Should Saddam Hang?

Not a surprising turn of events in the end for Saddam Hussein, guilty and sentenced to death.

There won’t be many outside of Tikrit with much sympathy for him but there are more raising justified questions about the veracity of his trail.

I don’t really see the point in replacing one rail-roading bunch of bloodthirsty bastards with another, but that appears to be what Bush and Blair in their oh-so-very finite wisdom have done.

Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have slammed the trail as seriously flawed and have highlighted the fact that the Iraqi government have illegally interfered throughout.

Really, what is the point? If you’re going to topple a corrupt, evil regime, the idea must be to replace it with something better. But instead of showing “them” how it’s done, this trail has simply highlighted how massively pea-brained the whole notion of Westernising Iraq was in the first place.

The corruption, the race hate, the senseless violence, the incompetence – our presence has made it all much, much worse. And now, even the trophy capture of the great butcher has turned into an embarrassing fiasco for the “coalition of the willing”.

Of course, now that we’ve made a horrible mess of the place and losable elections are coming up, the US and the UK powers-that-be are starting to make sure that the topic of withdrawal pops up with alarming frequency in the media.

No wonder the people of the Middle East hate us. We swan in, wreck their countries infrastructure, allow religious militias to take virtual control of Baghdad, railroad their former leader and then, when things are at their absolute worst, we fuck off and just let things disintegrate.

But that’s not even why they have ever right to despise the West. It’s the arrogance, the crypto-imperialist assumption that we would be able to order and manage their frigging country better than they could. That after the toppling of Saddam, there would somehow just be this organic development of Western ideas and customs. At best, the US and the UK have made a disastrously over-ambitious mistake in good faith. But most see the truth.

This baneful episode in human suffering was borne of a racist urge for revenge against Arabs, any Arabs in the wake of September the 11th and was fuelled by a desire to control a strategic area of the Middle East.

In many ways, US and British business interest in the country has been like the mafia “bust-outs” from the film “Goodfellas”.

We’ve set alight the joint, taken the valuables and offered to re-build the place at a price we decide upon. The Iraqi people thought Saddam was bad, but now find themselves paying protection money to the biggest bully around. All in a country where they can be murdered at random by barely-checked nutter brigades who’ll butcher you for wearing the wrong kind of hat.

Applause, applause Blair and Bush, a bang up job indeed. Not opportunistic incompetent liars at all.

So should Saddam hang? Hardly the point, is it?