The Significance of the Assassination of Saddam by the New World Order

The brutal execution of Saddam, which took the form of a kind of lynching at the hands of religious irrationalists representing the Iraqi “government”, was in fact, as I will try to show below, a judicial assassination organised by the transnational elite and the occupiers in particular. However, in view of the colossal and systematic misinformation effort launched by the transnational elite[1] and the international mass media (assisted by the reformist Left in its usual role of keeping equal distances from oppressor and oppressed), it is particularly important to examine the real aim behind this act. As I will try to show, this aim has nothing to do with the punishment of a dictator, a criminal tyrant and so on, something that would imply that a similar fate should have befallen other local despots in the past with a much worse background—the list is endless: Spain’s Franco, Indonesia's Suharto, Chile’s Pinochet, to mention just a representative example from each of these continents. In fact, the real aim of this despicable act was not at all the assassination of a person -- even if this person was a well-known peripheral nationalist despot involved in the usual “localised” political crimes also carried out by other similar despots, which of course bear no comparison to the genuine international crimes against humanity carried out every day by the transnational elite. The real aim was the assassination of any notion that peoples can live as autonomous entities determining their own fate.

The process used by the transnational elite in Iraq was exactly the same as that which was used so successfully to destroy Yugoslavia, and it made clear the fact that the system of representative “democracy” could easily be manipulated by external forces to push peoples divided by various irrationalisms--either religious (Iraq), or nationalist (Yugoslavia)-- into catastrophic civil wars. These wars invariably end up with the destruction of the countries concerned and their transformation into protectorates of the transnational elite. However, the messages that were sent across by this act (as well as by the attempted similar judicial assassination of Milosevic who, however, died before the completion of the process), were particularly revealing of the way the “civilised” capitalist West of today appreciates “democracy”, “freedom” and human life –values which, in the utterly distorted form in which it has assimilated them, it has the nerve to export all over the planet. Furthermore, the messages sent across were aimed to be received not only by the peoples concerned but also by the elites of so-called “rogue” regimes. The clear message sent to these elites was that what they risked losing by not proving themselves to be ready to ‘play the game’ according to the rules set out by the transnational elite was not only their power, or even their personal freedom, but their own lives as well!

1. Why was it a judicial assassination?

Saddam’s trial was promoted by the transnational elite and the world media controlled by it as the first completed trial (in contrast to the unfinished trial of Milosevic) since the end of the Second World War in which “a tyrant and his henchmen” were judged for crimes against humanity. However, not only did the trial proceedings constitute pure farce -- as was recognised even by transnational NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch,[2] which of course have nothing to do with the radical Left and particularly the anti-systemic Left, being directly or indirectly financed by the transnational elite -- and not only was the trial condemned as a travesty of a fair trial by the UN's human rights chief in Iraq, but the trial itself was also History repeating itself as farce. The comparison of the trial of Nazi criminals in Nuremberg to the trial of Saddam in Baghdad is itself ridiculous and clearly shows the level of barbarity and criminality that the elites have reached in the New World Order (NWO).

In Nuremberg, the main charge faced by Nazi criminals was that they launched an aggressive world war that cost tens of millions of lives all over the world. In this sense, one could readily find justification for an international court of justice, which, under the rules of international law, would try them. On the other hand, in Baghdad, it was not the real war criminals -- Bush, Cheney, Blair and Co -- who were sitting in the dock, even though it was they who launched an aggressive war and were directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of well over a million people in Iraq (including the victims of sanctions-mostly children), tens of thousands in Afghanistan as well as thousands in their own countries (bombings in New York, London, Madrid etc). Instead, the person who was sitting in the dock was the victim of an illegal invasion, albeit a political criminal himself, but on a much smaller scale. Furthermore, this pathetic local despot who was only capable of launching local wars of a nationalist nature, and who could in no way threaten the world --as the present-day Goebbelses in the transnational elite had accused him of trying to do, proving themselves to be the blatant liars that they are—was not even condemned to death for his major crime of launching a catastrophic, aggressive war against Iran. Instead, he was executed for killing those he suspected of organising an assassination attempt against him, as if a similar attempt by, say, US anarchists against Bush would have been dealt with less harshly! At the same time, the people really responsible for the destruction of these countries and the threat to the lives of their citizens for many years to come due to the inevitable response of the resistance, (which has flourished as a result of the mass crimes they committed), were holidaying on their luxury ranches and villas. It is, therefore, obvious that there was no justification at all for an international court (let alone the kangaroo court that was set up in Baghdad) to try the elected representative of the people of an occupied country, because this was the exclusive responsibility of the Iraqi people—provided, of course, that they were free of any foreign domination (let alone the present occupation which makes any such trial a cruel joke).

As regards the tragi-comic proceedings of the trial itself, it is doubtful today whether anybody, apart from those in the direct pay of the transnational elite, would deny the fact that the process through which Saddam was condemned and brutally executed not only had nothing to do with a democratic trial, but did not even meet the minimal requirements imposed by the present system of representative “democracy”. Here are some of the facts confirmed by the NGOs and journalists who make it clear that this was a pre-planned judicial assassination:

The court that made the decision was in fact a kangaroo court set up by the US occupiers and therefore outside Iraq's established legal structure; in fact, it was US viceroy Paul Bremer who appointed its judges, in direct contravention of international law.
The trial itself was subjected to continuous political interference and the presiding judge, Rizgar Mohammed Amin, was forced to resign in January 2006 under political pressure[3] when MPs denounced him and demanded his resignation, in essence, because he was not sufficiently co-operative with the political elite and the occupiers.
Three defence lawyers were killed — possibly by Shia death squads, linked to the interior ministry or to Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army — and others were attacked by gunmen, while another lawyer was forced to flee abroad. And the victims were not only defence lawyers. As a recent Leader in the Independent put it: “Even with the Americans running the show, maintaining the semblance of a fair trial seemed, at times, a daily struggle. The mortality rate among judges, lawyers and witnesses was appalling.”[4]
Important evidence was not disclosed to the defence lawyers during the trial, and Saddam was prevented from questioning witnesses, who were testifying anonymously (!) against him. Furthermore, Saddam's defence lawyers were given less than two weeks to file their appeals against a 300-page court decision, and the trial judgment was not finished when the sentence was pronounced.
Jalal Talabani, Saddam's successor as Iraq's “president” of the puppet regime in Iraq, had declared at the beginning of the trial on Iraqi television that "Saddam Hussein is a war criminal and he deserves to be executed 20 times a day for his crimes against humanity." Also, the so –called “prime minister” of the puppet regime, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, said repeatedly that he favoured Saddam's swift execution.[5] No wonder that before the sentencing session began, former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark was ejected from the courtroom after handing the judge a note in which he called the trial a "travesty".

One could only, therefore, agree with Sadakat Kadri, a distinguished lawyer and author of The Trial: A History from Socrates to OJ Simpson, who, upon seeing the judicial assassination being planned, wrote half way through the trial:

The hanging to come will signify nothing but sleight of hand. A more fitting tribute to the tragedy unleashed by Operation Iraqi Freedom would be Saddam's head, shot through the temple and stuck on a pole, with nary a human-rights lawyer in sight.[6]

2. Why was it an assassination by the NWO?

The trial was promoted by the transnational elite and particularly the neoconservatives in the US and the social-fascists of the British “New” labour party as a kind of demonstration of Iraqi sovereignty, carried out by Iraqis. In fact, none of this is true. The puppet regime in Baghdad controls only the Green Zone secured for them by the overwhelming firepower of the military superpower, and outside this zone 120 Iraqis are officially being killed every day according to the latest UN count, mostly at the hands of sectarian militias. The transnational elite exercises only nominal control over the country (apart from its real control of oil!) through the government in Baghdad which survives only through the occupiers’ protection. Contrary to the transnational elite’s propaganda, the development of this sectarian conflict was not an unfortunate turn of unforeseeable events, but one deliberately brought about by the actions of the transnational elite.

This elite was well aware of the fact that, after the dismantling of the Baathist regime (which it systematically carried out as soon as the occupation began for reasons that will become clear in the next section), which was based on a secular state, the religious Shia majority, in coalition with the nationalist Kurds, would be keen to take part in the “democratic” process. However, the only Shia and Kurdish aim in doing so was to secure their dominance over the Sunnis, who were established as a dominant minority by British colonialists in the aftermath of the First World War. In other words, the dismantling of the secular state – the existence of which is a necessary precondition for the very maintenance of a state in a country like Iraq divided by all sorts of religious irrationalisms (Shias, Sunnis, Christians, Jews etc) -- inevitably implied the resurrection of all sorts of irrationalisms (religious and nationalist) which had been kept under control before.

The occupiers, therefore, having dismantled the Baathist regime and after excluding Baathists from taking part in the electoral process, had no other option in the pursuit of their main objective to secure control of the Iraqi government but to organise parliamentary elections, in the sure knowledge that these elections would take a sectional character and would therefore rule out any Baathist return. So, despite their present hypocritical “desperation” at the present situation in Iraq, the occupiers were well aware of the fact that the election result would inevitably lead to the eruption of a civil conflict, which would not only make any elected government powerless to govern without the protection of the occupiers, but would also preclude any possibility of the resistance against them becoming powerful enough to throw them out of the country, as the Vietcong did in the 1970s.

So, there could be no doubt that the setting up of the trial, its political supervision and the organisation of Saddam’s execution itself were carried out by the US occupiers, even though the actual execution was left to the religious Shias in the government in collaboration with nationalist Kurds—the latter seeing their political “independence” in terms of a kind of protectorate of the transnational and Zionist elites. An official recognition of this fact (for those who still need such confirmation!) was given by a senior US military source who recently stated, "we are still in charge. The Iraqi government is a façade."[7] And of course, witnesses to the execution were flown in by American helicopters, Saddam was held in US custody right up to the end and only handed over to the Iraqis for the horrible deed itself, while his body was whisked away immediately afterwards by a US helicopter for a hasty, middle-of-the- night burial—a condition imposed by the US-controlled “security forces”.

And yet, all this was celebrated by the transnational elite as the expression of the will of a truly independent Iraqi court and a sovereign state!

3. What were the aims of the assassination?

There were several aims that motivated the transnational elite and, correspondingly, several messages that were sent across to various recipients.

The first aim was to crush any movement and notion of resistance to the New World Order, as a necessary means of securing the full integration of the Middle East, with its valuable sources of energy, into the NWO of neoliberal globalisation. The recipients of this message were supposed to be the peoples in the Middle East and their political or military movements which were not prepared to “toe the line” by following the example of various protectorates and dependencies which have already been established in the area. In this sense, the judicial assassination of Saddam had the symbolic significance of the final dismantlement of the Baathist movement, which had always fought for an Arabic socialism spread all over the Arabic world.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the US Congress has provided $128m for the investigations and prosecutions of Ba'athist officials, while the US-established regime crimes liaison office has played a leading role in interviewing "high-value detainees" and preparing evidence.[8] The reasons for this enthusiastic support of the dismantling of the Baathist party are obvious. The Baathist party, and Saddam as deputy to the ailing Baathist leader General Bakr, instituted widespread reforms in the 1970s, among which was the crucial nationalisation of the Iraqi Petroleum Company, which had been set up by British colonialists in order to pump cheap oil to the West. To add salt to the capitalist wound, the Baathists used the soaring oil revenues resulting from the 1973 oil crisis to invest in industry, education and healthcare, raising Iraq's standard of living to one of the highest in the Arab world[9]. Furthermore, Saddam was the one Arab president who continued to uphold the rights of Palestine and the Palestinian people, refusing to bargain over them in return for staying in power.

On the other hand, Saddam personally received the CIA's help in destroying the Iraqi communist party -- killing many communists and their families in the process -- at the time he was on the receiving end of a huge US economic and military package to carry out his war against the Islamic regime in Iran. Although the leadership of the Iraqi communist party played an almost treacherous role with respect to the Gulf War in 1991 and again after the invasion of 2003 when it collaborated with the occupiers, still this does not exonerate Saddam for his crimes against ordinary communist-party members. Neither could he be forgiven for his role in launching an aggressive war against Islamist Iran, when encouraged by the US elite in its effort to destroy the Islamist revolution. This catastrophic war led to 1.7 million Iraqis and Iranians being killed to the great joy of the well-known Zionist, Henry Kissinger, who was reportedly disappointed at the time about the impossibility of both countries losing the war! The dirty role that the US elite played in encouraging Saddam’s grandiose nationalistic plans to launch the war against Iran was, of course, the main reason why he was not tried for this major crime; in fact, during the trial he was not even allowed to comment about it, or about the sale of chemical weapons to his regime by the transnational elite. And yet, the same elite had no qualms about accusing him of using chemical weapons against the Iraqi Kurds when in 1988 some Kurdish guerrilla forces, betraying their country, had joined the Iranian offensive. This, despite the fact that, as it is now known, the CIA -- in the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi war crimes against the Kurds-- told US diplomats in the Middle East to claim that the gas used against the Kurds was dropped by the Iranians rather than the Iraqis![10] However, these events in no way justify the present stand of the Islamist Iranian regime, which sided with the US and the Zionist elite in approving the assassination of Saddam, further enhancing the divisive trends within Iraq and the Arab world in general.

The second aim of the judicial assassination was, as mentioned above, to terrorise not just peoples and movements but also their leaders, even if they belong to the political elites. The old Bush message to the peripheral political leaders of “either you are with us, or against us” is therefore being complemented as follows: “either you are with us, or you are against us and pay the price in terms of your own lives.”

Last, but not least, another clear aim of the judicial assassination was drastically to enhance the divisive trends in Iraq, and possibly in the entire Middle East area, turning Sunnis and Shias against one another, so that the very survival of Iraq as a unified state (even in the form of a loose federation) would simply be impossible without the military support of the transnational elite.

All the above aims seem to be in the process of being achieved at the moment by the transnational elite, although at a potentially heavy price: according to a survey carried out by the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies in November 2006, 89.9 per cent of respondents felt that Iraq was worse today than when Saddam Hussein was in power. Furthermore, just over 50 per cent wanted the multinational forces to leave immediately, with a further 20 per cent declaring that they wanted them to start to leave now on a set timetable.[11] This is not at all surprising, despite the colossal effort by the transnational elite and its media to personalize the conflict. People are well aware now of the fact that, under the secular Baathist regime, they were living peacefully with one another. On the other hand today --even if we accept the wildest reports about the numbers of people murdered by the Saddam regime -- more than 650,000 have died, compared with 210,000 if Saddam had continued murdering at the same pace. This, apart from the fact that ordinary people, under Saddam, were able to cover their basic needs in terms of health, education, electricity, sanitation, etc. relatively easily. Such basic needs have become luxuries for the rich in today’s regime.

One can, therefore, only hope that the Iraqi people, facing the present catastrophe caused by the barbarous invasion and occupation of their country, will eventually be able to transcend their sectarian leaderships and religious irrationalisms and start again by building a truly democratic and secular society, which will not depend on the benevolence of hierarchical parties and tyrannical despots. The alternative is too frightening even to conceive: continuous fraternal conflict and poverty for most of the people, so that the local elites, in direct or indirect collaboration with the transnational elite, may continue with their exploitation of the country’s rich natural resources and their abominable domination over the people, which would gradually lead to the dismantling of the country.

[1] See on the meaning of the transnational elite, “Globalisation, the reformist Left and the Anti-Globalisation ‘Movement’”, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 2001).
[2] Human Rights Watch, Hanging After Flawed Trial Undermines Rule of Law (New York, December 30, 2006)
[3] Guardian Leader (30/12/2006).
[4] “Victor’s Justice”, The Independent on Sunday (31 December 2006).
[5] Michael Howard, “Trial of a dictator that lost the confidence of the international community”, The Guardian (6/11/2007).
[6] Sadakat Kadri, “They'd do better sticking Saddam's head on a pole”, The Guardian (4/4/2006).
[7] Ewen MacAskill & Dan Glaister, “Deadline looms as US toll reaches 3,000”, The Guardian (1/1/2007).
[8] Rory Carroll, “Dictator on trial for his life as Iraqi court faces ultimate test”, The Guardian (19/10/2005).
[9] Even the pro-establishment BBC admits that: see “Saddam’s life and times”, BBC NEWS SERVICE (posted 30/12/2006).
[10] Robert Fisk, “This was a guilty verdict on America as well”, The Independent (06 November 2006).
[11] Adrian Hamilton, “The meaningless execution of a tyrant”, The Independent (28 December 2006).