In no way to excuse Saddams methods — but for a long time I’ve wondered if much of his crimes against his own people, were not in fact, a response to the sectarian (shiite) and confederate (kurdish) forces hell-bent on overthrowing his secular/socialist government. That his crimes were commited , indeed, within the same parameters and context of “holding the country together” or maintaining a “national unity” government — as say for example, the U.S. efforts to rid Fallujah of “anti-Iraqi” elements. If Saddams genocidal actions are contrasted within the same “counter-insurgency” framework as that of the U.S. efforts at “counter-insurgency” then apples to apples, Saddams apples are less rotten via the body count, than those of the U.S.

Posted by: anna missed | Nov 5 2006 22:09 utc | 3

It wuz satire?

Posted by: Snuffy smith | Nov 5 2006 22:48 utc | 5

as this day has passed into night – i am in wonderment again at the pure bestiality of our species & of how we permit our political class to articulate that which is most obscene in us
today was not justice in anyone’s language except of thos who hold the rope or who pay the hangman for his deed
that we permit the kind of vulgar vengeance that can be witnessed in any western media today is sufficient cause for shame
how can we ever think we had the right to judge the brutal technocrats of eastern germany, romania etc
our political class has so much, so much blood on its hands that it will never wash away
they think tonight that they are victors but they have just gone further into their pit of depravity, a depravity only matched by the worst political regimes of the 19th & 20th centuries
this empire has degraded everything – even the most simplest of emotions
i watched iraq for sale tonight & i could not have felt more anger at these men who rule from the roll of dollars & like the krupps & the thysens & their whole army of technocrats – they will die peacefully in their beds unlike the bloody murders they inflict on other people including their own
they are liars, then they are thieves & they are without question, murderers
& they can in their crude way sing odes to their justice – but in the end they too know they will be committing murder
it is appalling the manner in which they describe their evil & sordid acts
i hope only that this tuesday the people can see the moral bottom of all this & can try to put a brake on it – but i am a dark man & i do not believe so – i have the most terrible presentiment that their worst has not yet been done
but communities around the world must recoonquer the space taken by these most tawdry of tyrants

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 6 2006 0:14 utc | 7

The war was losing support ’cause we weren’t doing everything needed to win. We weren’t killing enough people, weren’t brutal enough, yada yada. Killing 600,000+ doesn’t matter ’cause it was done quietly. In this one, our hand is clear as day. So we’ll kill another Iraqi and the 20% or so who had wandered off the farm will return with the hope that there will be more killing now. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t but the Shia Sunni devide is now etched in stone. Talk all you can about keeping Iraq united but do everything to make sure that it won’t; thus starts phase II of the great Negraponte plot.
Max

Posted by: Max Andersen | Nov 6 2006 2:08 utc | 9

off topic, but I wonder if MoA-ers in Europe are okay.
power outtage

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 6 2006 4:03 utc | 11

hmm, not even the usual night owls and nachtigalls. but some of them are surely sleeping–very interesting to look at the MoA visitor map with day/night lighting depicted.
are the power outages patchy or sweeping?

Posted by: catlady | Nov 6 2006 5:02 utc | 13

power outage – there was one for about half an hour that hit some ten million households in France, Belgium, Germany. Overload of some lines due to an unknown cause that led to a shutdown of several distribution points – last time such happened was 30 years ago.

Posted by: b | Nov 6 2006 8:15 utc | 15

Far as I know no power outtage here in Hamburg.

Posted by: Hamburger | Nov 6 2006 10:22 utc | 17

The news here that I heard made it sound like all of mid-northern continental Europe was in total darkness…with no mention of the time. Lots made about “was nearly a total blackout.” And as the link shows, you continental Europeans are worth ‘tsk-tsking’ about in GB because you need to upgrade your infrastructure.
…because, of course, we’re spending so much here to maintain public life. :/

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 6 2006 14:07 utc | 19

@clueless – I agree – monopolistic infrastructure, especially networks should be publicly owned or at the very least highly regulated. Still average outage (planned and unplanned) per customer here is only some 25 minutes per year. But this event will help to drive that down even further – there were quite some editorials today that hit the electricity companies.

Posted by: b | Nov 6 2006 15:46 utc | 21

The Goose and the Gander ( counterpunch)
Is Bush Next?
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
The show trial of Saddam Hussein was drawn out until two days before the midterm US elections. The death sentence imposed on the former Iraqi president may help the deluded band of Bush supporters find victory in the defeat that Bush has met in Iraq and motivate them to support the beleaguered Republicans on November 7.
But Saddam’s sentence will do nothing for reconciliation and peace among Iraq’s Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites. In Iraq the sentence is seen by all parties as revenge for the years of Sunni rule. Saddam’s sentence is perfectly timed to drive the rising sectarian conflict, which is already causing 100 or more Iraqi deaths per day, over the brink into full scale civil war. Indeed, one could conclude that the real purpose of the sentence is to achieve the neoconservative goal of a dismembered and impotent Iraq.
Saddam was sentenced to death because 148 Shiites were killed in 1982 in the Iraqi government’s response to an attempted assassination of Saddam. We have no way of knowing how many, if any, of the 148 were involved in the assassination attempt, or whether the botched attempt was a “black ops” event to enable the police to settle local scores or to take out potential trouble-makers. The killings, however, do not fit the propaganda picture of Saddam gratuitously killing people for the fun of it.
Now that the Bush administration has adopted the torture and detention practices of Saddam’s regime, one wonders what would be the fate of Americans accused of an assassination plot against a US president?
Saddam’s trial itself is suspect. The most qualified lawyer in the courtroom, former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, was ejected from the trial for handing Judge Abdul-Rahman a memo in which he said the trial was a “travesty” of law. I am confident that Ramsey Clark has more integrity than Abdul-Rahman.
But, to get to the main point, let us assume that Saddam is guilty as charged and that his death so serves the cause of justice that it is worth heightened sectarian conflict and even full-fledged civil war.
What did Saddam do that Bush, and Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and Blair have not done?
If Saddam can be sentenced to death for his responsibility in the killing of 148 Shiites, what about Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/Blair’s responsibility for the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians slaughtered by Bush’s invasion of Iraq? This massive carnage is the direct consequence of an illegal invasion–a war crime in itself for which Nazi leaders were sentenced to death–that was based on lies and deception. Bush himself admits that 30,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. Iraq Body Count puts the civilian deaths at between 45,000 and 50,000. The recent Johns Hopkins University study published in the peer-reviewed British medical journal, The Lancet (11 Oct, 2006), puts the Iraqi civilian deaths caused by Bush’s invasion as high as 655,000.
What does the world think of American hypocrisy when the US government, drowning in the blood of tens of thousands of its innocent victims, cries “justice” as the president of Iraq is sentenced to death for killing 148 people for trying to assassinate him?
The verdict against Saddam was influenced by the propaganda of mass graves uncovered by the US-led invasion and seized upon as justification for that illegal invasion. However, as various experts have pointed out, the graves are those of war dead from the Iraq-Iran war. The US government has responsibility for these deaths also, as Washington gave aid to both sides in the bloody conflict that is believed to have claimed as many as one million lives.
Now that Saddam Hussein has been held accountable for his crimes, can we look forward to accountability for George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, John Bolton, Kenneth Adelman, Michael Rubin, Eliot Cohen, and their propagandists in the media, such as Billy Kristol, Victor Davis Hanson, Robert Kagan, David Frum, the Wall St Journal editorial writers, the editors of National Review and the New York Times, and the Fox “News” talking heads?
Will accountability be extended to the conservative foundations and think tanks that financed the neoconservative takeover of the Republican Party and Bush administration?
Now that the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have ended in defeat, those most responsible for the destruction of those two countries, tens of thousands of deaths, and a bill for US taxpayers in excess of $2 trillion (according to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz) are running from any responsibility.
Richard Perle, the principle instigator of the illegal invasions, declared to Vanity Fair (Nov. 3, 2006): “Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened.” “At the end of the day,” Perle told ABC News’ Karen Mooney (Nov. 4, 2006), “you have to hold the president responsible.”
Kenneth Adelman, who promised us a “cakewalk war,” now puts all the blame on Rumsfeld: “He certainly fooled me” (Vanity Fair, Nov. 3).
The neoconservatives, of course, are trying to escape blame for the defeat of their strategy by accusing Bush and Rumsfeld of incompetent implementation. Will the neoconservatives escape responsibility for launching the wars that have turned the United States into a war criminal abroad and a police state at home?
Paul Craig Roberts

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Nov 6 2006 18:00 utc | 23

r’giap :
Is Bush Next?

Richard Perle, the principle instigator of the illegal invasions, declared to Vanity Fair (Nov. 3, 2006): “Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened.” “At the end of the day,” Perle told ABC News’ Karen Mooney (Nov. 4, 2006), “you have to hold the president responsible.”

This is a bald faced description of a “president” failing to follow orders and accomplish the task assigned, is it not?
Where do the neocons think they are going with this?
Will the American supporters of the fair-haired, blue-eyed, born-again George Bush now accept that his direction was from the “higher power” of the neocon cabal? and that he should be vilified and punished for not carrying out their “divine direction”?
Or will they suddenly discover a handy scapegoat upon whom to heap their guilt at having championed what turn out to be war criminal acts by their annointed one in the person of his maligner, Perle, et al?

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Nov 7 2006 4:48 utc | 25