Saddam: A War Trophy: for the ‘New Empire’

by David Jones / January 2007 issue of Socialist Action Newspaper

Imperial Rome dragged its captured Britons, Celts, and Africans to Rome for public humiliation and killing. Imperial America kidnapped Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega and brought him to the U.S., where he has been entombed in a Florida prison since 1989.

Saddam Hussein was hanged in Baghdad on Dec. 30 by Iraqi executioners, while the American overlords discreetly kept their distance—reminiscent, perhaps, of Imperial Romans in the subjugated province of Palestine some 2000 years ago, who ingenuously washed their hands of the matter and let their indigenous collaborators take the rap for crucifying a local agitator.

Of course, the legend of the Prince of Peace, as it has been handed down to us, does not accord with the responsibility for a multitude of tortures and deaths attributed to Iraq’s former chief executive. But imperial practices among subject peoples have a remarkable continuity.

Commenting on the earlier capture of Saddam and his triumphant transport to a Baghdad prison by exultant American forces, the socialist journalist Tariq Ali wrote, “Parading a captured prisoner in this fashion is the new model of imperialism. The latter-day equivalent of how barbarian chieftains were paraded in ancient Rome, prior to their execution.”

Saddam and Noriega were nurtured by British and American imperialism, collaborated with the CIA, and were installed as American goons serving their time as oppressors until they attempted to exercise some degree of national sovereignty independent of their masters.

Their origins as thugs and enforcers for their imperial masters were far from unique. Britain’s Ugandan proconsul, Idi Amin, fresh from assisting the British army in crushing the so-called “Mau-Mau” rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s, was trained at the renowned Sandhurst military academy before he was re-deployed to his native country.

General Pinochet, the CIA’s principal Chilean asset in the 1970s, lived into his nineties without ever being tried for the kidnapping, torture, and murder he directed with the guidance of the U.S. government.

The transparent fiction that Saddam was hanged for his crimes against humanity persuades very few. Saddam was hanged for making a deal to sell Iraqi oil to European customers without the permission of the U.S. petro-imperialists, and for other attempts to break out of the British-American oil monopoly.

Did Saddam deserve to die? Who “deserves” to die? That question can only be answered by reference to religion. The Bolsheviks were forced to resort to capital punishment during the Russian Civil War. Sentence was rendered as a military necessity, not moral judgment. The participants in a civil war, Trotsky said, are not deterred by lesser penalties because they expect to win the war, rendering previously assessed punishment a nullity.

The decay of capitalist society gradually is reviving the most repellent and submerged practices of the past and reinventing them for the present. The revolting spectacle of Saddam’s execution circulated on worldwide television, and the personal abuse directed at the condemned prisoner by his captors is reminiscent of the brutal orchestration of public punishment that disappeared for the most part, at least in the modern world, in the 19th century.

In a gruesome regression, the Nazis, after taking state power, indulging their demented fantasies about a glorious Teutonic past, reintroduced beheading in 1933.

Perhaps more pertinent, their postwar conquerors asserted the moral right to try a few selected captives for crimes against humanity, while the war crimes tribunals remained silent on the Allies’ massive destruction of civilian life by the indiscriminate bombing of enemy cities and working-class neighborhoods.

Capital punishment is spectacle; an act of official intimidation and terror directed not so much against the victim as against the spectators. As the relative weight of the urban proletariat grew in industrial society over the past 200 years, the mood of spectators at public executions began to shift towards sympathy towards the condemned prisoner, with underlying rumblings of popular insurrection, eventually driving the spectacle indoors and removed from sight of the masses.

The brutality marshaled around Saddam’s hanging has repulsed many throughout the world who had no sympathy for the deposed dictator, not only for its intrinsic ugliness, but because it is seen by many as a portent of the direction of the post-Soviet-era American colossus.

Meanwhile, the greatest criminals on the planet remain mired in the catastrophic disaster of their own creation in the tortured country of Iraq. No one has yet called them to the bar of justice, but the great engine of the class struggle will inevitably resume its historic course as the masses of the world turn in horror from the death and destruction let loose by the insatiable greed of the profit system. They may find another use for Saddam’s rope.