Saddam The Tyrant: Never Forget

Not long after Saddam's status has toppled in Baghdad in front of the whole world and President Bush declared victory on a U.S. carrier, Iraq, regrettable for the people, slide into sectarian violence that was provoked by America's sliding with the Shias and leaving the Sunnis feeling that they had no other course but to join an insurgency.

Because the nation slide into violence, the time and effort needed to uncover and fully appreciate the crimes of Saddam Hussein was initially lost as all manners of human concentration were consumed by the violence.

But now that Iraq is finally - one hopes - moving into an arena of stability and normalcy, it is time to properly reflect on the brutality of the Hussein years.

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[A deserved fate.]

An excellent new book - reviewed here by The Economist - titled The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny by American-British journalist Wendell Steavenson provides a good manual in that direction.

Ms. Steavenson persistently tracks down numerous officials who served Saddam Hussein during his 35 year reign. She also speaks to family members of, say, generals who were killed by Saddam - sometimes literally. Besides Iraq, Ms. Steavenson travels far to get interviews with those men living in exile in "Abu Dhabi, Amman, Beirut, Damascus and London."

What she uncovers is horrific. No one ever doubted Saddam's brutality, but as with reading stores from the Holocaust one is always taken back as the scope of crimes as if it were the first time such words had been heard. She pieces together a saddening picture.

The stories compiled are diverse, but "just about all of them witness summary executions: of enemy soldiers (mainly Iranians), of Kurds, of Kuwaitis, of Iraqi deserters, of senior Iraqi officers who are deemed to have been guilty of losing battles or even merely of retreating when they should have stayed to fight and die."

The brutalities of the Kuwaiti occupation have been mostly documented due to an effort by Kuwaitis and the Kuwait government after the Gulf War. But a new detail emerges. Kuwaitis held captive had their ears nailed to pieces of wood. Iraqi generals though did not leave all abuses to the Kuwaitis, but occasionally their own were brutalized. One Iraqi soldier who abused a Kuwait was tied to a grain then lifted up as his fellow soldiers shot him to death.

Abu Ghraib become infamous in the first year of the Iraqi war as The New Yorker and CBS News broadcastted images of sadistic American troops abusing mostly innocent Iraqis in a manner fitting a brutal dictator not a nation claiming to spread freedom to the world. What happened at Ghraib was shocking and appalling, but what took place before hand was worse. A relative of General Sachet recalls how Saddam's more ruthless son Qusigh [or Qusay as you know him in English] once ordered 2,000 prisoners to be killed as a means to dealing with overcrowding.

Some of the men whom Ms. Steavenson tracks down are apparently impressed by Saddam's vileness. One former bodyguard recalls with admiration how Saddam personally shot a relative right between the eyes because the young man had sought to marry a woman of his choice rather than the bride Saddam choose for him. When the would-be groom refused Saddam's advice to go back to the other woman, he was killed in cold blood.

Many of the many Ms. Steavenson speaks to also suffered from the anguish of violating their own morality. They had to continually lie and engage in deception for that was the only way to remain alive under Saddam's Iraq. Do they take responsibility though for their actions?

What is despairing about the book is that not a single person - whether genuinely regretful over the crimes or admiring - takes responsibility over what happened then and their participation. Their efforts to avoid responsibility are similar to those of Nazis and all other enforcers of dictators: "We were simply following orders."

Such reasoning provides no comfort for the remaining loved ones. Iraqis should Never Forget the injustices of that era.