Posted on 02/22/2003 10:40:00 AM PST by Wallaby
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WHY SADDAM IS GUILTY
Christopher Kremmer Sydney Morning Herald; News And Features; News Review; Pg. 26 February 22, 2003 Saturday
He committed his first murder to settle a personal score at the age of 15. When he became displeased with his health minister in 1982, he hauled him out of a cabinet meeting and personally shot him dead.
Clawing his way to the top in a country where politics is both a bloodsport and a route to social mobility made Saddam Hussein the ruthless dictator that he is.
The British author and journalist, Con Coughlin, claims Saddam appeared to have had prior warning of September 11: Just two weeks before the attacks took place, he put his country's armed forces on their highest alert since the invasion of Kuwait.
Born in the late 1930s in a dirt-poor village on the banks of the Tigris River, he was orphaned at an early age. But when Arab nationalism swept the Middle East in the 1950s, his life found meaning and he plunged into violent student politics. Gunplay was his forte. In his early 20s he took part in a failed attempt to assassinate Iraq's president Abdel Karim Kassem.
Modelling himself on Joseph Stalin, he toughed his way up through the ranks of the Ba'ath Party, doing several stints in jail and exile before seizing the presidency in July 1979.
Since then he has ruled Iraq by terror the only way such a disjointed and turbulent country can be ruled, many observers say. But Iraq, a country of 24million people, was too small a stage for Saddam's maniacal ambitions.
In April 1998, Coughlin says, Osama bin Laden even sent a delegation to attend the birthday celebration of Saddam's son, Udai, who in return agreed to train al-Qaeda operatives in Iraqi camps.
In September 1980, he launched a doomed invasion of neighbouring Iran, hoping to kill its Islamic revolution at birth and stamp his secular leadership on the entire Arab and Muslim world. America covertly supported him, with the president, Ronald Reagan, sending a special emissary called Donald Rumsfeld to shake on the deal.
But instead of a glorious victory, Gulf War I degenerated into an eight-year bloodbath in which more than 1million people died, many of them Iranian troops exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons.
Frustrated in Iran, Saddam turned on Kuwait two years later hoping its 10percent of world oil reserves would replenish his exhausted coffers. Instead, defeat cost Iraqis $US230 billion in damaged infrastructure and at least $US200 billion in lost oil production.
But miraculously, Saddam survived, only to squander the opportunity to quickly repent, surrender his weapons of mass destruction and rejoin the world community.
Instead, weapons inspections became a game of cat and mouse, and sanctions stayed.
The human cost was incalculable. Infant mortality doubled, and according to the World Health Organisation, the vast majority of Iraqis have had a semi-starvation diet for years.
The demography of Iraq has exacerbated its leader's political psychosis. Two-thirds of the population are Shia Muslims, but since independence in 1932, the country has been ruled by the Sunni Muslim minority.
When his citizens have tried to rise up, Saddam has repressed them brutally. The 20per cent Kurdish minority in the north were shown the price of defiance in March 1988 when Iraq's military attacked the Kurdish city of Halabja with chemical weapons, killing an estimated 5000 people.
Terrorism is the political currency of the Middle East, and rare is the leader who has not invested in it.
Recent Iraqi defectors have told of a training camp at the Salman Pak military base south of Baghdad, where Islamists from across the Middle East have trained in hijacking aircraft.
In the 1980s, Saddam gave shelter to notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, but later expelled him at Washington's behest.
In 1993, the FBI says, Saddam's agents smuggled a car bomb into Kuwait in a failed effort to assassinate George Bush Snr, although explosives experts have questioned the evidence.
Recent Iraqi defectors have told of a training camp at the Salman Pak military base south of Baghdad, where Islamists from across the Middle East have trained in hijacking aircraft.
Whenever it has suited him, the whisky-drinking Saddam has mouthed the language of jihad. He helped fund the Islamic fundamentalist government in the Sudan.
Then there was the well-known meeting in Prague between al-Qaeda suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer just five months before the attacks on New York and Washington.
The British author and journalist, Con Coughlin, claims Saddam appeared to have had prior warning of September 11.
Just two weeks before the attacks took place, he put his country's armed forces on their highest alert since the invasion of Kuwait.
In April 1998, Coughlin says, Osama bin Laden even sent a delegation to attend the birthday celebration of Saddam's son, Udai, who in return agreed to train al-Qaeda operatives in Iraqi camps.
Didn't Abu Nidal just die in Baghdad a few months ago?
Osama bin Laden even sent a delegation to attend the birthday celebration of Saddam's son, Udai, who in return agreed to train al-Qaeda operatives in Iraqi camps.
I wasn't aware of this allegation. Nice article Wallaby, thanks for the ping.
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