THE PLANK JANUARY 9, 2007
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John Burns has a remarkable, chillingly good piece in today's Times. Tapes made years ago reveal Saddam Hussein discussing the use of chemical weapons against Kurdish Iraqis. Some excerpts:
Mr. Hussein sounds matter of fact as he describes what chemical weapons will do. "They will prevent people eating and drinking the local water, and they won't be able to sleep in their beds," he says. "They will force people to leave their homes and make them uninhabitable until they have been decontaminated."[Snip]But it was Mr. Hussein's chilling discussion of the power of chemical weapons against civilians that brought prosecutors and judges to the verge of tears, and seemed to shock the remaining defendants. One of the recordings featured an unidentified military officer telling Mr. Hussein that a plan was under development for having Soviet-built aircraft carry containers, packed with up to 50 napalm bombs each, which would be rolled out of the cargo deck and dropped on Kurdish towns."Yes, in areas where you have concentrated populations, that would be useful," Mr. Hussein replies.
Whatever one thinks of Saddam's execution, it's too bad they didn't keep the late dictator alive for this phase of his trial. His presence in the courtroom today, aside from being satisfying, would surely have focused more attention on this shameful slice of history.
--Isaac Chotiner
11 comments
That would be a drawback of an exceedingly prompt execution, wouldn't it?
- drdannyu
January 9, 2007 at 10:41am
for his war crimes, I am not at all interested in what we coulda / shoulda done with Saddam. Neil
- purcellneil
January 9, 2007 at 10:53am
Watching a recent show on Rudolf Hess they showed the defendants at the trials as jovial and dismissive of the process, until the concentration camp footage was shown. After that things became a great deal more somber. Hitler wasn't present but it was still important, as if that makes anyone feel any better. Not sure if this translates to modern Iraq, of course.
- TMastermind
January 9, 2007 at 11:01am
The sordid trial and lynching certainly doesn't hold a candle to Nuremburg, more's the pity. Of course, such matters can wait until Hell freezes over for those who imagine Bush as a war criminal.
- Robert Powell
January 9, 2007 at 11:54am
It was important that Saddam be executed now for limited actions against a small number of Shi'a rather than after a conviction for war crimes against the Kurdish people. The shouting of "Moqtada! Moqtada!" during the execution was the final grotesque proof of the disaster we've wrought in Iraq -- toppling a brutal but secular dictator and handing the country over to a Shi'a theocracy.
- ironyroad
January 9, 2007 at 12:51pm
- purcellneil
January 9, 2007 at 2:38pm
. . . another translation would be "hey Mom, it's me -- is the picture coming through ok?"
- ironyroad
January 9, 2007 at 3:31pm
Glad to see Saddam was astute enough to realize the tactical advantages of bombardment using incendiary devices. As U.S. Col. Randolph Alles told the San Diego Union-Tribune in August 2003, "We napalmed both those (bridge) approaches. Unfortunately, there were people there because you could see them in the (cockpit) video...They were Iraqi soldiers there. It's no great way to die...The generals love napalm...It has a big psychological effect." (Note that the incendiary used in the attack was technically not napalm but rather a more recently developed weapon using a different chemical compostition.) Kim Phuc, the Vietnamese girl in the famous photo whom we napalmed in 1972 and who is now an adult, notes that "Napalm is the most terrible pain that you can imagine...Napalm generates temperatures of 800 to 1200 degress Celsius." The United States (i.e. the Clinton Adminstration and the U.S. Senate) did not sign the 1980 U.N. protocol restricting the use of incendiaries. "Incendiaries are the only weapons which can effectively destroy certain counter-proliferation targets such as biological weapons facilities which require high heat to eliminate bio-toxins. To use only high explosives would risk the widespread relase of dangerous contaminants with potentially disastrous consequences for the civilian population," wrote DOD's Office of Arms Control Implementation and Compliance. One wonders if Col. Alles suspected the bridge approaches U.S. forces torched in Iraq of having been built over smallpox caches, or what not.
- williamyard
January 9, 2007 at 5:40pm
...Having him alive during that part of the trial would have been very, very embarrassing for the US, since both Henry Kissinger (under Ford) and Rumsfeld (under Reagan) not only gave him explicit permission to carry out those massacres, but even promised to have the US run interference for him in the UN against any attempt to charge him with war crimes there -- a fact that he and his defense lawyers would unquestionably, and loudly, have pointed out during that part of the trial. I rather suspect that that's also the reason he was so hurriedly hanged, and that the Administration is lying through its teeth (as usual) when it says that it tried to have al-Maliki delay the execution.
- moomaw1
January 10, 2007 at 7:13am
The data on this shows you've extrapolated outrageously and made assertions you can't substantiate. The execution was a shambles because the Iraqi government, and to a lesser extent, the Bush administration is. "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity".
- Robert Powell
January 15, 2007 at 4:39am
Same story with white phosphorus, cluster-bombs, landmines, etc. The job of soldiers is to break things and kill people. If this is not what you want, send the Peace Corps. One of the advantages of incendiary devices is that they minimize the hazards of leaving a lot of decomposing bodies lying around.
- Robert Powell
January 15, 2007 at 4:43am