Home > 30 December 2006 - a day of infamy
by Gabriele Zamparini
30 December 2006 will be remembered as a day of infamy. In violation of international law and human decency, the quisling government of occupied Iraq, a puppet, sectarian regime installed by the American occupation and supported by Iran, assassinated the legitimate President of the Republic of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.
It’s been reported that after his execution the assassins shouted: “Long live Muqtada, Long live Muqtada” [Moqtada Al-Sadr]
It’s also been reported that Saddam Hussein was tortured before his execution and his body was mutilated afterwards. Another source tells us: “The video shows no blood on Saddam’s face and body, TV aired video of the body showed blood, cuts and bruises on the face.”
About the Iraqi apocalypse, Riverbend recently wrote: “Again, I can’t help but ask myself why this was all done? What was the point of breaking Iraq so that it was beyond repair? Iran seems to be the only gainer. Their presence in Iraq is so well-established, publicly criticizing a cleric or ayatollah verges on suicide. Has the situation gone so beyond America that it is now irretrievable? Or was this a part of the plan all along? My head aches just posing the questions.”
Professor As’ad Abdul Rahman, Chairman of the Palestinian Encyclopedia, observed, “Today, three and a half years after the Iraqi misadventure, the American military is not the decisive power there. In southern Iraq, it is practically Iran that is in control, and the various Shiite militias simply receive directions from Tehran.”
After writing eleven little notes on the lynching of Saddam Hussein [see appendix], on 29 December 2006, the day before the assassination, I wrote, “I want to dedicate the piece below written by Layla Anwar, an Iraqi woman, to the grotesque Western antiwar movement and its influential intellectuals, whose shameful silence on the lynching of Saddam Hussein will be remembered as one of the most disgraceful pages of infamy’s history.”
Understanding the silence of those in the West who should have been the first to denounce the outrageous lynching requires deconstructing the climate of propaganda and deception we are immersed in. Obviously the reason of this shameful silence can’t be found in the history of Saddam Hussein’s regime and his alleged crimes. Nobody asked or expected from the anti-war movement and its intellectuals to side with Saddam Hussein and his regime. This wasn’t requested to denounce the outrageous lynching that could take place, we must remember, only because of the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US and its allies. So, why this deafening silence?
Is it because some quarters of the Western left and its war movement apparatus established a special relation with the reactionary regime of Teheran and the quisling government of Baghdad or some part of it, like the Motqada al-Sadr movement and its militia, the Mahdi Army, responsible for massive crimes against humanity in Iraq? Is this disgraceful silence one more sign of the legitimization of the puppet Iraqi government? Does it mean that the supreme international crime, the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, and its effects have now been accepted? And why the Iraqi Resistance to this illegal invasion and occupation has never been recognized as such, even less supported, by a Western antiwar movement that fills its mouth with words such as “peace” and “justice”?
After the initial silence on the real scale of the horror in Iraq, when the Iraq Body Count figures were used even by the antiwar movement in spite the apocalypse was already known and after the ongoing silence on the responsibility of the sectarian militias in mass murdering and ethnic cleansing, this other silence on the lynching of Saddam Hussein raises once again fundamental questions on the role of the Western left and the anti-war movement and forces each of us to an unpleasant but honest and necessary reflection. If a better world is possible, it starts at home.