[Vision2020] Reactions to hanging

[Ted Moffett]

Ralph et. al.

I'm relieved to read your post raising the issue of US culpability in some
of Saddam's worst crimes, given the responses on this topic so far, written
as though the US never aided Saddam during his reign of terror.  Indeed,
a open trial at the International Criminal Court

http://www.icc-cpi.int/home.html&l=en

or a UN tribunal, as Paul suggested, could have thoroughly exposed the US
involvement in assisting Saddam during his years as dictator.

This following article raises many of the salient issues, with
chilling references to the moral principles outlined in the Nuremberg trials
and the moral culpability of those who were complicit with the Nazis.  In
short, we all have blood on our hands:

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1223-11.htm

   *Published on Tuesday, December 23, 2003 by CommonDreams.org *
 *Partners in Crime: US Complicity in the War Crimes of Saddam Hussein *
 *by Paul Rockwell*

 Notwithstanding the upcoming show-trial of Saddam Hussein in Occupied Iraq,
U.S. complicity in the war crimes of its former military ally may well
become the most eye-opening issue facing the international community in the
coming months.

There is a revealing photograph of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with a
known war criminal in 1983-Saddam Hussein. If Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld
were forced to testify at an impartial, international war crimes tribunal,
no doubt he would be asked: "What did you know, and when did you know it?

Of all the conventions in humanitarian law, none is more relevant to
contemporary affairs than the Nuremberg principle: "Complicity in the
commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against
humanity, is a crime under international law."
 The jurists at Nuremberg enacted the law of complicity only after long
deliberations about the essential dynamics of modern war crimes. They
recognized that modern industrial atrocities are collective in nature. War
criminals do not act alone, and their capacity for mass brutality depends on
a supply of sophisticated weapons, business deals, international finance,
contracts and covert shipments, coordination and training, diplomatic
protection, and the winks and nods of international Machiavellian politics.
Nuremberg's farsighted judges codified the complicity principle in order to
protect future generations from the scourge of war and terror.

There is no better interpreter of war crimes, of man's inhumanity to man,
than Hannah Arendt, who published a definitive book on the trial of Adolf
Eichmann in 1963. Eichmann was not a top official in the Nazi Party. He was
a mere accomplice, a bureaucrat who facilitated the deportation of millions
of Jews into the concentration camps. He never pulled a switch, and he kept
a healthy distance from the consequences of his handiwork. As an
administrator who "did his job," made no big decisions, he was still a key
part of the machinery of mass murder. It was not any demonic trait of
Eichmann's personality, but the "banality of evil" that appalled Arendt most
of all.

Arendt warned against sensationalistic accounts of the Holocaust, the
demonization of individual personalities. She called attention to "the
unspeakable horror of the deeds and the ordinariness of the men who
committed them." Impartial, dignified war crime tribunals are not an
occasion for gloating or propaganda. At their best they give voice to all
the victims, produce a complete record for future generations, and help to
prevent more war crimes from taking place. They produce a sense of humility
among all the participants. Triumphalism degrades mankind's memory of
itself.

International accomplices of Saddam Hussein have yet to be arrested, named,
interrogated, much less held accountable for their crimes against peace and
humanity.

The victims of Saddam and his accomplices, Iranians as well as Iraqis, have
a right to know: Who armed Iraq? Who built Saddam's arsenal of terror in the
'80s? They also have a right to interrogate Rumsfeld, other U.S. officials,
CIA agents, and U.S. arms merchants as suspects or witnesses. The executives
of Alcoliac International of Maryland, that transported mustard gas
precursors to Saddam; the Tennessee manufacturers that provided sarin-based
chemicals; the heads of Dow chemical who sold toxins that cause death by
asphyxiation; the heads of Bechtel that produced chemicals for Saddam in
their Iraqi plant; the CIA agents that made covert arms deals and
transported heinous cluster bombs to a known war criminal-all the
participants in Iraq's machine of death should come before an international
court and answer a single question: What did you know, and when did you know
it? It is not just the buyers, it is suppliers of death who are accountable
under the Nuremberg Conventions.

Justice will be served only after the official records of U.S. and European
complicity are made public.

In December 2002, Bush seized 800 incriminating pages of the 2,000-page
Iraqi report to the U.N., pages that contained the names of U.S. companies
that supplied arms to Saddam, including details on weapons, dual-use
technologies, and materials of mass destruction. That censored report, which
rightfully belongs to the victims, not Bush, constitutes a major piece of
evidence for any impartial war crimes tribunal.

The National Security Decision Directive 114 of November 26, 1983, replete
with revelations on U.S. collusion with Saddam Hussein, should be
declassified. The world has a right to know the truth and see the evidence.
**
*28 Years of U.S. Support *

U.S. officials colluded with Saddam's regime for over 28 years. Like the
Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein became another son of Frankenstein, a creature
of U.S. foreign policy.

In 1963 the CIA helped the Ba'athist Party overthrow General Abdel-Karim
Kassem, who was gunned down with other leaders from a list supplied by the
CIA. One of the conspirators was a young, ruthless insurgent named Saddam
Hussein. After a purge and revolt, the Ba'athists took total control of
Iraq, and Saddam Hussein took power in 1979. Together, the U.S. and its
surrogate waged a brutal, illegal war against Iran for eight years. In
violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925 (which outlaws chemical warfare)
the Reagan-Bush Administration authorized the sale of poisonous chemicals
and deadly biological stocks, including anthrax. Iraq was already was using
chemical weapons-on an "almost daily basis," according to the Washington
Post-when envoy Donald Rumsfeld met with Saddam Hussein in 1983, an historic
meeting that consolidated an active military partnership. The repression and
brutality of Saddam's regime was not a secret when U.S. and Iraqi officials
coordinated their military efforts. Not only did the U.S. supply planes,
munitions and bombs, it supplied the satellite images that enabled Saddam to
massacre thousands of Iranians. Twenty-four U.S. firms exported arms and
material to Baghdad. France also sent 200 AMX medium tanks, mirage bombers,
and Gazelle helicopter gunships.

What is the legal and moral difference between German industries that
manufactured ovens for concentration camps in Europe and U.S. and European
merchants of death who supplied Saddam Hussein with cluster bombs, nuclear
materials, anthrax spores, helicopters, and the most heinous weapons
directed against innocent Iranian people?

The vast, lucrative arms trade in the Middle East laid the ground work for
Saddam's aggression. Without high-tech weapons from the U.S., Iraq's wars
against Iran and Kuwait would never have taken place. Complicity makes a
difference.

It was not Saddam's atrocities-his torture rooms, his gassing of the Kurds,
the use of chemicals against Iranians, his crimes against peace-that turned
Rumsfeld and U.S. officials against Iraq. It was the invasion of Kuwait,
which threatened Western oil, that transformed Saddam from an ally into "the
butcher of Baghdad." Prior to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, few Americans
ever heard about Saddam's atrocities. In a typical white-wash of Saddam's
crimes the New Republic (April, 1987) noted "a degree of moderation," in
Iraq. Its editors described Iraq as "an independent militaristic regional
power...the de facto protector of the regional status quo."

And it is certainly reasonable to believe that, had Saddam refrained from
invading Kuwait, the alliance between Iraq and the U.S. would still be in
place today. No doubt the photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam would
still be hanging from the wall of the White House.
**
*Paul Rockwell (rockyspad at earthlink.net) lives in Oakland, CA. *
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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