Saddam Hussein's execution: V

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Originally Posted by Caravel

I'm in full agreement with econ21 and a few of the others. An execution like this will never solve anything. It won't miraculously make Iraq, or the world as a whole, a better place.

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but putting him in jail for Life would not have solve anything anyhow people.

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Originally Posted by {BHC}KingWarman888

but putting him in jail for Life would not have solve anything anyhow people.

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Keeping Saddam locked away for life, preferably in exile, would have prevented any further polarisation of public opinion. The execution has removed him from the equation and completed that polarisation. Old allegances will be cast off and new ones formed. People will have to choose their loyalties. The shadow of Saddam gone, the extremists and militias will now increase in power as the people see and accept them as the successors to the ba'athists. The militias are hoping that, now that the US have seemingly "got their man" (because, after all it was the US that wanted him toppled and captured in the first place), they will grow tired of the whole mess and pull out altogether. This is their goal, to terrorise the coalition forces out of the country. Bush is losing favour, possibly because of the Iraq war and the death toll (particularly the death toll as regards US service personnel), and it may be that if the militants push hard enough, the coalition will pull out, allowing them to go at it tooth and nail in a bloody free for all until a victor emerges. This is what certain people are hoping for. With the coalition forces still there they can't realise these ambitions. The Shi'ites especially being the stronger faction know full well that a win is pretty much guaranteed to them if the US and the rest of the coalition pull out of Iraq.

I had to shake my head at this story.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcont...1.3da24bb.html

I'm not at all happy with where this is going. Saddam as a martyr? How messed up do you have to be to believe that? How messed up are we for allowing this to happen? What a mess. What a freakin' mess.

https://img.photobucket.com/albums/v.../600_arabs.jpg

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Images of Hanging Make Hussein a Martyr to Many

By HASSAN M. FATTAH
Published: January 6, 2007

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Jan. 5 — In the week since Saddam Hussein was hanged in an execution steeped in sectarian overtones, his public image in the Arab world, formerly that of a convicted dictator, has undergone a resurgence of admiration and awe.

On the streets, in newspapers and over the Internet, Mr. Hussein has emerged as a Sunni Arab hero who stood calm and composed as his Shiite executioners tormented and abused him.

“No one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed,” President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt remarked in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot published Friday and distributed by the official Egyptian news agency. “They turned him into a martyr.”

In Libya, which canceled celebrations of the feast of Id al-Adha after the execution, a government statement said a statue depicting Mr. Hussein in the gallows would be erected, along with a monument to Omar al-Mukhtar, who resisted the Italian invasion of Libya and was hanged by the Italians in 1931.

In Morocco and the Palestinian territories, demonstrators held aloft photographs of Mr. Hussein and condemned the United States.

Here in Beirut, hundreds of members of the Lebanese Baath Party and Palestinian activists marched Friday in a predominantly Sunni neighborhood behind a symbolic coffin representing that of Mr. Hussein and later offered a funeral prayer. Photographs of Mr. Hussein standing up in court, against a backdrop of the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem, were pasted on city walls near Palestinian refugee camps, praising “Saddam the martyr.”

“God damn America and its spies,” a banner across one major Beirut thoroughfare read. “Our condolences to the nation for the assassination of Saddam, and victory to the Iraqi resistance.”

By standing up to the United States and its client government in Baghdad and dying with seeming dignity, Mr. Hussein appears to have been virtually cleansed of his past.

“Suddenly we forgot that he was a dictator and that he killed thousands of people,” said Roula Haddad, 33, a Lebanese Christian. “All our hatred for him suddenly turned into sympathy, sympathy with someone who was treated unjustly by an occupation force and its collaborators.”

Just a month ago Mr. Hussein was widely dismissed as a criminal who deserved the death penalty, even if his trial was seen as flawed. Much of the Middle East reacted with a collective shrug when he was found guilty of crimes against humanity in November.

But shortly after his execution last Saturday, a video emerged that showed Shiite guards taunting Mr. Hussein, who responded calmly but firmly to them. From then on, many across the region began looking at him as a martyr.

“The Arab world has been devoid of pride for a long time,” said Ahmad Mazin al-Shugairi, who hosts a television show at the Middle East Broadcasting Center that promotes a moderate version of Islam in Saudi Arabia. “The way Saddam acted in court and just before he was executed, with dignity and no fear, struck a chord with Arabs who are desperate for their own leaders to have pride too.”

Ayman Safadi, editor in chief of the independent Jordanian daily Al Ghad, said, “The last image for many was of Saddam taken out of a hole. That has all changed now.”

At the heart of the sudden reversal of opinion was the symbolism of the hasty execution, now framed as an act of sectarian vengeance shrouded in political theater and overseen by the American occupation.

In much of the predominantly Sunni Arab world, the timing of the execution in the early hours of Id al-Adha, which is among the holiest days of the Muslim year, when violence is forbidden and when even Mr. Hussein himself sometimes released prisoners, was seen as a direct insult to the Sunni world.

The contrast between the official video aired without sound on Iraqi television of Mr. Hussein being taken to the gallows and fitted with a noose around his neck and the unauthorized grainy, chaotic recording of the same scene with sound, depicting Shiite militiamen taunting Mr. Hussein with his hands tied, damning him to hell and praising the militant Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, touched a sectarian nerve.

“He stood as strong as a mountain while he was being hanged,” said Ahmed el-Ghamrawi, a former Egyptian ambassador to Iraq. “He died a strong president and lived as a strong president. This is the image people are left with.”

Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian media critic and director of the online radio station Ammannet.net, said: “If Saddam had media planners, he could not have planned it better than this. Nobody could ever have imagined that Saddam would have gone down with such dignity.”

Writers and commentators have stopped short of eulogizing the dictator but have looked right past his bloody history as they compare Iraq’s present circumstances with Iraq under Mr. Hussein.

In Jordan, long a bastion of support for Mr. Hussein, many are lionizing him, decrying the timing of the execution and the taunts as part of a Sunni-Shiite conflict.

“Was it a coincidence that Israel, Iran and the United States all welcomed Saddam’s execution?” wrote Hamadeh Faraneh, a columnist for the daily Al Rai. “Was it also a coincidence when Saddam said bravely in front of his tormentors, ‘Long live the nation,’ and that Palestine is Arab, then uttered the declaration of faith? His last words expressed his depth and what he died for.”

Another Jordanian journalist, Muhammad Abu Rumman, wrote in Al Ghad on Thursday: “For the vast majority Saddam is a martyr, even if he made mistakes in his first years of rule. He cleansed himself later by confronting the Americans and by rejecting to negotiate with them.”

Even the pro-Saudi news media, normally critical of Mr. Hussein, chimed in with a more sentimental tone.

In the London-based pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, Bilal Khubbaiz, commenting on Iranian and Israeli praise of the execution, wrote, “Saddam, as Iraq’s ruler, was an iron curtain that prevented the Iranian influence from reaching into the Arab world,” as well as “a formidable party in the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Zuhayr Qusaybati, also writing in Al Hayat, said the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, “gave Saddam what he most wanted: he turned him into a martyr in the eyes of many Iraqis, who can now demand revenge.”

“The height of idiocy,” Mr. Qusaybati said, “is for the man who rules Baghdad under American protection not to realize the purpose of rushing the execution, and that the guillotine carries the signature of a Shiite figure as the flames of sectarian division do not spare Shiites or Sunnis in a country grieving for its butchered citizens.”

In Saudi Arabia, poems eulogizing Mr. Hussein have been passed around on cellphones and in e-mail messages.

“Prepare the gun that will avenge Saddam,” a poem published in a Saudi newspaper warned. “The criminal who signed the execution order without valid reason cheated us on our celebration day. How beautiful it will be when the bullet goes through the heart of him who betrayed Arabism.”

Mr. Safadi, the Jordanian editor, said: “In the public’s perception Saddam was terrible, but those people were worse. That final act has really jeopardized the future of Iraq immensely. And we all know this is a blow to the moderate camp in the Arab world.”

He deserved it, though the way it was executed was shoddy and left much to be desired.

I do not accept the idea of capital punishment as immoral or wrong, either.

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And while we are putting people to death for warcrimes - lets not forget the ones who Fire Bombed Dresden, and wiped out millions of innocent women and children in the blink of an eye in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - why arnt they on trial? Until that day - how dare we pass judgement on others.

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Far, far less than a million died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and even then actually saved lives.

CR

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Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit

He deserved it, though the way it was executed was shoddy and left much to be desired.

I do not accept the idea of capital punishment as immoral or wrong, either.



Far, far less than a million died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and even then actually saved lives.

CR

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Only hundreds of thousands.... Oh well that makes it ok then [sarcasm] :no:

I hear the holocaust numbers are exagerated too [more sarcasm]

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Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit

He deserved it, though the way it was executed was shoddy and left much to be desired.

I do not accept the idea of capital punishment as immoral or wrong, either.

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Have you thought about whether it might be wise to do, not what is right, but what is useful? With Saddam out of the game, what purpose did his execution serve? What dangers did it bring? If he were left alive, how could he still be used? After all, leaving him alive now doesn't mean he's definitively going to be left alive, but killing him now means no turning back the clock.

My suggestion of keeping him alive to threaten the Sadrists with would have been a better idea. It's not as if the Iraqis can do anything to prevent whatever decision you make - the VP proved that when he moaned about Blair rescinding a promise to pull out.

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My suggestion of keeping him alive to threaten the Sadrists

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By that time, Saddam couldn't threaten or intimidate/scare anything.

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Originally Posted by Patriarch of Constantinople

By that time, Saddam couldn't threaten or intimidate/scare anything.

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No harm in trying. Why give up all your options just because you don't think they'll work? The 1st president of Kenya was once condemned by the British to several years of hard labour. Once we found the alternatives were even worse, we put him back in charge of the natives, with our backing. Despite our brutal suppression of the native Mau Mau rebellion, we've maintained fairly cordial relations with Kenya, because we were flexible enough and wise enough to backtrack.

PS. Isn't the sig supposed to be 10K or less in size?

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Originally Posted by Yunus Dogus

Only hundreds of thousands.... Oh well that makes it ok then [sarcasm] :no:

I hear the holocaust numbers are exagerated too [more sarcasm]

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I never said that. I believe no war, no matter how just, to be pleasant.

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Have you thought about whether it might be wise to do, not what is right, but what is useful? With Saddam out of the game, what purpose did his execution serve?

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Point taken. However, it could be argued that his execution served certain purposes - to put the old regime to rest for good, to put the country on a new track unimpeded by the past, etc.

Lemur, you're right about this being a mess. Gah, what a mess.
Saddam, for all his evilness, had a stiff upper lip. Perhaps it would have been more useful for him to spend his days in jail - though what violent attempts to free him would it provoke?

Crazed Rabbit

Saddam as Sunni martyr was a forgone conclusion.

It was the best means to capitalize upon his death for political value. The placards were probably printed up weeks ago.

In fact, had I been running the insurgency, I'd have had my Sunnis yelling "Moqtada" during the hanging knowing that somehow the scene would be broadcast.


Now, for the real question. Aside from a bit of verbal hoopla over the course of the next few weeks, will Saddam's death have made any material impact on the unfolding events of the Middle East in general and of Iraq in particular?

Saddam's murder is definitely going to motivate more people to become Jihadists to fight the infidels. That will clearly result in more tangible deaths of American soldiers and civilians who get in the crossfire.

Glad to see him go, although it took about 3 years longer than it should have.

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Originally Posted by Navaros

Saddam's murder is definitely going to motivate more people to become Jihadists to fight the infidels. That will clearly result in more tangible deaths of American soldiers and civilians who get in the crossfire.

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You're stating the obvious, unfortunately there are some that see this as "justice" that needed to be done. These people can't see the bigger picture they simply look at the evil villain and want to see him getting his just deserves, if as a result of this worthless retribution, the situation in Iraq worsens with an increase in militancy, civilian and military personnel deaths, well that was just regrettable collateral damage and they had a "job to do", and will plunge on ahead regardless with the same tunnel vision approach as before.

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Originally Posted by Crazed Rabbit

Point taken. However, it could be argued that his execution served certain purposes - to put the old regime to rest for good, to put the country on a new track unimpeded by the past, etc.

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If you're going to have a clean start, then you needed to put far more resources into Iraq than you actually did, or terrorise them so that a 100,000 strong occupation army is sufficient to intimidate the rest (say, by massacring the population of Tikrit). If you don't want to put in the boots, and you want to keep your hands relatively clean, you'll need to play the balance of power game. That game requires as much certainty on your part, and as much uncertainty on the part of others, as you can create. On one level, it means keeping as many options open as possible - you know what options you want to take, but the opposition doesn't. Removing your options for no better reason than justice is stupid.

I'm not saying the execution of Saddam was unjust. It's worse than that. It was stupid.

The problem is that you can't put old regimes "to rest for good" using these sort of methods. Once a leader is martyred the cause usually grows in strength, and if a new leader is found of a similar calibre the cause is often renewed. If you want to crush insurgency like this, in a country such as Iraq, you have to use much the same methods as Saddam used in the past, which makes you no better than he. The alternative is to continue as at present. Even if the supporters do evaporate, as some people seem to think they will, they will often, having lost their leadership and feeling embittered against the coaltion forces, join other militant movements adding to their numbers, and adding to the problem. The other militias will now fill the power vacuum and the average man on the street will look to them for representation. In such times, people often turn to extremism ("anything is better than the Westerners"). The main issue in Iraq is not forces loyal to Saddam anyway. Shi'ite militias look to be the next biggest problem, that really hasn't even got started yet.

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Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh

Aside from a bit of verbal hoopla over the course of the next few weeks, will Saddam's death have made any material impact on the unfolding events of the Middle East in general and of Iraq in particular?

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I think his hanging and the circumstances surrounding it (such as prime minister Maliki declaring he wants to quit a.s.a.p.) have sent a clear signal that Shia militants are now in control of the Iraqi government, and that they are planning their own day of reckoing with the Sunnis. A very bad omen for all involved.

No longer just one young boy dying as a direct result of Saddam's murder.

Several boys die copying Saddam hanging

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

By ANNA JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer

CAIRO, Egypt - The boys' deaths — scattered in the United States, in Yemen, in Turkey and elsewhere in seemingly isolated horror — had one thing in common: They hanged themselves after watching televised images of Saddam Hussein's execution.


Officials and relatives say the children appeared to be mimicking the former dictator's Dec. 30 hanging, shown both on a sanitized Iraqi government tape and explicit clandestine videos that popped up on Web sites and some TV channels.

The leaked videos, apparently taken by cell phone cameras, set off international outrage over the raucous scene at Saddam's execution, but some experts are more concerned about the images of the deposed Iraqi leader dropping through the gallows floor and his body swinging at the end of a rope.

The experts say such graphic images can severely affect youngsters who do not yet understand the consequences of death and violence — especially because Saddam's death received intense international attention.

"They see how it's done, but they don't think it's horrific, and they're more likely to imitate it," said Hisham Ramy, an associate professor of psychiatry at Ain Shams University in Cairo.

A day after Saddam's execution, a 10-year-old boy in Texas hanged himself from a bunk bed after watching a news report on the execution. Police in the Houston suburb of Webster said the boy, Sergio Pelico, tied a slipknot around his neck while on the bed but had not mean to kill himself.

"I don't think he thought it was real," Julio Gustavo, Sergio's uncle, said afterward. "They showed them putting the noose around his neck and everything. Why show that on TV?"

Something similar occurred in Turkey, where 12-year-old Alisen Akti hanged himself Wednesday from a bunk bed after watching TV footage. His father, Esat Akti, told a newspaper in the southeastern province of Mus that his son had been affected by the televised images.

"After watching Saddam's execution he was constantly asking 'How was Saddam killed?' and 'Did he suffer?'" Akti was quoted as saying. "These television images are responsible for my son's death."

Nine-year-old Mubassahr Ali, from the eastern Pakistan town of Rahim Yar Khan, died hours after Saddam when he also mimicked the ousted leader's execution, local police official Sultan Ahmed Chaudhry said.

"The ill-fated boy used a long piece of cloth, tied it with a ceiling fan and wrapped its other end around his neck. Then he stood on a chair and fell down," Chaudhry said.

In Yemen, at least two young boys died and another was injured in apparent imitations of Saddam's hanging.

One of the cases involved a 13-year-old junior high school student who hanged himself after watching Saddam's execution on television, a Yemeni security official said.

When the boy's family returned to their home outside the capital, San'a, on Wednesday, they found him hanging from a tree wearing a traditional Arab headdress, said the boy's cousin, Yahya al-Hammadi.

In Saudi Arabia, a 12-year-old boy was found by his brother hanging from an iron door with a rope around his neck, the newspaper Okaz reported. The boy, Sultan Abdullah al-Shemmeri, lived with his family in the province of Hafr al-Baten, near the Iraqi border.

"The child was just 12 years old and didn't really know whether the execution of Saddam was something good or bad," a Saudi Interior Ministry official said Saturday. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

Local media in Algeria and India also have reported other mimicking deaths, but these could not immediately be confirmed.

Ramy, the professor in Egypt, said children are prone to imitating violence they encounter on television, the Internet and movies, but usually they act out against another person. Mimicking a hanging or suicide is unusual, but perhaps in this case it is unsurprising, he said.

Because "some people have said Saddam is a hero and martyr and have glorified his death, this has affected children," Ramy said.

But Jasem Hajia, a child psychologist in Kuwait City, cautioned against placing all the blame on video images. "This is extreme, and I think there were physiological disorders as well with the children," Hajia said.

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Associated Press writers Ahmed al-Haj in Yemen and Khalid Tanveer in Pakistan contributed to this report.

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Originally Posted by Navaros

No longer just one young boy dying as a direct result of Saddam's murder.

Several boys die copying Saddam hanging

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Future idiots taken care of - thanks to Saddam. :laugh4:

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Originally Posted by PanzerJager

Future idiots taken care of - thanks to Saddam. :laugh4:

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EDIT: No personal attacks please. BG

*looks up how to add user to ignore list*

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*looks up how to add user to ignore list*

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Easy. Go to user CP, ignore/buddylist and add the name in question and update the list. Works like a charm.

Come on now, these darwin award nominees were 12 and 13 years old.

Either I was of superior than average intelligence at that age(edit: which is hard to believe), or these boys were idiots; as I certainly could comprehend the results of hanging myself.

I mean, what kind of genius sees a man die by hanging on TV, and decide to try it out himself?

Some of the members of this board are 12 and 13... such idiocy is insulting to their intelligence I would presume. :yes:

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Originally Posted by PanzerJager

Some of the members of this board are 12 and 13... such idiocy is insulting to their intelligence I would presume. :yes:

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You presume too much, and not just the younger members!!!:laugh4:

What, nothing for me to edit, Dave? You're slippin' man. Wait... 'not just the younger members'... hmmmm. :)