A footnote

Saddam will hang it appears, having been found personally responsible for a 1982 massacre at Dujail following an assasination attempt. It was “only” 148 people who paid for the dictator’s fear of his own people, combining as it did with his toxic lust for vengeance. A drop in the ocean of the at least 290,000 missing Iraqis counted by Human Rights Watch, people who vanished during the course of his regime and are assumed to have been killed by his state apparatus, littered perhaps in one of the thousands of mass graves that dot the countryside north, south and center.

A small crime by Saddam’s standards – especially as compared to the genocidal Anfal campaign in the Kurdish north – around 182,000 lives lost there, many of them killed by chemical weapons, a class of weapons commonly labelled “weapons of mass destruction,” or WMD. You may have heard the term bandied about.

As Saddamite mass murders go, Dujail was a relatively small affair, but a remarkably well documented one. Nothing much is said here about the one million lives lost during the brutal, eight-year Iran/Iraq war that Saddam started by invading his Persian neighbor. Those lives don’t much count, just wogs bashing each other about. Nothing that should concern us at home. You know how “they” can be.

The rape rooms are shut down for now, as is the plastic shredder. Saddam will have no chance to re-activate that nuclear weapons program the New York Times revealed he was keeping on the back burner last week while waiting out the invitable collapse of an immoral and ineffective UN sanctions regime. That regime kept Saddam “in his box” of course, but caused untold suffering and loss of life to his own people while he built ever grander pleasure domes in celebration of his own grandiose murderousness. Under these sanctions as many as another million of his citizens may have died of malnutrition and disease, many of them under the age of five.

So he’ll dance on the end of a rope at the order of a judicial system made up of his own countrymen, and never in history will a man be more justly hung.

Some people will call this “victor’s justice,” as though perhaps one day, sickened at last by his own evil, Saddam would have turned himself in to The Hague. As if there was ever any way to stop him, to bring him before justice. If you are an American, or a Brit, or any of the many several others in the coalition of the willing, they will expect you to apologize for your country’s part in this, and allowing his brutalized people to bring him to trial.

If it was me, I’d flip them off.

By their fruits will you know them.