility of executing Hussein. At his Monday news conference, he was
asked by one reporter: “Do you think that execution should be an option?”

Bush smirked, “He will be detained. We will work with the Iraqis to
develop a way to try him that will stand international scrutiny, I guess
is the best way to put it.... I’ve got my own personal views of how he
ought to be treated, but I’m not an Iraqi citizen. It’s going to be up to
the Iraqis to make those decisions.” And the assembled reporters pretended
to believe his last point.

There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has many crimes to answer for. But
so, for that matter, does George W. Bush and those among his associates
whose launching of an aggressive war against Iraq constitutes, if the
precedent of the Nuremberg trials retains any standing, a crime. What
legal, let alone moral right have American government officials—whose hand-
picked man in Baghdad, Ahmad Chalabi, is a convicted felon—to put Hussein
on trial? They all have unclean hands. The tribunal proposal is another
example of Washington’s criminality and flouting of international law.
Bush administration officials simply make things up as they go along,
according to the military, political or electoral needs of the moment.

And the media laps it up, as do the tops of the Democratic Party. The
inevitable Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, candidate for his party’s
presidential nomination, quickly joined the chorus calling for blood. If
an international or Iraqi tribunal could not execute Hussein, Lieberman
said, “he should be brought before an American military tribunal and face
death.”

Providing a glimpse into the depths of depravity to which the US media has
sunk, Leslie Stahl of CBS News’s prestigious 60 Minutes program queried
Rumsfeld Sunday night on the advisability of torturing or killing Hussein.
She asked, “Let me raise the whole question, for lack of a better term,
[of ]torture. Let’s say he’s not forthcoming. Would we deprive him of
sleep, make it very cold where he is, or very hot? Are there any
restrictions on the way we treat him to get him to cooperate more than he
has been?” When Rumsfeld indicated that the US would not torture “this
person,” she pursued the matter, “Sleep deprivation, that kind of thing.
You’re ruling it completely out, is that what you’re telling us?”

Later this revealing exchange took place:

Stahl: “Did it cross your mind at all once you heard it was likely that
they knew where he was and he might be captured—that it would be better if
he were killed? Would it just be better if he weren’t alive?”

Rumsfeld: “Well that’s a fair question. You know, I have a lot of things I
worry about and try and think through, and that was one thing I could do
nothing about. We either were going to kill him or capture him, and our
policy is we try and capture and not kill and if we’re not able to capture
and we can kill, we do it.”

We might as well be listening in on a conversation between two Mafia wise
guys.

The desire to humiliate and terrorize is uppermost in the minds of
Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and the Bush brain-trust, as well as their
servants in the media. The demeaning handling of Hussein, in contravention
of the Geneva Conventions, including the medical examination broadcast to
a worldwide television audience, is intended to intimidate not only the
Iraqi resistance and general population, the Arab world and all those who
might consider opposing US imperialism around the globe, but, in the final
analysis, the American population as well. The message is: all resistance
is futile, we will trample on you too.

To whom is such a display intended to appeal today? The most backward and
morally depraved section of the US population, the semi-fascist base of
the Republican Party, the social and psychological type whose counterparts
in the ancient world used to whoop at the sight of a man or woman thrown
to the lions. Celebrating this barbaric episode speaks to their own lack
of humanity.

The degrading of Hussein follows the obscene display of his sons’ corpses
earlier this year. No one in the US media will recall the howls emitted by
the Pentagon when the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera broadcast footage
of dead and captured American soldiers last March. At the time Rumsfeld
piously told the press, “The Geneva Convention indicates that it’s not
permitted to photograph and embarrass or humiliate prisoners of war.”

The spectacle of official America celebrating over Saddam Hussein’s
capture, with its air of a particularly primitive and bloodthirsty ritual,
will horrify and outrage masses of people. It becomes more and more
apparent, and this is a relatively recent feature of modern social life,
that the American ruling elite inhabits a political and moral universe
that is distant and alien from the lives and feelings of the overwhelming
majority of humanity, including American humanity. In decent-minded people
such goings-on can only evoke feelings of shame, the sense of witnessing
something unclean.

Whatever Bush and company can claim to represent is foreign and hostile to
the most honorable traditions and ideals of the American people. They
exist in another world.


Iraqis have no cause to celebrate

There is no reason to doubt the list of Hussein’s crimes, although no US
commentator will point out that the worst of them were committed when he
was in a de facto alliance with Washington. However, reporters were quick
to note a subdued mood in the Iraqi population. The experience of eight
months of American military rule, combined with a natural and inevitable
instinctive hostility to foreign, colonial occupation, have disabused all
but the most naïve or corrupt Iraqis of any illusions in US “justice.” A
recent poll indicated that 91 percent of the population had little
interest in the hunt for or prosecution of members of the former regime.

Joshua Logan of Reuters, for example, writes: “Joy at the capture of
Saddam Hussein has given way to resentment towards Washington as Iraqis
confront afresh the bloodshed, shortages and soaring prices of life under
US occupation. Many were ecstatic to see Saddam in the dock and hoped he
would answer for his deeds but said they would not rush to thank America—
in their eyes the source of their problems since a US-led coalition
toppled Saddam in April.” Resistance attacks on US forces and Iraqi
collaborators continued unabated following Hussein’s capture.

Arab public opinion throughout the Middle East was similarly hostile,
responding to the obvious attempt by the American military to humiliate
and degrade the former leader. Even those interviewed by Western media
outlets who were pleased with Hussein’s capture deplored the fact that it
was Bush and the US military who brought him down.

The mood in the American population was markedly subdued as well, outside
of the pockets of pro-war zealots and despite (or perhaps because of) the
media bombardment. The Washington Post published the results of a poll
indicating that only 15 to 23 percent thought the arrest would “help a
great deal.” Nine in ten Americans felt “big challenges” remain in Iraq.
Forty-two percent of the population continued to argue that the war was
not worth fighting. Twice as many Americans say the war is going worse
than expected than think it is going better than expected.

A CNN-Gallup poll found the same general result, that the capture of
Hussein had relatively little impact on attitudes toward the war or Bush.

The general response in the US is one of caution, skepticism, apathy. Bush
made a pompous and lying “address to the nation,” as though many cared to
listen to what he had to say. Why should anyone in America rejoice over
Hussein’s capture, an event that will not bring the end of US military
intervention one day closer, save the life of one Iraqi or American
soldier, improve the state of international or regional stability or
remedy the increasingly desperate economic condition of broad layers of
the population at home?


Hussein’s crimes pale in comparison

If every crime attributed to Hussein since the Baathists took power for
good in 1968 were true, his hands would still not be stained with a
fraction of the blood spilled by a series of US presidents over the same
general period. Under Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, four million Vietnamese
lost their lives as the result of US intervention, along with an estimated
one million Cambodians and half a million Laotians. In Indonesia in 1965,
a CIA-supported coup resulted in the deaths of another half a million
people. Between 1954 and 2002, 300,000 Guatemalans are estimated to have
met their deaths as the result of US-backed government repression. Another
100,000 are thought to have died in El Salvador.

In Argentina and Chile in the 1970s, with the capable assistance of the
Nixon-Kissinger and Carter-Brzezinski regimes, military butchers tortured
and murdered 50,000 people. Hundreds of thousands, if not more, Iraqis,
including half a million children, have encountered a tragic fate as the
result of the two wars conducted by US forces, and a decade of devastating
sanctions under Bush and Clinton.

The Afghan catastrophe since 1979 has resulted in another one million
deaths, and one should add the lives of 3,000 innocent Americans lost in
the terrorist attacks of September 2001, which was one of the byproducts
of the disastrous US encounter with the Central Asian nation.

And for all the talk about the Kurds, the US has stood shoulder to
shoulder with the worst oppressor of that people, the Turkish regime.
Indeed, the arrest of Hussein, carried out with US assistance, resembled
nothing so much as the capture of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan in
February 1999.


Treatment of captured enemies

In more civilized times even the most implacable enemies were treated with
dignity. Napoleon Bonaparte, whom a contemporary British account
termed “that bloody miscreant, who has so long tortured Europe” and whose
cruelty “is written in characters of blood in almost every country in
Europe and in the contiguous angles of Africa and Asia which he visited,”
was treated with respect aboard the Bellerophon when he surrendered in
July 1815, and this was after a first escape and subsequent military
campaign.

And what of the treatment of Gen. Robert E. Lee, who had led a rebellion
against the United States in defense of slavery, resulting in the deaths
of 600,000 Americans? Consider the response of his dedicated enemy, Gen.
Ulysses S. Grant, at Appomattox in April 1865: “Whatever his [Lee’s]
feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own
feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter
[proposing negotiations], were sad and depressed. I felt like anything
rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and
valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I
believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for
which there was not the least excuse. I do not question, however, the
sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.”

Some might argue that these are not appropriate analogies; after all,
Saddam Hussein is neither a Napoleon nor a Lee. No doubt he is not. But
then, Bush is neither a Wellington nor a Grant. In any event, it is not so
much a question of the character and actions of the vanquished, but those
of the victor. Hussein’s brutal and illegal treatment is a further sign of
the political, moral and cultural degeneracy of the American ruling elite.

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