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Its In! Saddam to be hanged NLT 27 Jan 07

Black Watch said:
Look at all those criminals, such as Milosevic and Pinochet, whom were not trialed for their murders. So please, stop making fun of different opinions.

Were those 2 people in Iraq ?  The Iraqis dealt wit Sadam in their own way ( which was alot more fair and just than what sadam ever gave anyone)....Who are you to criticize how they did it. Are you going to criticize the Roumanians too ?
 
Black Watch said:
i do not have to take your insults (I'm not trolling). I was just saying (perhaps I didn't made my point clear enough) that for a democratic country, they might have waitted for other trials to be carrid our. He was a human being after all. Yes yes, I know and I agree to those that say that he was a nasty bastard. I also think that it's not fair. Look at all those criminals, such as Milosevic and Pinochet, whom were not trialed for their murders. So please, stop making fun of different opinions.

So how many death sentences should he have?  What is the point?  Were you hoping for more judges, lawyers and prosecutors to get killed during the other trials?  Did you thing that there would be some good served by the expense and danger to the security detail that was employed for keeping him around?  Were you hoping that if somehow he got freed, and there would be a cool cat and mouse chase across Iraq that would make a great docu-drama?  Would his existence as a rallying point for some of the resistance be a good reason to keep him alive longer?  Are we so disdainful of the Iraqi people that we here in Castle North America should be able to look down our noses at them and decide what is good justice or not? 
This one isn't going to work out for you. 
 
Black Watch said:
He was a human being after all. Yes yes, I know and I agree to those that say that he was a nasty *******. I also think that it's not fair. Look at all those criminals, such as Milosevic and Pinochet, whom were not trialed for their murders. So please, stop making fun of different opinions.

A human being??? Please give it a break! He was a socialpath, and a murdering monster. He was found guilty in his own country, by his countrymen. Its none of our business. He was buried in a plywood coffin, carried in the back of a 1/4T small truck. Next you'll be whinging that he should have had a state funeral.

"Please stop making fun of different opinions"

Are you for real?  :o

Do you want me to call you a whaaaaambulance?

BW, I am not making fun of anything, I am dead serious.

Time to let your balls drop pal, or at least give ém a squeeze for a shot of testosterone!

(shakes head)

Wes
 
Black Watch said:
i do not have to take your insults (I'm not trolling). I was just saying (perhaps I didn't made my point clear enough) that for a democratic country, they might have waitted for other trials to be carrid our. He was a human being after all. Yes yes, I know and I agree to those that say that he was a nasty bastard. I also think that it's not fair. Look at all those criminals, such as Milosevic and Pinochet, whom were not trialed for their murders. So please, stop making fun of different opinions.

::)

Maybe if Milosevic and Pinochet where executed for their crimes the worl dwould be a better place.
 
 
Saddam deserved to die.  As far as I'm concerned the execution should have been done during GW1.

I think he should have stood trial for more of his crimes, but I see why the Iraqis wanted to get it over with (his execution).  He's been in custody for a couple years, it was time to put him down and let the Iraqis move on.

I've met several Iraqis who spent time being tortured under his system and also heard from others of friends/family that 'disappeared'.  An electrical engineer had both of his elbows repeatedly snapped so his arms were permanantly bent backwards.. This was part of his incarceration for daring to have a book on communism written in English.

Outside of his ruling circle and hometown, most people are glad he's dead.

 
Iraq's PM orders probe into leaked Saddam video
Updated Tue. Jan. 2 2007 12:58 PM ET CTV.ca News Staff
Article Link

Iraq's prime minister has ordered an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Saddam Hussein's hanging after a damaging cell phone video of the event was leaked to the media.

Sami al-Askar, a close political adviser to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, told The Associated Press that the Iraqi leader had "ordered the formation of an investigative committee in the Interior Ministry to identify who chanted slogans inside the execution chamber and who filmed the execution and sent it to the media."

The unofficial video shows the former dictator moments before his death being taunted with chants of "Muqtada, Muqtada, Muqtada" -- referring to Muqtada al-Sadr, a Shiite cleric who controls one of Iraq's most violent religious militias.

Al-Sadr is a major power behind the government of al-Maliki, a Shiite, who pushed for the speedy execution.

Others can be heard shouting "Go to hell" and trading insults with Saddam before the metal trap door below him opens and he drops to his death. His body is then shown swinging from the rope with his neck clearly broken.

The official video released by the Iraqi government shows a hangman talking to a composed Saddam as he placed the noose around his neck. There is no audio in that version and it does not show Saddam's actual death.

Munqith al-Faroon, an Iraqi prosecutor who worked to convict Saddam of genocide, was among the small group of witnesses who saw the hanging.

"Two top officials... had their mobile phones with them (at the execution). There were no mobile phones allowed at that time," he told AP.
More on link
 
cdnaviator said:
Were those 2 people in Iraq ?  The Iraqis dealt wit Sadam in their own way ( which was alot more fair and just than what sadam ever gave anyone)....Who are you to criticize how they did it. Are you going to criticize the Roumanians too ?
who am I? Well, I study foreign poluitics in Université de Montréal
 
Black Watch said:
who am I? Well, I study foreign poluitics in Université de Montréal

Really? Well, maybe some would take you more seriously if you'd stayed at a Holiday Inn last night.

Their system did what it did. Saddam's dead, and he damned well deserved it. I never understood why we spent thousands of dollars on trials that result in multiple life sentences, or the Americans on multiple death sentences.

You can only kill the guy once. Quick and clean, which is more than can be said for many who were under his thumb.
 
Black Watch said:
who am I? Well, I study foreign poluitics in Université de Montréal

Well i'm sorry, i didnt realise that it gave you more insight into Iraqi justice than the Iraqi people themselves. I study political science as well, should i go over to the US now to tell them thier system is messed up or just wait for later?
 
cdnaviator said:
Well i'm sorry, i didnt realise that it gave you more insight into Iraqi justice than the Iraqi people themselves. I study political science as well, should i go over to the US now to tell them thier system is messed up or just wait for later?



Just tell them now.  ;D
 
Black Watch said:
who am I? Well, I study foreign poluitics in Université de Montréal

The difference between school and real life... are huge.

And I speak from experience  -  M.Div does not prepare you for real life in ministry.

Education is no substitute for practical experience.
 
According to this Spectator article, Saddam could have used a little more education...


Like Stalin, but more Stupid:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/online-edition/elsewhere/27139/like-stalin-but-more-stupid.thtml
 
daftandbarmy said:
According to this Spectator article, Saddam could have used a little more education...


Like Stalin, but more Stupid:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/online-edition/elsewhere/27139/like-stalin-but-more-stupid.thtml

Not having a subscription, there is really little to read there.
 
Once more with feeling...

Like Stalin, but more stupid
Niall Ferguson


Only a minority of modern dictators have been executed for their crimes. The most bloodthirsty of all, Stalin and Mao, died in full possession of their powers, if not their faculties. Franco pulled off the same trick. Hitler cheated the hangman with a bullet in the bunker. Pol Pot lost power, but was never brought to justice and died in his bed, as did Idi Amin.

Slobodan Milosevic stood trial for his crimes, but died of a heart attack in March with 50 hours of testimony still to be heard. Augusto Pinochet, too, suffered the indignity of arrest; three weeks ago he also expired naturally before prosecution could even begin. Suharto is another fallen dictator who has avoided standing trial on the grounds of ill health. And let's not forget that dwindling band of dictators who are still alive and in power: Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe and Muammar Gaddafi.

Dictators, by definition, have absolute power. For a dictator to end his life hanging from a rope, or facing a firing squad, therefore requires a rather rare combination of wickedness and stupidity: enough of the former to incur the hatred of his countrymen, enough of the latter to take on armies mightier than his own. Both these qualities Saddam Hussein possessed in abundance. That is why, in the wake of his execution at dawn yesterday morning, he deserves to be remembered as the Mussolini of Mesopotamia — if not the Ceausescu of Baghdad.

These were not, of course, Saddam's intended role models. Even before he came to power, he boasted to KGB agents in Iraq of the admiration he felt for Stalin. And the majority of his crimes were perpetrated in an authentically Stalinist spirit of paranoia and sadism. The atrocity for which Saddam Hussein was hanged — the murder in 1982 of 148 Shias in the town of Dujail — was only one of many murderous acts directed, like so many of Stalin's crimes, against supposedly unreliable ethnic groups.

As Stalin persecuted the Poles and Ukrainians of the Soviet Union, so Saddam hounded the Shias and Kurds of Iraq. Among his worst crimes was the so-called "Anfal" ("Spoils") campaign he launched against the latter in 1988. Thousands died as poison gas and other weapons were deployed against Kurdish towns like Halabja. Even more Kurds and Shias were killed in the wake of their 1991 revolt.

Saddam shared more than a few traits with his hero Stalin. Like Stalin, his origins were humble (he was a shepherd's son from Tikrit). Like Stalin, he was attracted as much to nationalism as to socialism, which made the Ba'ath Party his natural political home. Like Stalin, he had no fear of revolutionary violence; indeed, he was wounded in the leg during an abortive Ba'athist rising in 1959. And, like Stalin, he rose through the party ranks until powerful enough to establish a ruthless dictatorship.

As Deputy President after the 1968 Ba'athist coup, Saddam brought to Iraq an authentically Stalinist combination of modernisation and repression. Under his direction, revenues from the newly nationalised oil industry were poured into education and infrastructure. At the same time, however, he tightened his grip on both party and army. Having forced his way to the presidency in July 1979, he gathered together the leading members of the Ba'ath Party and read out the names of 68 people he suspected of disloyalty. Each was immediately arrested. After being tried for treason, in true Stalinist fashion, 22 of them were executed. A pattern of exemplary terror was soon established that owed as much to The Godfather as to "Koba the Dread" (Stalin's nickname). One minister who ventured to criticise Saddam was literally diced up and presented to his own widow.

The People's Army — the military wing of the Ba'ath Party — and the Mukhabarat (Department of Intelligence) were his chosen instruments for terrorising real and imagined opponents. The facade of legitimacy was provided by a classic personality cult. The gargantuan statues, the garish murals, the bombastic propaganda: all were taken from the 1930s Soviet playbook.

Yet Stalin would never have been as stupid as Saddam was — to pit his own army not once but twice against the most powerful military in the world.

The first mistake was perhaps understandable. Between 1980 and 1988, Saddam had tried and failed to annex the Iranian province of Khuzestan. Weighed down by war debts, he turned his eye to neighbouring Kuwait. The United States was at best equivocal in its support of the Kuwaitis in the months before Saddam's invasion; indeed, President George H W Bush seemed to Margaret Thatcher to be "going wobbly" even after Iraqi troops had crossed the border. Yet Saddam had fatally miscalculated. The collapse of Soviet power after the fall of the Berlin Wall meant that he could no longer play one superpower off against the other. Facing a clear-cut ultimatum from the UN Security Council, Saddam should have backed down. Instead he fought — and was thrashed.

Saddam's second and ultimately fatal blunder was downright stupid. In George W Bush he faced an antagonist very different in temper from the elder President Bush; a leader persuaded by his advisers that Saddam's overthrow was desirable in three ways: as retaliation for the terrorist attacks of 9/11 (though Iraqi complicity was conspicuous by its absence); as pre-emption before Saddam acquired weapons of mass destruction (though the evidence for their existence was woefully thin); and as proof of the superiority of democracy over dictatorship (though history offered no evidence that democracy could be imposed at gunpoint in the Middle East). Saddam had been Bush-whacked once; to suffer the same fate twice was worse than carelessness. Rather than confess that his WMD programmes had been abandoned in the 1990s, he continued to bluff, apparently ruling out the possibility that Bush Jnr was hell-bent on invading Iraq, with or without UN backing.

Today, of course, we can look back and understand Saddam's miscalculation better. In Saddam's eyes, as in the eyes of Bush Snr, the lesson of history was that the alternative to Saddam was civil war, not democracy. The US had stopped short of regime change in 1991 and had cynically left the Shias and Kurds to face Saddam's wrath, having initially urged them to rise up in revolt. All that has happened since 2003 has vindicated those who argued that, without Saddam's iron fist, Iraq would disintegrate, not democratise. The dictator's nemesis proved to be a president so naive that he did not even know the difference between Sunni and Shia.

The decline and fall of Saddam Hussein has been too tawdry to pass muster as a Shakespearian tragedy. Its protagonist was too crass a character, more Don Corleone than Coriolanus. This play has been part Marlowe, part Brecht: a cross between The Massacre at Paris and The Threepenny Opera. Like the Duc de Guise in Marlowe's bloodthirsty drama, Saddam was responsible for more than enough mass murder to justify his own violent end. Unlike Macheath in Brecht's musical, Saddam was not pardoned in the last minute before his execution, but his death seems to pose a version of Brecht's old question: "Who is the bigger criminal: he who robs a bank, or he who founds one?"

In the same spirit, we may ask ourselves who is the bigger criminal: he who tyrannises a people, or he who first bankrolls the tyrant — and then replaces his tyranny with anarchy?

For Saddam's career would have taken a very different course had he not, at vital times, received support as well as opposition from the United States. He was given training by the CIA in Egypt following the abortive coup of 1959. Though Iraq appeared to be drifting into the Soviet orbit in the early 1970s, Saddam won favour in Washington for purging the Iraqi Communists. After 1979, he received copious quantities of arms and aid to prosecute his war of aggression against Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran.

President Bush yesterday described Saddam's execution as "an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the War on Terror". Another way of regarding it is as just the latest of tens of thousands of acts of vengeance perpetrated by Iraqis against other Iraqis since the American invasion.

The dictator is dead, hoist by the petard of his own Stalinist cruelty and Mussolini-like miscalculation. But Iraq's road towards democratic stability has a very long way still to run. If every milestone is an execution, it will be a hellish highway indeed.

Niall Ferguson is Laurence A Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University www.niallferguson.org

 
Black Watch said:
who am I? Well, I study foreign poluitics in Université de Montréal

Bloody hell, its just 0645h here in Baghdaddy, its cold and crappy out, and you have made me laugh, not with you, but at you.

Do you want a medal or something? Feeling special are we? Does being a foreign POLUITICS 'student expert' give you a special qualification of the school of real life in real time in a real war? The media and people like you, are the main problem why we cannot prosecute this war the way it should be.

What does being a student (and one with an attitude at that) have to do with the topic at hand? Keep your day job.

Before you go any further, if you can't even spell the subject you are taking, something is wrong.

Stop the press! Another live wire as entered the ring.


Shaking head and smiling,

Wes

EDITed for clarity
 
Wesley (Over There) said:
Bloody hell, its just 0645h here in Baghdaddy, its cold and crappy out, and you have made me laugh, not with you, but at you.

Do you want a medal or something? Feeling special are we?

What does being a student (and one with an attitude at that) have todo with the topic at hand?

Before you go any further, if you can't even spell the subject you are taking, something is wrong.

Stop the press! Another live wire as entered the ring.


Shaking head and smiling,

Wes
truly sorry if I'm francophone
 
what I find realy weird is that Saddam was kept under the cusdity of the Americans...
 
Black Watch said:
truly sorry if I'm francophone

You do not need to apologize for that here.
We do have a spell checker feature to help you out however.

 
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