Chrono Compendium
Zenan Plains - Site Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Ramsus on December 29, 2006, 11:59:21 pm
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As reported by the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6218485.stm
Thoughts?
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I posted this to the intarwebs a few hours ago. Now, whaddya know, it's a few hours later. Still applies.
With Saddam Hussein’s execution just hours away, while his old sectarian rivals cheer and hoot in the streets as the governments of Iraq and America look on in approval, I find myself…uncomfortable.
I do not typically speak on authority of a hunch, but everything about this spectacle strikes me as a charade. I seriously doubt his trial was fair. For that matter, I seriously doubt that life under Saddam in Iraq was as bad as American propaganda has made it out to be. Though I am prepared to concede that Saddam’s administration committed human rights abuses and perhaps even war crimes and crimes against humanity, I reject the audacious claim that his hanging today is because of those charges. Plain and simple, I think this whole thing was George Dubya Bush’s revenge against a man he hated. The invasion wasn’t merited. And this “justice” was a show trial.
History is so filled with instances of political murder, so often ballyhooed at the time, yet so often recognized by future generations to be deeply unjust. We look back at history and pity the ignorance of those who allowed political prisoners to be wrongly put to death. Yet, if my hunch is true, then we today are as ignorant as any who came before us.
But we don’t even realize it…and we never will. The people of Iraq will cry out under the agony of civil war, paramilitary terrorism, and strict Islamic tyranny…while people here in America will cry out in glee at the bloody success of their gang leader’s plan for revenge against the man who tried to kill his father.
The death penalty is a most severe means of imposing justice. It should never be imposed unjustly, or when uncertainty rules. If we were a more enlightened society, we would not allow Saddam to hang.
There is nothing more I can do. I have said my piece.
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It's the same old thing. The powerful tyrants rule, and the weaker ones are hanged. Like in the second World War. Did Churchill hang at Nurnburg? Hardly. You could give just as much - probably more - cause to have had him hanged than a figure such as Jodl. The thing is, power is a cuthroat thing to have. Saddam was hanged because, though a powerful leader of people, he came into confrontation with those more powerful. Now, maybe he justly deserved to hang - I don't know enough to be able to say - but likely as not there are those within the US political system that deserve an equal share, yet are protected by what remains a fortune favourable to their power.
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An evil dictator hanged on my birthday. BEST PRESENT EVER! :D
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Though the war should never have been, and the trial no doubt had a foregone conclusion, I cannot weep at the thought that Saddam will never hurt anyone ever again.
Perhaps if we were to hang all leaders at the end of their term, we would attract the megalomaniacs that positions of power seem to attract these days. Impractical, but a thought.
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Like most of the things that happened on 9-11 and most of the media lies...
My guess is Saddam is alive. His death had been faked and someone was bribed. Saddam resides on some private island or something to live out the rest of his days in exile rather than hell. That's my belief. It could be dead wrong. However, considering the facts of many untold reports, I wouldn't be surprised if something like that took place.
Yet the same story sitll lingers around... Saddam was found in a "spider hole" near a farm close to his hometown.
Media = lolz
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Yes, Saddam is still alive and is actually hiding on some private island with Elvis, Hitler, and Fidel Castro.
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Maybe Fidel, but I doubt Hitler and Elvis unless they somehow discovered a fountain of youth. Part of me wanted to see him hang and the other part of me felt sorry for him. I checked out the youtube and found some footage, but all the footage I saw was either frozen at the part of the so called execution. Afterwards, there you can see a distorted body wrapped in a white blanket or something.
I'll be convinced if he's displayed in an open casket type burial (if Iraq even does those kinds of things).
Has anyone else found actual footage? or does anyone know if Saddam is really dead?
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I saw the whole thing. It was leaked on a mobile..
I have to give it to the man. He showed no fear or hysteria in his final moments. He went gracefully, if anything.
I don't think he deserved the hanging. The first judge was sacked by the US because the trial wasn't going in their favor. The judge that convicted Saddam only had 2 weeks training. And I bet he was bribed.
Saddam, at any rate, deserved a humane death.
But as for my own opinion, he didn't deserve to die at all. Come on, his charged aren't worth his death. If somebody was out to kill me, i'd have them fkin killed too, the stupid bastards. He did have them killed, but only after he put an appeal through the Iraqi legal system, even though it was biased towards him.
Now, people have done worse than him. Bush has had more casualties from the Iraqi war than those 14x shiites.
Truman had like 200,000 killed with Hiroshima an Nagasaki. He wasn't hanged for ORDERING that. Yet Saddam does.
And btw, all those Iraqi's, Jews, Muslims, Shiites, that are partying now, and especially the ones firing guns into the air. They are just planely retarded. Anyone who gets satisfaction from anothers death is sick and should die themselves.
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But as for my own opinion, he didn't deserve to die at all. Come on, his charged aren't worth his death. If somebody was out to kill me, i'd have them fkin killed too, the stupid bastards. He did have them killed, but only after he put an appeal through the Iraqi legal system, even though it was biased towards him.
Biased? Dude, he ran the whole fucking country. In elections if you didn't vote for him he would have you killed. And you say it was biased.
The fucker looked hella scared as they dropped the floor from under him.
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But as for my own opinion, he didn't deserve to die at all. Come on, his charged aren't worth his death. If somebody was out to kill me, i'd have them fkin killed too, the stupid bastards. He did have them killed, but only after he put an appeal through the Iraqi legal system, even though it was biased towards him.
He didn't retaliate against a person who attempted to kill him. He wiped out the city where the people who tried to kill him were from. That's not eye-for-an-eye, that's mass murder.
Now, people have done worse than him. Bush has had more casualties from the Iraqi war than those 14x shiites.
Truman had like 200,000 killed with Hiroshima an Nagasaki. He wasn't hanged for ORDERING that. Yet Saddam does.
That doesn't matter. He was a brutal and murderous dictator. That other dictators have been more brutal or more murderous does not allow his behaviour, nor absolve him of guilt for his actions.
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Umm, don't forget that he didn't actually commit the murders. He hired them. And quite frankly, thats in the power of a president. If Bush wanted, he'd have you arrested by the FBI, have you Haebus Corpus taken away from you and then have you killed for whatever reason he wanted. Heck, he has the right to order a nuclear strike, have a soldier killed on the battle fields and heaps of crap.
Saddam did what he did. He may have been a dictator, but don't forget that 70% of Iraqi's supported him. The other 30% were retards who brought it upon themselves.
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Wow. Someone on this topic has posted the dumbest thing he has ever posted on the entire forum.
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Umm, don't forget that he didn't actually commit the murders. He hired them. And quite frankly, thats in the power of a president. If Bush wanted, he'd have you arrested by the FBI, have you Haebus Corpus taken away from you and then have you killed for whatever reason he wanted. Heck, he has the right to order a nuclear strike, have a soldier killed on the battle fields and heaps of crap.
Wrong sir, wrong. In America, we have Congress to prevent things like that. Hell, we have the Bill of Rights to protect our freedoms.
Saddam did what he did. He may have been a dictator, but don't forget that 70% of Iraqi's supported him. The other 30% were retards who brought it upon themselves.
Wrong again. It was more like 7%. It could have been 70%, but we took Sadam out of Power before he could kill everyone else.
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Umm, don't forget that he didn't actually commit the murders. He hired them.
Still a murderer. That he didn't actually pull the trigger (or rather, launch the chemical weapons) himself doesn't somehow make him innocent of the murders that occured specificially because he demanded they take place.
And quite frankly, thats in the power of a president. If Bush wanted, he'd have you arrested by the FBI, have you Haebus Corpus taken away from you and then have you killed for whatever reason he wanted. Heck, he has the right to order a nuclear strike, have a soldier killed on the battle fields and heaps of crap.
Even if it is the power of a president, which it isn't, capability does not give justification. That's like saying that if you own a gun you can shoot anyone or anything you like. Obviously not the case. That Bush is also willing to abuse his power doesn't justify Saddam, it shows that Bush is also unforgivably unjust.
Saddam did what he did. He may have been a dictator, but don't forget that 70% of Iraqi's supported him. The other 30% were retards who brought it upon themselves.
That's a wonderfully magical number. People that don't support a barbarous madman in his constant abuse of his power aren't retards who deserve torture and death. They are the just people that are the basis of any free society. Better a society filled with those that rage against tyranny than one filled with retards who support it, and thus, bring it upon themselves.
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Wow. Someone on this topic has posted the dumbest thing he has ever posted on the entire forum.
I don’t think you give enough credit to some of the dumb things people have posted on the Compendium over the years.
Umm, don't forget that he didn't actually commit the murders. He hired them. And quite frankly, thats in the power of a president. If Bush wanted, he'd have you arrested by the FBI, have you Haebus Corpus taken away from you and then have you killed for whatever reason he wanted. Heck, he has the right to order a nuclear strike, have a soldier killed on the battle fields and heaps of crap.
Wrong sir, wrong. In America, we have Congress to prevent things like that. Hell, we have the Bill of Rights to protect our freedoms.
I would like to be able to agree with you, but your assessment is more idealistic than practical. Ever since September 11, the Republican Congress has entirely rejected its obligation to keep a check on the administration. Dubya could do no wrong, as far as they were concerned. In truth, he did everything wrong. Many of us watched on with dismay as the Republicans steadfastly ignored that. Then you guys finally lost the elections, and started turning on one another to explain what had gone wrong. I'll tell you what went wrong: You actually believed all the lies whistled at you by pied pipers like Bill O’Reilly and James Dobson. Meanwhile, your leaders were whisking us off to Hell in a hand basket. Deficits, Plan B, Plan D, Katrina, Iraq…all that shit adds up.
I know history. Congressional oversight of an administration is always kinder and more tolerant when a single party is in control. Nonetheless, “kinder and more tolerant” is an understatement for these past few sessions’ neglect of their duty to uphold the Constitution. What Congress has shown us since 2001 is that we do not have Congress to protect us from the dictatorial leanings of an administration. Nominally, and usually, we do, but when the ingredients are mixed just right, these checks and balances cease to function. In this case, we suffered a major terrorist attack during the rule of a single political party that happened to be dominated by religious fundamentalists. Presto. It might not be the only recipe, but we have hereby discovered a scenario under which the American democratic system fails. The direct repercussions of these past few years will ring on throughout most of our natural lives.
You know how I could go on about the dangers of religious fanatics. You believe it too, nightmare—just replace “Christian” with “Muslim.” But I’ll spare you yet another rendition of that tirade.
Umm, don't forget that he didn't actually commit the murders. He hired them. And quite frankly, thats in the power of a president. If Bush wanted, he'd have you arrested by the FBI, have you Haebus Corpus taken away from you and then have you killed for whatever reason he wanted. Heck, he has the right to order a nuclear strike, have a soldier killed on the battle fields and heaps of crap.
Despite the tactlessness of what you wrote, you raise some good points. The excesses of government that you attribute to Bush—nearly all true, by the way—account for people like Radical_Dreamer who are so wary of governmental authority over and pervasiveness in our lives.
I don’t share that wariness myself; I think a successful modern nation requires extensive government, and that a well-written national charter will insulate a good system against bad leadership and deleterious cultural movements. The United States has done this quite remarkably well in the past, within the limit of the context of history. Britain and northern Europe have done even better.
Nevertheless, whatever I might think, there are many who think differently, and the complaint you espouse above is at the root of much popular suspicion of government. So you do have a point there.
Where you do not have a point is to excuse whatever Saddam may have done by alleging that Bush has done worse. Bush has done worse than Saddam, and, as of December 31, 2006, his Iraq war now claims more American deaths than even the full official death toll of September 11. This is to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths resulting from our bungled occupation, the destabilization of the entire Middle East, the permanent damage to American prestige, and our inconceivable financial losses that will ultimately burden every one of us. But be that as it may, a just society does not try to defend its arguments by the tu quoque logical fallacy. Therefore, whatever Bush may have done is irrelevant in the determination of what penalty might have been just for Saddam.
Saddam did what he did. He may have been a dictator, but don't forget that 70% of Iraqi's supported him. The other 30% were retards who brought it upon themselves.
I don’t buy your statistics. However, I also don’t buy the more popular American vilification of him. All of this strikes me as propaganda. The fact of the matter is that, were dictatorship our concern, we could have picked from plenty of countries that had the tyrant bug worse than Iraq’s government. Ditto, were human rights abuses our concern, we would have had to invade quite the menagerie of failed countries before getting to Iraq—which itself was hardly a “failed country” prior to the first Gulf War—the point in time at which our fixation upon that nation began.
American critics of Saddam like to squawk about rape rooms, mustard gas, and acid vats, and for them that is the end of the discussion as to whether we should have removed him from power (and ultimately hanged him). But, as is typical of the right wing, this gross oversimplification, spiced with a dash of shameless prevarication, precludes such people from ever achieving a workable understanding of what Iraq was really like under Saddam.
So, even though I don’t agree with what you said, I like the point that you raise. People of good conscience must accept the unsavory truth that, yes, in all likelihood there was some serious crimes committed by the Iraqi government, but that not even the whole sum of these crimes taken at once was enough to justify the invasion of a sovereign nation. You have to weigh the crimes that occurred as a direct result of malice or incompetence at the highest levels of Iraq’s government, against everything else that Iraq was.
First of all, and most importantly, there was all of this seething sectarian fundamentalism, held in check by Saddam’s secular administration. That beast of Islamic fanatics, now unleashed, has proven far more ruinous to the lives, limbs, and livelihoods of the Iraqi people than Saddam’s government ever was. Could the United States possibly have quashed that Islamic fanaticism without a full-scale occupation and reconstruction effort not seen since the mid-twentieth century? We opened a real can of worms!
Likewise, not every misdeed in Iraq was at the command of Saddam Hussein. Much of it was not governmental at all. Of what was governmental, there was greater corruption in the lower levels of government—less opulent than Uday’s disgusting extravagances, but more relevant to the Iraqi people. This became evident in the aftermath of the war, when, once the central government broke down, Iraqi society collapsed into near oblivion. Again, this should have been a warning sign against invasion. Institutionalized ineptitude further down the chain of command cuts off the discussion of invasion, because it is more just in such a case to work the diplomatic channels and cooperate with the central government to institute reforms. If nothing else, we once again should have been prepared for a full-scale occupation and reconstruction effort. We weren’t. Bush not only encouraged Americans to spend more money during the war; he even cut taxes to help them do it. He did that in wartime. In that regard, our decision to remove Saddam was particularly devastating not simply to Iraq but to the United States especially.
We could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, and trillions of dollars, with a smarter Iraq policy. Saddam was not the depraved and perverted caricature that American propaganda made him out to be. Life in Iraq under him was more stable and prosperous, and liberal, than that of most of the rest of the Middle East, prior to the first Gulf War. Those Americans (and others) who try to imagine Iraq under Saddam and can see only rape rooms, mustard gas, and acid vats, are beholden to a fantasy concocted by the neoconservative movement, in cahoots with the Bush administration and the right-wing noise machine. The real Iraq under Saddam was a much better place than that.
Which leads me to a real truth: You are almost certainly wrong that that “30 percent” of Iraqis, whatever their true number may have been, brought their own misfortunes upon them by not supporting Saddam. Quite the contrary: The government probably disenfranchised those people. Some of them were no doubt oppressed, and a few really were tortured, abused, and so forth. It is a bit disgusting of you to blame them for the abuses of their own government.
However, as I pointed out, you are definitely right that Iraq under Saddam was better than many Americans realize—an inconvenient truth which delegitimizes our invasion of that country, and makes us implicitly responsible for all the chaos and death that has befallen Iraq since 2003.
Like I say from time to time, the real truth is always simple but only sometimes pleasant.
It's the same old thing. The powerful tyrants rule, and the weaker ones are hanged. Like in the second World War. Did Churchill hang at Nurnburg? Hardly.
That is a particularly intellectually vapid comparison. Churchill was many things, but he was never a “tyrant.” The poor fool—having served his purpose as Britain’s war champion—was voted out of office (quite peacefully) shortly after World War II.
A head of government is not automatically a tyrant. Your attention to classic Greek history, indeed, should remind you of the subtleties in the etymology and meaning of words.
I don't know enough to be able to say - but likely as not there are those within the US political system that deserve an equal share, yet are protected by what remains a fortune favourable to their power.
Well, I do know, and you’re right—not necessarily that anybody deserves to hang, but that many people in positions of power and influence deserve instead to be flattened beneath the heel of justice. Colorful metaphors aside, though, most actual punishments would more appropriately end with jail time and monetary fines—not death, and certainly not hanging.
Perhaps if we were to hang all leaders at the end of their term, we would attract the megalomaniacs that positions of power seem to attract these days. Impractical, but a thought.
I am certain you miswrote at least some of that. How much, though, I can’t say.
My guess is Saddam is alive. His death had been faked and someone was bribed. Saddam resides on some private island or something...
Unlikely.
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Wow, you bring up some great points J. I actually agree with you for once.
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Yes, that was a typo. I had intended to speculate on whether executing all heads of state after their term would stop destructive megalomaniacs from being drawn to the power in the first place. It was not meant as a serious comment, however.
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(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v489/Wes_Janson/smallsnap.gif)
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Yes, Saddam is still alive and is actually hiding on some private island with Elvis, Hitler, and Fidel Castro.
Not to forget Kurt Cobain.