‘They turned him into a martyr’

January 6, 2007

I guess this goes under the “unintended consequences” category.

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.”

“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.”

The NYT reported that hostility towards the United States is so strong now, Saddam, who was not a popular Arab figure before, “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.”

And the battle for hearts and minds continues….

No wonder Republicans can’t win hearts and minds, they don’t have any themselves.

I hear Saddam’s romance novels are selling like hot cakes now.

  • And this surprises, who…?

    But maybe BushBrat will see being deposed and captured by invaders, then tried and exectuted as a way to secure his legacy.

    Canada and Mexico! Yo, help us out here!

  • “Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher who said a man can do what he wants but cannot will what he wants, would have understood W.’s nonsensical urge to Surge.

    We don’t know if human beings have free will. We just know that human beings in Washington appear not to.” – Maureen Dowd, Monkey on a Tiger

    Not only is he a martyr, his grave also provides them with a shrine.

  • Only the Bushies could have turned what should have been an act of justice and perverted it until it looked like a petty hit. Short-sighted political gains once again trump what’s best in the long run.

    Executing a tyrant is an exercise in telling somone their actions have repercussions. Making Saddam a martyr should let the White House realize their actions have repercussions. But that’s expecting an awful lot out of this White House.

  • Should we propose a corollary to the current understanding that everything W touches turns to sh$t?

    How about sh$t touched by W gains a golden sheen?

    No, that’s not quite right.

    How about everything attempted by W will exceed the worst anticipated result, but will not stink (due to Karl) in the eyes of the MSM (except for Fox where they delight in deep breathing this stuff) until someone in the real world points out the completely astounding width and depth of the latest steaming pile.

    Well, that’s a bit complicated and perhaps a little hard on some of the MSM which seems to be realizing that the public’s got it’s BS detector’s calibrated for moron and sees through Karl’s snow job.

  • Quick! get Mel Gibson out rehab! There’s a buck to be made here with “The Passion of the Saddam”.

    On a grander scale: in a few years, when the new religion has spread even beyond the Arab world, everyone will be proud to proclaim himself a Saddamite. No more the tripartite division of Judaism-Christianity-Islam which had led to millenial bloodshed, but a world united through Saddamy.

  • One will get you ten that Bush and his buddies try to dig up the grave, and add Saddam’s skull to their little “fraternity” collection.

    And now that Saddam’s a martyr to the anti-American movement in the ME, the US would do well to get its act together, and find a replacement for petroleum. It might become a bit harder to get oil from that part of the world—especially if people start refusing to load tankers destined for US offloading facilities….

  • Making Saddam a martyr — or embellishing his already defiant image in the ME — was my greatest concern about the decision to execute him rather than let him rot in jail. Little did I know that the execution would be unofficially videoed, and that the images would look exactly like al queda’s taped murders.

    The act reminded me of something else. We invaded Iraq to liberate its people from a brutal dictator, and succeeded. But, as we should have realized before we invaded, Iraq has potential brutal dictators lined up like a “Harry Potter” book-signing. Saddam was hardly unique or obsolete. It’s only a matter of time before another killer rises to the top — probably with our assistance.

  • Watching the last moments before the execution (I didn’t watch the widely-available video of the hanging itself), I’d have to agree. The whole idea of punishment is to extract contrition and remorse. That never happened during the trial: Saddam never admitted to doing anything wrong. On the gallows, he kept his dignity and died with his faith intact, while his executioners capered and hooted like monkeys. Try to imagine George Bush in similar circumstances, and see if you think he’d look so statesmanlike in his final moments.

    The White House is slowly beginning to realize that they made the best choice they could have when they supported Saddam for leader of Iraq. While he was unquestionably a cruel dictator, many sources suggest Iraq was the most progressive of the Gulf States, and that Iraqis were generally well-educated and technologically adept. Iraq under Saddam was considerably more tolerant of competing faiths than it is now, and recent surveys of ordinary Iraqis conclude they were better off. Basic services were hugely improved over current levels, security likewise, and job opportunities were plentiful compared to today’s penurious environment. It’s hard to imagine those were good days – until you take a look at what it’s like now. A popular conservative view is that they are all savages, so what do you expect? However, nobody with any real intellect believes that. Nobody ever referred to the United States as the “Cradle of Civilization”, and there was a functioning, advanced society in Baghdad when there was nothing in America but trees and animals. Iraq under Saddam had its problems, but they were not American problems, and nobody in Iraq was crying out to Americans to solve them. The only Iraqis doing so were slimy snake-oil expats like Amhed Chalabi.

    Once again, George steps on his own dick. In movies, it’s always funny. But in movies, the consequences are light-hearted and without import. In real life, today, the consequences are horrible.

  • So Mark – that sounds like a variation on “at least the trains ran on time under Mussolini.” How many hundreds of thousands of people did Saddam kill under his dictatorship? You say he was a cruel dictator but other than that, look at how wonderful life was!! Sorry, that’s a pretty tough sell for me. Life is awful there but that’s because of the war- and post-war planning being so atrocious – all this was predictable and predicted by any number of experts, all of whom Bush refused to even listen to. They created (intentionally?) the environment that we have now. But to wish that we could go back to the good ol’ Saddam days is, I think, misguided.

  • Well, the Mussolini analogy doesn’t really work – at least not contextually – because he ramrodded one of the Axis powers with whom the U.S. was at war. The U.S. war with Saddam was one of choice, based on trumped-up reasons to drag the public along.

    I can’t claim to know how many people Saddam (or Mussolini) killed, directly or indirectly, under his leadership. I have seen news reports that suggest the mass graves were a myth, at least in terms of numbers; that no grave has yet been located with more than a few dozen people in it. Understand, I’m not suggesting that’s OK – just that it’s not the “thousands and thousands” an overheated press claimed before the war. While we’re on the subject, what happened to the Republican Guard? You know, the only military unit that actually came out and fought in anything like unit numbers? They were largely wiped out by U.S. air power. So, what happened to them afterward? Do they rest under tidy individual gravestones with flowers and candles, a little Arlington-on-the Tigris? Were they claimed by their families? They were not. They were bulldozed into a great big trench and interred together, the only practical way to deal with large numbers of dead bodies in a hot climate. If Saddam did it, it’d be called a mass grave.

    I didn’t mean to suggest Iraqis are nostalgic for the good ol’ days under Saddam because they really were great times, just that they seem so from the framework of the current hell. On that, I don’t think we’re too far apart. I would point out, however, that the power grid was thrashed in the first Gulf War also, at least as badly as Gulf War II jacked it up. The Iraqis had it up and running at about the prewar capacity in less than 6 months.

    I’m not sure now what my point was in the above post, but I think I meant to suggest both that things were not so bad in Iraq that America had to come over and kick everything to pieces, certainly no worse than they are in, say, Jordan or Egypt – and that the current leadership in Iraq is not an improvement on Saddam. Therefore, taking the two as a construct, both Americans and Iraqis would have been better off to leave things as they were.

  • I am for giving our Regal Retard a new middle name. Something with a middle eastern sound since he is so knowledgeable about the region. How about Insein. That sounds good, George Insein Bush and it is descriptive too. Since Libya is building a statue of Hussein, couldn’t we just sell them ours, the one that was torn down in Baghdad in that meaningless gesture. Shrub probably had it flown to Crudf__k, Texass at our expense to plant brush around.

  • Mark @14 – I’m not sure now what my point was in the above post…”

    Been there, done that, my friend….I don’t necessarily disagree with the rest of what you said in your last paragraph. It’s a fine line to walk between doing what is necessary to stop people like Hussein without invading every country.

    • Comments are closed.