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Pastor's
Page
By
Fr. George Welzbacher
November
12, 2006
Focussing on a minuscule subset of victims selected from
the vast multitude of Iraqi citizens (conservatively estimated at half
a million) who during the two and half decades of Saddam Hussein's
dictatorship were brutally murdered, a five-judge court has pronounced
a sentence of death on the deposed dictator. Though the conduct of the
trial could scarcely be described as faultless if judged by the
standards governing western courts, its pursuit of justice (despite
assassinations of attorneys and witnesses and judges) compares very
favorably with the modus agendi
of courts throughout the Muslim MiddleEast, and it surpassed by light
years the kind of "justice" that was standard under Saddarn's regime
The sentence, moreover, will be reviewed by a nine-judge court of
appeal. All in all, the machinery of justice is functioning essentially
as it should in Iraqi law courts, despite the chaos prevailing on the
streets of Baghdad and of so many other cities in Iraq's Arab
provinces, where far too many of the Sunni Arabs hope to subvert
democracy through indiscriminate violence, thus to regain for a small
minority the political primacy it had once enjoyed, and where Shiite
militias have committed themselves to a savage war of reprisal.
In stark contrast with Iraq's chaotic Arab sectors, where internecine
battles between Shiites and Shiites and between Sunnis and Sunnis
complicate matters, even further, topped off by suicide bombers
shouting "Allah is great!" as they blow themselves to kingdom come
together with scores of the innocent, the comparatively stable Kurdish north shows how things can
sometimes turn out well even in today's Middle East, given a modicum of
good will and commitment to a common good. Having long enjoyed a de facto autonomy thanks to the "no
fly" zone imposed upon Saddmn by American forces in the wake of the
first Gulf War, an autonomy happily blessed with ethnic, linguistic and
religious cohesion, the non-Arab and decidedly pro-American Kurds have
made impressive progress towards achieving stability thanks to the
agreement of rival Kurdish leaders to compose their differences in the
common interest of the Kurdish people. Kurdistan is the one bright hope
emerging in Iraq today.
All of which suggests that perhaps some kind of partition is the ultimate solution
for a state that was artificial right from the start when its arbitrary
boundaries were drawn on a British map of the Middle East shortly after
World War I. The considerable political disadvantages that would accrue
from a division of Iraq into three large sectors (dominated
respectively by Kurds in the north, Sunni Arabs in the west and Shiite
Arabs in the south and east) could be reduced if the three major groups
would accept a loose federal union centered in Baghdad, authorized both
to distribute with some effort at fairness the profits from Iraqi oil
and to provide a foreign policy pursued in common by the three groups.
But given such long entrenched hostilities perhaps even a loose federal
union is too much to expect. Time will tell, and probably fairly soon.
In any event America's intervention has at least dethroned
one of the most monstrously blood-drenched regimes in Islamic
history---Genghis Khan's was admittedly worse- and we have given the
people of Iraq at least the opportunity
to achieve democratic self-rule, something ordinary Iraqis seem to have
earnestly desired when despite massive threats of violent retribution
they trooped to the voting stations in astonishing numbers not so very
long ago to elect a government that would draft a democratic constitution. If only
the Iraqis can muster and sustain the collective will to establish an
army that will actually defend that new constitution, their experiment
in self-rule might just succeed. But such collective will to serve a
common good will
have to emerge soon. Whether it will is the million dollar question,
and for the answer to that question we cannot be expected to wait
forever. At some point not too far down the road the Iraqis will have
to start depending on themselves to put their house in order.
In the meantime America at this moment is more secure for
having overthrown Saddam Hussein. The protest raised just this past week by nuclear
physicists and security officials against the unfortunate publication
of certain official Iraqi
documents captured in the wake of the invasion of 2003, Iraqi documents that
have been described as constituting a veritable "guide to building an
atomic bomb," demonstrates that Saddarn had progressed much
further down the road towards gaining the know-how to produce atomic
weapons than the media's grand high panjandrums and sundry politicians
would lead us to believe. And, thanks to the efforts of one of his
scientists, Ahmed Obeidi, who describes in his book, The Bomb in My Garden, how he
secured the design and produced the pilot model for the ultra-high
speed centrifuge that is essential for isolating the uranium isotopes
that are adaptable for employment in weapons, Saddam could have resumed
his earlier well attested quest for an actual bomb the moment the U. N.
sanctions were lifted. And almost certainly they would have been
lifted, given the pressure exerted to that very end by Russia, China
and France. With those sanctions lifted, so Professor Obeidi observes,
the active pursuit of the bomb awaited only "the snap of Mr. Hussein's
finger."
Whatever the future may hold, America is faced at this
moment with only intensely hostile Islamic government-the "mullocracy"
of Iran-that is seemingly on the verge of becoming a nuclear power
instead of being faced with onetwo such
governments, or even three.
(Chastened by what he saw happen to Saddam, Libya's Muammar Khadafi
voluntarily surrendered to American and British authorities his fairly
advanced facilities for the production of atomic weapons together with
a considerable quantity of uranium). America is thus significantly more
secure today than we were before the invasion of March of 2003.
*****
As a timely reminder of just how vicious was
the regime that we overthrew, may I share with you a few passages from
an op-ed essay written by L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the
Coalition Provisional Authority that governed Iraq before the holding
of elections and the drafting of a constitution. This article appeared
in The Wall Street Journal for November 6, 2006. I reprint parts of the
essay here, as our restrictions of space permit.
Criminal Against Humanity
By L. Paul Bremer
The decision by Iraq's Special Tribunal to
convict Saddam Hussein of some 150 murders is a welcome step on Iraq's
painful journey toward its more hopeful future .... The verdict should
be seen as a necessary, though not sufficient. step in helping, Iraq's
persecuted majority put behind them the awful years of Saddam's brutal
rule....
The strong Iraqi urge to redress Saddam's crimes was made
clear on the first day of Iraq's governing Council - Julv 13. 2003. The very first decree the Council passed
that dav. wiith unanimous
support from its Shiite, Kurdish. and Sunni members. was to demand the
establishment of the Special Tribunal to punish Saddam and his top
Baath party officials. This step (which took the Coalition bv
surprise, given the lack of any prior discussion) showed how deep the
scars were from Saddam's rule.
It is impossible to overstate the psychological and
physical damage that Saddam inflicted on his countrymen.
In May. 2003, the Coalition found the first of Saddam's
mass graves. After the 1991 Gulf War. the Shiites. representing some
60% of Iraq's population, rose up to try to throw off his dictatorship.
Saddam ordered his armv to savagely crush this uprising. Iraqi army units went into Shiite towns
south of Baghdad and rounded up men, women and children
indiscriminately, threw them onto flat bed trucks, drove them into
nearby fields and machine-gunned them to death. Their bodies were
thrown into common graves and covered over.
I visited that first mass grave a few days after I arrived
in Iraq. It made a searing impression on me. as it did on all who
visited it. In an
area about the size of three football feilds, bones and clothing had
been collected into little piles. Women in black robes, ignoring the
sweltering heat. were scrabbling titrouoh the dirt and bones with
their fingers, desperate to find a scrap of clothing, a faded ID, or a
piece of jewelry, which would identify the remains as those of their
mother, or husband or daughter. Uncounted thousands of bodies
were in that grave alone. By the time I left Iraq
14 months later, we dadfound over 300 mass graves.
Saddam's brutality was not limited to the Shiites. He is also standing trial for the crime of
genocide against the Kurds, another 20% of the population. For a
decade. Saddam's army tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of
Kurdish men, women, and children. On
the sunny morning of March 16, 1988, the armv used chemical weapons on
the peaceful Kurdish town of Halabja, killing, 5,000 civilians in onlv
a few hours. A few months after I arrived, Secretarv of State
Colin Powell and I visited this village and spoke with the horribly
scarred survivors of this chemical attack They were living proof that
Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction, and had been prepared
to use them, even against his own countrymen.
Visiting police
stations in towns all over Iraq, I saw that each one had a torture
chamber because under Saddam torture was legal. Most stations,
including the Central Police Academy in Baghdad which was responsible
for training Iraqi police, also had a rape room. I saw human shredding machines into which
Saddam ordered his enemies to be thrown.
Nor did the Sunnis go unscathed under Saddam. Though
Sunnis dominated the Baath Party and its vicious securitv and
intelligence forces, they too, were tortured and killed when it suited
Saddam's purposes. Sunnis, Kurds, Shiites, Christians, Turkomen - no
Iraqi group escaped his brutality. The
most conservative estimate is that during his regime, Saddam killed
over a half-million of his countrymen, though since more than a million
and half Iraqis are still unaccounted, for the actual is, no doubt, far
higher....
L. Paul Bremer
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