Eulogy for a Tyrant

Tunc ait illi Iesus converte gladium tuum in locum suum omnes enim qui acceperint gladium gladio peribunt.

Photo by Alicia. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

At 6:00 pm on December 30, 2006 Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging in the gallows of Camp Banzai, the same used by his own intelligence services throughout the tenure of his regime in Iraq. His death brought to a close, not just a chapter in Iraqi history, but a bloodstained metaphor for the continued failings of US foreign policy throughout the middle east. In Saddam Hussein's life and death are reflected the meddleings of western powers in the tribal struggles of the middle east -- an arrogance of power, wealth, and morality that have contributed to untold human misery and suffering in the name of political expediency and ephemeral alliances. The United States deserves no laud, no glory, no praise for righting - too late -- a wrong of her own creation, shortsightedness, and disregard.

Historians will write, not to praise Saddam Hussein, but to bury him -- to document in fact and figure the lifetime of a despot, a tyrant, and a murderer. In so doing they must, unavoidably, document the jagged blade of American Foreign Policy held too long against the necks of countless pivotal states in the struggle for global supremacy against the Soviet Union.

Hussein's tale begins in 1959. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then President of the United States, authorized the CIA to undertake the assassination of Iraqi Prime Minister and General Abd al-Karim Qasim. Such operations were typical of US intervention in the Middle East during the early Cold War. After Qasim withdrew Iraq from the pro-Western Baghdad Pact, the United States saw danger in the possibility of a Soviet friendly Iraq pushing west towards US interests in Israel and Turkey. Rather than expose itself by attempting the assassination of a foreign leader, the CIA sought out six members of the Iraqi Ba'ath party to assassinate the Prime Minister. Among them was a young Saddam Hussein. Trained, housed, and armed by the Americans, Hussein's assassination attempt ultimately failed. Hussein was wounded,Qasim escaped with a minor injury, and Hussein became, overnight, a fugitive in his homeland. Though the pro-Soviet leader would ultimately find himself ousted by other US financed operations in 1963, his government wasted little time in pursuing his assailants. With CIA assistance Hussein went into exile but was sentenced to death in absentia by the government he'd been hired to overthrow. Upon his return to Iraq following the American orchestrated coup, he was imprisoned for three years before escaping and rising through the ranks of the Ba'ath party. It was a story played out in other countries with other assets and, like the others who shared Hussein's experience with the United States, the would-be revolutionary found himself at once indebted to and wary of his one-time benefactor.

Hussein's rise to power in the Ba'ath party brought with it a new set of interactions with the United States, at once entirely different and exactly the same as those he had already experienced as a hired killer for the CIA. Following the overthrow of Iraqi President Abdul Rahman Arif, Hussein rose to power as the right-hand-man of the coup's leader and new Iraqi President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr. Again courted by the United States, but this time as a political power rather than a trigger-man, Hussein saw the United States as again willing to overlook brutish methods and violence in exchange for the security of its interests in the region. As Hussein's power grew, so did his brutality and his obsession with party and social unity. Like Pinochet and many other useful monsters in contested states around the world, Hussein continued to enjoy a somewhat favored relationship with the Americans despite his almost Stalinist purges of Iraq and the Ba'ath party in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Hussein assumed power in Iraq in 1979 both for his own sake but also to the advantage of his American benefactors. President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr's agenda for Iraq had moved the contested nation further towards the Soviet Bloc and had actively attempted to marginalize Hussein's influence. With tensions between the two Ba'athist leaders on the rise, Hussein moved in 1978 to distance Iraq from the Soviets with the mass executions of numerous Iraqi Communists. Shortly thereafter he forced President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr into resignation and assumed the Presidency of Iraq himself. As in Nicaragua and Vietnam, Hussein's ascension brought an individual to power who was saw the United States as both benefactor and adversary, friend and foe. For Hussein, who had already experienced the rapidity of US disentanglement in his three year prison term, the United States was a benefactor unconcerned with brutality and oppression, always fit for exploit but never for trust. It was an outlook that was nearly endemic to US client-leaders around the world.

So long as he was needed by the United States, few in the west questioned Hussein's methods or inhumanity. As was frequently noted of Joseph Stalin during World War II, "he [was] a bastard but he [was] our bastard." The United States found use of "our bastard" with the overthrow of theShah in Iran. Overnight a staunch ally became a sworn enemy. The revolution of 1979 was so sudden and unexpected that it was an as-yet-unacknowledged act of industrial sabotage that kept a substantial complement of American F14 fighter aircraft (purchased by the Shah of Iran in 1976) from falling into Soviet hands. The United States, under Reagan, turned to an old ally.

Thus did Hussein's experience with the United States escalate to the third archetype of an American client: the Proxy War. Again the United States implicitly condoned Hussein's brutality and genocide in the name of regional interests and opposition to the Soviet Union and again America's Faustian pact with Hussein served it well in the eight year long Iran-Iraq war. The outbreak of war between Iraq and Iran gave the United States an opportunity to transform what should have been a decisive loss for Iraq and a debilitating blow for Hussein into a lengthy war of attrition that would destroy the economy of Iran at the expense of Iraq. Funneling chemical munitions and other weapons of mass destruction to Iraq, the United States prolonged the conflict, undertaking, as the US National Security Counsel said "whatever was necessary and legal" to ensure a bloody and costly Iranian defeat. Even when US satellites returned images strongly suggesting that Hussein was turning the chemical weapons provided him against the civilian Kurdish populations in the North of of Iraq, the destruction of Iranian military power was deemed more important and munitions continued to flow. As in instances from Panama to Vietnam, the monster created became the monster enabled.

Yet even the most tame of beasts remains, to one degree or another, wild. The United States has found itself on the wrong side of innumerable one-time-allies, from Diem in Vietnam to Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Hussein would prove no exception. As border disputes with Kuwait flared, Hussein met with the US Ambassador to his country as well as then Secretary of State James Baker and received conflicting messages from Washington. With a decade of interaction and billions of dollars in aid behind them, Hussein took US statements of apathy and indifference towards aggression as more of the same policies that had supported him in his purges of the Iraqi government and his chemical attacks on the Kurds.

Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait, and within days Iraq went from an ally of the United States to a pariah state.

Thus began Hussein's long slide from friend to foe, client to condemned. Once laid bare before the world, his atrocities cast into the limelight and his agenda no longer beneficial to the United States, Washington disavowed its storied and decades long association with the Iraqi despot, consigning him to the status of a madman, a rabid mongrel, and a menace to Western Civilization. Through war with the United States, sanctions, corruption, and intrigue Hussein clung tenaciously to power. It would take an invasion, occupation, and a nation-wide manhunt to finally take the forty-year CIA asset, broken, battered, and bedraggled, into custody.

In Hussein's execution there is no victory. Wrongs righted too late and justice delivered to those long dead are of no comfort. Even in death, Hussein's experience is that of a failure of American Foreign Policy: an incarnation of nearly a century of arrogance, complacency, and indifference.

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