all this bush n blair are as bad bollox is simply wrong!

 

saddams death, and the death of every other person in this conflict is the sole responsability of one man and one man alone... saddam hussain himself.

 

all he had to do was comply with the un weapons inspectors and show that he had no wmd... instead the idiot chose to create a situation out of it and called the wests bluff. he was hoping for the other islamic states to support him when, as he knew, the west would intervene. he knew what the score was... there was utterly no reason why he shouldnt have complied with the legal un requests, requests that were made time and time again. he and he alone has the blood of everyone killed there including his own! on his hands.

 

he was innocent of having wmd, so why plead guilty?..

 

how would bush n blair be seen IF wmd had been found? saviours! and at the begining of the conflict we simply didnt know that he hadnt. the war may have been technically illegal, because they started before getting un backing, that backing would have come. theres no way this megolomaniac could have been left untouched, unchallenged, he was mad enough to have launched wmd. dont forget the 'big gun' he was building either.... here in the uk! we made it in parts and was shipping it there, but it was rumbled and the contract stopped... christ imagine what would have happend if he got it!

 

the war HAD to happen, the only person that could have stopped it chose instead to create conflict.

Sorry Rob but that is nonsense

 

Hassan Kemal who was in charge of the Iraqi weapons program and was married to one of Saddam's daughters and then sought exile in Jordan fled from Iraq with state documents and these documents showed that Iraq destroyed its weapons of mass destruction 4 years previous to the point Kemal fled Iraq (no he was not set up by Saddam Hussein because he was tricked into returning to Iraq and was shot dead by Qusay Hussein) but hey the American's and the Brits ignored all these documents, there were no WMD's but they then created ficticious documents to claim that there were as some means of going to war, then when the claims of WMD's were obviously horse$h!t Bush and Blair started spouting paranoid dribble about Saddam being responsible for 9/11 because 1 Al Qaeda commander met an Iraqi official 3 years previous (yeah great evidence :rolleyes: )

 

Bush and Blair were going to go to war regardless of what anyone wanted and regardless of what Saddam did or didn't do, they changed the goalposts every day, next they would have probably decided to invade Iraq because they thought Saddam killed Kennedy :rolleyes:

 

The war was not about WMD's it was about OIL and nothing more and the fact that the neo-con's and Bush Snr felt that there was unfinished business from Gulf War 1 you are deluding yourself if you think otherwise :)

Rob, that's nonsense.

 

Bush and Blair are every bit as guilty as Hussein - pobably with more blood on their hands now.

 

I do think maybe we should go back to the 80s and trace HOW Saddam got his cash and arms..... I know Reagan is dead and can't be tried - but Thatcher's still alive - she's got her hands dirty and justice should be served on her.

This guy speaks FULL TRUTH

 

 

 

Robert Fisk in the Independent.

Published: 30 December 2006

 

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

 

But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?

 

No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.

 

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.

 

Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.

 

And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission accomplished" - who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in comfortable and wealthy retirement.

 

Hours before Saddam's death sentence, his family - his first wife, Sajida, and Saddam's daughter and their other relatives - had given up hope.

 

"Whatever could be done has been done - we can only wait for time to take its course," one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and had already announced his own "martyrdom": he was still the president of Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All condemned men face a decision: to die with a last, grovelling plea for mercy or to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in their last hours on earth. His last trial appearance - that wan smile that spread over the mass-murderer's face - showed us which path Saddam`s double intended to walk to the noose.

 

Saddam's dead now, can't people just stop going on about him? :rolleyes:

Saddam's dead now, can't people just stop going on about him? :rolleyes:

So easy being 15 isn't it Joshy? :P

Saddam's dead now, can't people just stop going on about him? :rolleyes:

 

Because even though he's gone, people are still dying unesscarily!!

 

Love,

Kirsty xx

For more than three decades Saddam Hussein imposed his will on Iraq through an elaborate network of terror. Fear was the principal means by which he stayed in power.

 

No-one was immune. His intelligence services spied on government ministers, business leaders, school teachers, journalists, judges. They spied on members of his own family. They even spied on each other. Under Saddam's leadership Iraq became a country in which everybody, without exception, knew that they were being watched at all times, and in which everybody knew that the price of disloyalty - real or perceived - was torture, imprisonment or death. This was the defining characteristic of his regime. Iraq was - notoriously - the 'Republic of Fear'.

 

Saddam's fear sharpened his revenge. Iraqi opposition leaders say up to 300,000 people were tortured and executed in the repression that followed.

The experience of March 1991 left a legacy of bitter suspicion. The Americans, having liberated Kuwait, were now widely perceived in Iraq to have come to Saddam's rescue.

He had indeed enjoyed a long, complicated and mutually beneficial relationship with the United States. The coup that brought the Ba'ath Party, of which Saddam was a member, to power in 1963, was supported by the United States, openly welcomed by the White House and possibly even engineered by the CIA.

Saddam had escaped Iraq after being wounded in an attempt to assassinate the then President Qassim Abd al-Karim, in 1959. The doctor who was called to treat him remembered a "yellowish boy" with a flesh wound to the calf. Saddam, he said, had dug the bullet from his own leg with a razor during the night.

In 1979, Bakr, in poor health, announced his intention to step down and hand power to Saddam. Some members of the RCC objected and demanded a vote. They did not live long. Saddam accused his fellow Ba'athists of conspiring against him, and of plotting with foreign powers. A meeting of the RCC was filmed in which Saddam is shown denouncing the alleged conspirators and being persuaded by terrified acolytes not to be lenient. Between a quarter and half the members of the ruling body were executed. It was at this time, too, that another distinctive feature of the Saddam regime emerged - a willingness to punish not only direct opponents and potential opponents, but members of their families as well.

Shortly after becoming president, Saddam summoned the chief scientists of his nuclear energy programme and demanded to know how quickly their work could produce a nuclear bomb. The chief nuclear chemist, Hussein al-Shahrastani, was the only one at the meeting who spoke up. "I knew that he was a dangerous man," Sharahstani remembered. "I just tried to explain to him that it was against our international commitment. He told me I was a good scientist and I should mind my own scientific work and leave politics to the politicians. After a while they came to my office and arrested me. I was tortured for 22 days and nights till I was paralysed."

Saddam's use of terror explains why he was able to take manifestly disastrous decisions without a murmur of opposition from within the ruling elite. In 1980, he launched a war against neighbouring Iran, apparently convinced that the Islamic revolution that had taken place the previous year, replacing the regime of the Shah with the 'dictatorship of the clerics' led by Ayatollah Khomeni, had so weakened the Iranian state and army that a swift victory would be easy.

The Iran-Iraq War was to last eight years, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and result in an inconclusive stalemate. It revealed two vital characteristics of Saddam's regime. The first was the possession of - and willingness to use - weapons of mass destruction. Iran defended itself against Iraq's technological superiority by deploying so-called 'human waves' - overwhelming numbers of young men, mostly conscripts, whose lives were sacrificed to repel Iraqi attacks. Many of these were killed by chemical weapons.

In the 1980s, believing that Iraqi Kurds in the north of the country were in league with Iran, Saddam forcibly removed hundreds of thousands from their land and razed their villages. In 1988 he used chemical weapons, killing 5,000 Kurds at the village of Halabja.

The decision that was to change the strategic map of the Middle East - and, in the end, seal Saddam's fate, was made in late July 1990. Relations between Iraq and Kuwait had plummeted, partly because of a long standing border dispute (in which Iraq had a strong case) and because of a more recent disagreement over oil drilling rights. Iraq accused its southern neighbour of undercutting Iraqi oil production by overproducing for the world market, and by illegally 'slant drilling' from Kuwaiti territory into oil reserves beneath Iraqi territory. Kuwait dismissed Iraq's complaints.

It was the worst possible outcome for the Iraqi people. The terms of the ceasefire the allies imposed plunged them into crippling poverty. The lifting of economic sanctions and political isolation was made contingent upon Saddam surrendering all weapons of mass destruction programmes - chemical, biological and nuclear. Throughout the first half of the 1990s UN weapons inspectors did, indeed, locate and destroy large quantities of weaponry - more, they claimed, than had been destroyed by military means during the war to liberate Kuwait.

But they also found themselves in a perpetual game of cat and mouse. Weapons of mass destruction continued to matter to Saddam because they were part of his repertoire of fear, to be used against the Iraqi people. He gave the impression that keeping stockpiles of chemical weapons - and hiding them from the inspectors - was, throughout the 1990s and beyond, more valuable to him than the lifting of sanctions. As we now know, he actually had no stockpiles left; but even the illusion of possessing them remained more important to him than sanctions.

Throughout the 1990s, the ruling family turned in on itself, growing more isolated, more venal and more paranoid. Saddam's two sons, Uday and Qusay, began to assert their claims to political power. Uday showed an appetite for depravity that shocked even those in his inner circle, committing crimes - including murder - with impunity. His temperamental instability turned even Saddam Hussein against him, and his younger brother Qusay - quieter, more cautious and calculating and politically more astute - emerged as favourite son and heir apparent. Then in 1995, the ruling family split wide open. Saddam Hussein's two sons-in-law, Hussein and Saddam Kamel, turned up in Jordan unannounced to claim political asylum, bringing with them their wives and children - Saddam's beloved daughters and grandchildren. They were pumped by western security services for information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Then, as suddenly as they had arrived, they decided to go back. The head of King Hussein's private office, General Ali Shukri, was astonished that they believed that Saddam was willing to forgive and forget. "I told them" he said, "that if they went back they would be dead within seven days of crossing the border. I was wrong. They were dead with two days." Hussein Kamel and his brother had sat for decades at Saddam's right hand. They helped govern the Republic of Fear. And in the end it consumed even them. This was the nature of Saddam Hussein's hold on power: no-one - not even those who perpetrate the atrocities on his behalf - was safe.

As he goes to his grave, however, it is right to remember that - before he seized power - Iraq could have been one of the richest and most stable nations in the region. It had everything: fertile agricultural plains, a highly educated urban middle class with strong links with the English speaking world, near-universal literacy, plentiful supplies of water and, of course, oil.

Saddam squandered that inheritance in the pursuit of personal power. The legacy he bequeaths his people is the near destruction of their country.

 

Written by Allan Little is a former BBC correspondent in Baghdad

Sorry Rob but that is nonsense

 

Hassan Kemal who was in charge of the Iraqi weapons program and was married to one of Saddam's daughters and then sought exile in Jordan fled from Iraq with state documents and these documents showed that Iraq destroyed its weapons of mass destruction 4 years previous to the point Kemal fled Iraq (no he was not set up by Saddam Hussein because he was tricked into returning to Iraq and was shot dead by Qusay Hussein) but hey the American's and the Brits ignored all these documents, there were no WMD's but they then created ficticious documents to claim that there were as some means of going to war, then when the claims of WMD's were obviously horse$h!t Bush and Blair started spouting paranoid dribble about Saddam being responsible for 9/11 because 1 Al Qaeda commander met an Iraqi official 3 years previous (yeah great evidence :rolleyes: )

 

Bush and Blair were going to go to war regardless of what anyone wanted and regardless of what Saddam did or didn't do, they changed the goalposts every day, next they would have probably decided to invade Iraq because they thought Saddam killed Kennedy :rolleyes:

 

The war was not about WMD's it was about OIL and nothing more and the fact that the neo-con's and Bush Snr felt that there was unfinished business from Gulf War 1 you are deluding yourself if you think otherwise :)

 

 

...... all saddam had to do was allow weapons inspectors in, to gain access, that all he had to do then there COULDNT have been a war as there was no excuse.

 

without the excuse, there would be no war... period. saddam himself was the only one who could have prevented it and he chose bloodshed.

Its terrible, but i understand with what Josh said, but i know that because o fhis death, action will be taking and there are fears of revenge attacks. So it can't just be forgotten and over with, saddams death is a result of a chain of events waiting to happen, and precautions must be taken.

Rob, that's nonsense.

 

Bush and Blair are every bit as guilty as Hussein - pobably with more blood on their hands now.

 

I do think maybe we should go back to the 80s and trace HOW Saddam got his cash and arms..... I know Reagan is dead and can't be tried - but Thatcher's still alive - she's got her hands dirty and justice should be served on her.

 

 

youre missing the point....

 

it makes utterly no difference how/why.where/who armed him, thats a different argument.

 

if saddam had allowed the un weapons inspectors access to wherever they needed to go, then the un could have said 'theres no wmd', therefore bush/blair simply had notb the excuse. the only reason they have got away with it (so far) is that the world in general simply thought that he could have, and after seeing what he was upto on his own people, supported or at least didnt object to the war.

Saddam's dead now, can't people just stop going on about him? :rolleyes:

 

ffs... theres a war going on with our lads over there.... saddam was the reason. dead or alive.

For more than three decades Saddam Hussein imposed his will on Iraq through an elaborate network of terror. Fear was the principal means by which he stayed in power.

 

No-one was immune. His intelligence services spied on government ministers, business leaders, school teachers, journalists, judges. They spied on members of his own family. They even spied on each other. Under Saddam's leadership Iraq became a country in which everybody, without exception, knew that they were being watched at all times, and in which everybody knew that the price of disloyalty - real or perceived - was torture, imprisonment or death. This was the defining characteristic of his regime. Iraq was - notoriously - the 'Republic of Fear'.

 

Saddam's fear sharpened his revenge. Iraqi opposition leaders say up to 300,000 people were tortured and executed in the repression that followed.

The experience of March 1991 left a legacy of bitter suspicion. The Americans, having liberated Kuwait, were now widely perceived in Iraq to have come to Saddam's rescue.

He had indeed enjoyed a long, complicated and mutually beneficial relationship with the United States. The coup that brought the Ba'ath Party, of which Saddam was a member, to power in 1963, was supported by the United States, openly welcomed by the White House and possibly even engineered by the CIA.

Saddam had escaped Iraq after being wounded in an attempt to assassinate the then President Qassim Abd al-Karim, in 1959. The doctor who was called to treat him remembered a "yellowish boy" with a flesh wound to the calf. Saddam, he said, had dug the bullet from his own leg with a razor during the night.

In 1979, Bakr, in poor health, announced his intention to step down and hand power to Saddam. Some members of the RCC objected and demanded a vote. They did not live long. Saddam accused his fellow Ba'athists of conspiring against him, and of plotting with foreign powers. A meeting of the RCC was filmed in which Saddam is shown denouncing the alleged conspirators and being persuaded by terrified acolytes not to be lenient. Between a quarter and half the members of the ruling body were executed. It was at this time, too, that another distinctive feature of the Saddam regime emerged - a willingness to punish not only direct opponents and potential opponents, but members of their families as well.

Shortly after becoming president, Saddam summoned the chief scientists of his nuclear energy programme and demanded to know how quickly their work could produce a nuclear bomb. The chief nuclear chemist, Hussein al-Shahrastani, was the only one at the meeting who spoke up. "I knew that he was a dangerous man," Sharahstani remembered. "I just tried to explain to him that it was against our international commitment. He told me I was a good scientist and I should mind my own scientific work and leave politics to the politicians. After a while they came to my office and arrested me. I was tortured for 22 days and nights till I was paralysed."

Saddam's use of terror explains why he was able to take manifestly disastrous decisions without a murmur of opposition from within the ruling elite. In 1980, he launched a war against neighbouring Iran, apparently convinced that the Islamic revolution that had taken place the previous year, replacing the regime of the Shah with the 'dictatorship of the clerics' led by Ayatollah Khomeni, had so weakened the Iranian state and army that a swift victory would be easy.

The Iran-Iraq War was to last eight years, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and result in an inconclusive stalemate. It revealed two vital characteristics of Saddam's regime. The first was the possession of - and willingness to use - weapons of mass destruction. Iran defended itself against Iraq's technological superiority by deploying so-called 'human waves' - overwhelming numbers of young men, mostly conscripts, whose lives were sacrificed to repel Iraqi attacks. Many of these were killed by chemical weapons.

In the 1980s, believing that Iraqi Kurds in the north of the country were in league with Iran, Saddam forcibly removed hundreds of thousands from their land and razed their villages. In 1988 he used chemical weapons, killing 5,000 Kurds at the village of Halabja.

The decision that was to change the strategic map of the Middle East - and, in the end, seal Saddam's fate, was made in late July 1990. Relations between Iraq and Kuwait had plummeted, partly because of a long standing border dispute (in which Iraq had a strong case) and because of a more recent disagreement over oil drilling rights. Iraq accused its southern neighbour of undercutting Iraqi oil production by overproducing for the world market, and by illegally 'slant drilling' from Kuwaiti territory into oil reserves beneath Iraqi territory. Kuwait dismissed Iraq's complaints.

It was the worst possible outcome for the Iraqi people. The terms of the ceasefire the allies imposed plunged them into crippling poverty. The lifting of economic sanctions and political isolation was made contingent upon Saddam surrendering all weapons of mass destruction programmes - chemical, biological and nuclear. Throughout the first half of the 1990s UN weapons inspectors did, indeed, locate and destroy large quantities of weaponry - more, they claimed, than had been destroyed by military means during the war to liberate Kuwait.

But they also found themselves in a perpetual game of cat and mouse. Weapons of mass destruction continued to matter to Saddam because they were part of his repertoire of fear, to be used against the Iraqi people. He gave the impression that keeping stockpiles of chemical weapons - and hiding them from the inspectors - was, throughout the 1990s and beyond, more valuable to him than the lifting of sanctions. As we now know, he actually had no stockpiles left; but even the illusion of possessing them remained more important to him than sanctions.

Throughout the 1990s, the ruling family turned in on itself, growing more isolated, more venal and more paranoid. Saddam's two sons, Uday and Qusay, began to assert their claims to political power. Uday showed an appetite for depravity that shocked even those in his inner circle, committing crimes - including murder - with impunity. His temperamental instability turned even Saddam Hussein against him, and his younger brother Qusay - quieter, more cautious and calculating and politically more astute - emerged as favourite son and heir apparent. Then in 1995, the ruling family split wide open. Saddam Hussein's two sons-in-law, Hussein and Saddam Kamel, turned up in Jordan unannounced to claim political asylum, bringing with them their wives and children - Saddam's beloved daughters and grandchildren. They were pumped by western security services for information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Then, as suddenly as they had arrived, they decided to go back. The head of King Hussein's private office, General Ali Shukri, was astonished that they believed that Saddam was willing to forgive and forget. "I told them" he said, "that if they went back they would be dead within seven days of crossing the border. I was wrong. They were dead with two days." Hussein Kamel and his brother had sat for decades at Saddam's right hand. They helped govern the Republic of Fear. And in the end it consumed even them. This was the nature of Saddam Hussein's hold on power: no-one - not even those who perpetrate the atrocities on his behalf - was safe.

As he goes to his grave, however, it is right to remember that - before he seized power - Iraq could have been one of the richest and most stable nations in the region. It had everything: fertile agricultural plains, a highly educated urban middle class with strong links with the English speaking world, near-universal literacy, plentiful supplies of water and, of course, oil.

Saddam squandered that inheritance in the pursuit of personal power. The legacy he bequeaths his people is the near destruction of their country.

 

Written by Allan Little is a former BBC correspondent in Baghdad

 

 

we should have left him alone then!....lol...

Sorry Rob but that is nonsense

 

 

 

The war was not about WMD's it was about OIL and nothing more and the fact that the neo-con's and Bush Snr felt that there was unfinished business from Gulf War 1 you are deluding yourself if you think otherwise :)

 

of course it was, wmd was the excuse 'we' needed! without that excuse the war could never have happend!

 

we should have left him alone then!....lol...

 

damned if we did and damned if we didn't :blink:

damned if we did and damned if we didn't :blink:

 

 

exactly! :)

For more than three decades Saddam Hussein imposed his will on Iraq through an elaborate network of terror. Fear was the principal means by which he stayed in power.

 

No-one was immune. His intelligence services spied on government ministers, business leaders, school teachers, journalists, judges. They spied on members of his own family. They even spied on each other. Under Saddam's leadership Iraq became a country in which everybody, without exception, knew that they were being watched at all times, and in which everybody knew that the price of disloyalty - real or perceived - was torture, imprisonment or death. This was the defining characteristic of his regime. Iraq was - notoriously - the 'Republic of Fear'.

 

Saddam's fear sharpened his revenge. Iraqi opposition leaders say up to 300,000 people were tortured and executed in the repression that followed.

The experience of March 1991 left a legacy of bitter suspicion. The Americans, having liberated Kuwait, were now widely perceived in Iraq to have come to Saddam's rescue.

He had indeed enjoyed a long, complicated and mutually beneficial relationship with the United States. The coup that brought the Ba'ath Party, of which Saddam was a member, to power in 1963, was supported by the United States, openly welcomed by the White House and possibly even engineered by the CIA.

Saddam had escaped Iraq after being wounded in an attempt to assassinate the then President Qassim Abd al-Karim, in 1959. The doctor who was called to treat him remembered a "yellowish boy" with a flesh wound to the calf. Saddam, he said, had dug the bullet from his own leg with a razor during the night.

In 1979, Bakr, in poor health, announced his intention to step down and hand power to Saddam. Some members of the RCC objected and demanded a vote. They did not live long. Saddam accused his fellow Ba'athists of conspiring against him, and of plotting with foreign powers. A meeting of the RCC was filmed in which Saddam is shown denouncing the alleged conspirators and being persuaded by terrified acolytes not to be lenient. Between a quarter and half the members of the ruling body were executed. It was at this time, too, that another distinctive feature of the Saddam regime emerged - a willingness to punish not only direct opponents and potential opponents, but members of their families as well.

Shortly after becoming president, Saddam summoned the chief scientists of his nuclear energy programme and demanded to know how quickly their work could produce a nuclear bomb. The chief nuclear chemist, Hussein al-Shahrastani, was the only one at the meeting who spoke up. "I knew that he was a dangerous man," Sharahstani remembered. "I just tried to explain to him that it was against our international commitment. He told me I was a good scientist and I should mind my own scientific work and leave politics to the politicians. After a while they came to my office and arrested me. I was tortured for 22 days and nights till I was paralysed."

Saddam's use of terror explains why he was able to take manifestly disastrous decisions without a murmur of opposition from within the ruling elite. In 1980, he launched a war against neighbouring Iran, apparently convinced that the Islamic revolution that had taken place the previous year, replacing the regime of the Shah with the 'dictatorship of the clerics' led by Ayatollah Khomeni, had so weakened the Iranian state and army that a swift victory would be easy.

The Iran-Iraq War was to last eight years, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and result in an inconclusive stalemate. It revealed two vital characteristics of Saddam's regime. The first was the possession of - and willingness to use - weapons of mass destruction. Iran defended itself against Iraq's technological superiority by deploying so-called 'human waves' - overwhelming numbers of young men, mostly conscripts, whose lives were sacrificed to repel Iraqi attacks. Many of these were killed by chemical weapons.

In the 1980s, believing that Iraqi Kurds in the north of the country were in league with Iran, Saddam forcibly removed hundreds of thousands from their land and razed their villages. In 1988 he used chemical weapons, killing 5,000 Kurds at the village of Halabja.

The decision that was to change the strategic map of the Middle East - and, in the end, seal Saddam's fate, was made in late July 1990. Relations between Iraq and Kuwait had plummeted, partly because of a long standing border dispute (in which Iraq had a strong case) and because of a more recent disagreement over oil drilling rights. Iraq accused its southern neighbour of undercutting Iraqi oil production by overproducing for the world market, and by illegally 'slant drilling' from Kuwaiti territory into oil reserves beneath Iraqi territory. Kuwait dismissed Iraq's complaints.

It was the worst possible outcome for the Iraqi people. The terms of the ceasefire the allies imposed plunged them into crippling poverty. The lifting of economic sanctions and political isolation was made contingent upon Saddam surrendering all weapons of mass destruction programmes - chemical, biological and nuclear. Throughout the first half of the 1990s UN weapons inspectors did, indeed, locate and destroy large quantities of weaponry - more, they claimed, than had been destroyed by military means during the war to liberate Kuwait.

But they also found themselves in a perpetual game of cat and mouse. Weapons of mass destruction continued to matter to Saddam because they were part of his repertoire of fear, to be used against the Iraqi people. He gave the impression that keeping stockpiles of chemical weapons - and hiding them from the inspectors - was, throughout the 1990s and beyond, more valuable to him than the lifting of sanctions. As we now know, he actually had no stockpiles left; but even the illusion of possessing them remained more important to him than sanctions.

Throughout the 1990s, the ruling family turned in on itself, growing more isolated, more venal and more paranoid. Saddam's two sons, Uday and Qusay, began to assert their claims to political power. Uday showed an appetite for depravity that shocked even those in his inner circle, committing crimes - including murder - with impunity. His temperamental instability turned even Saddam Hussein against him, and his younger brother Qusay - quieter, more cautious and calculating and politically more astute - emerged as favourite son and heir apparent. Then in 1995, the ruling family split wide open. Saddam Hussein's two sons-in-law, Hussein and Saddam Kamel, turned up in Jordan unannounced to claim political asylum, bringing with them their wives and children - Saddam's beloved daughters and grandchildren. They were pumped by western security services for information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Then, as suddenly as they had arrived, they decided to go back. The head of King Hussein's private office, General Ali Shukri, was astonished that they believed that Saddam was willing to forgive and forget. "I told them" he said, "that if they went back they would be dead within seven days of crossing the border. I was wrong. They were dead with two days." Hussein Kamel and his brother had sat for decades at Saddam's right hand. They helped govern the Republic of Fear. And in the end it consumed even them. This was the nature of Saddam Hussein's hold on power: no-one - not even those who perpetrate the atrocities on his behalf - was safe.

As he goes to his grave, however, it is right to remember that - before he seized power - Iraq could have been one of the richest and most stable nations in the region. It had everything: fertile agricultural plains, a highly educated urban middle class with strong links with the English speaking world, near-universal literacy, plentiful supplies of water and, of course, oil.

Saddam squandered that inheritance in the pursuit of personal power. The legacy he bequeaths his people is the near destruction of their country.

 

Written by Allan Little is a former BBC correspondent in Baghdad

 

Fascinating article but you could easily swap the nsme Saddam Hussein and replace it with Robert Mugabe or Jiang Zemin or the ruler of Indonesia and what is being done about them ?

 

Mugabe has murdered tens of thousands and has condemned 500,000 white farmers and poor people to starvation by seizing the land of whites without compensation. why are Bush and Blair doing nothing about him ?? **** all

 

The leader of China has been responsible for terrible atrocities domestically and the illegal occupation of Tibet, pregnant women in China who have more than 1 child are cut open without anaesthetic and having the babies pulled out of the womb by hand, children as young as 8 are in adult prisons because they are related to political opponents, China is a VILE country but what are Bush and Blair doing about them ?? the USA state department is giving them ****ing financial aid :rolleyes:

 

The leader of Indonesia has been responsible for over 150,000 murders and the invasion and illegal occupation of East Timor, guess what Bush and Blair are doing about him ??? selling him ****ing fighter jets in Blair's case :rolleyes:

 

Bush and Blair are turning a blind eye to and even helping finance human rights violations and mass murders as bad or worse than anything Saddam Hussein was doing :rolleyes: fukkin hypocrite scum they are

 

 

Edited December 31, 200618 yr by Kimi Raikkonen

Fascinating article but you could easily swap the nsme Saddam Hussein and replace it with Robert Mugabe or Jiang Zemin or the ruler of Indonesia and what is being done about them ?

 

Mugabe has murdered tens of thousands and has condemned 500,000 white farmers and poor people to starvation by seizing the land of whites without compensation. why are Bush and Blair doing nothing about him ?? **** all

 

The leader of China has been responsible for terrible atrocities domestically and the illegal occupation of Tibet, pregnant women in China who have more than 1 child are cut open without anaesthetic and having the babies pulled out of the womb by hand, children as young as 8 are in adult prisons because they are related to political opponents, China is a VILE country but what are Bush and Blair doing about them ?? the USA state department is giving them ****ing financial aid :rolleyes:

 

The leader of Indonesia has been responsible for over 150,000 murders and the invasion and illegal occupation of East Timor, guess what Bush and Blair are doing about him ??? selling him ****ing fighter jets in Blair's case :rolleyes:

 

Bush and Blair are turning a blind eye to and even helping finance human rights violations and mass murders as bad or worse than anything Saddam Hussein was doing :rolleyes: fukkin hypocrite scum they are

 

 

got to start somewhere i suppose <_<

Fascinating article but you could easily swap the nsme Saddam Hussein and replace it with Robert Mugabe or Jiang Zemin or the ruler of Indonesia and what is being done about them ?

 

Mugabe has murdered tens of thousands and has condemned 500,000 white farmers and poor people to starvation by seizing the land of whites without compensation. why are Bush and Blair doing nothing about him ?? **** all

 

The leader of China has been responsible for terrible atrocities domestically and the illegal occupation of Tibet, pregnant women in China who have more than 1 child are cut open without anaesthetic and having the babies pulled out of the womb by hand, children as young as 8 are in adult prisons because they are related to political opponents, China is a VILE country but what are Bush and Blair doing about them ?? the USA state department is giving them ****ing financial aid :rolleyes:

 

The leader of Indonesia has been responsible for over 150,000 murders and the invasion and illegal occupation of East Timor, guess what Bush and Blair are doing about him ??? selling him ****ing fighter jets in Blair's case :rolleyes:

 

Bush and Blair are turning a blind eye to and even helping finance human rights violations and mass murders as bad or worse than anything Saddam Hussein was doing :rolleyes: fukkin hypocrite scum they are

 

but those leaders arnt posing a threat to world peace... and arnt sitting upon massive oil reserves!

 

but what would your answer be to the saddam problem?...

 

got to start somewhere i suppose <_<

 

They will sit around doing nothing while those 3 kill on a scale that would make Saddam blush, the conspiracy theorist in me says that nothing will ever be done about them as their is no oil in those nations