.... what has this white house actually gotten right????

W.orthless
W.hining
W.eakling

Same old mistake... ally oneself with a powerful but dangerous leader for stability now... and chaos in the future. Thats is part of what got is here in the first place both in Iran and Iraq.

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Jonathan Cook explored the scenario back in mid December. End of the Strongmen: The era of the Middle East strongman, propped up by and enforcing Western policy, appears well and truly over. His power is being replaced with rule by civil war, apparently now the American Administration's favoured model across the region.

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Of him actually hanging.

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Who recorded the cell phone video and published it on internet fully knowing that this would provoke a long lasting violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Iraq? The video seems to clearly "prove" that Shia government and Mahdi Army executed Saddam. Who wants and needs a bloody, full scale civil war i Iraq? The timing of the execution, that was carried out on the morning of the Eid al-Adha, can only be explained by a desire to upset both radical and moderate Muslims and therefore to increase the size and scope of the expected conflict.

It is highly unlikely that "the organizers" of Saddam's execution did not and would not think about the above questions and consequences. What is really going on here?

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...in an effort to "nation build" a tribal society?

I didn't need one. There is no valid military mission in Iraq. The military mission--even if you buy into the official line--was accomplished ~2 years ago.

Bring our people home. Let Iraqis decide whether Iraqis want civilization or barbarism, and let Iraqis decide what price they are willing to pay for the future of Iraq.

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After a fair and impartial trial of Bush, Chenney, Rumsfeld and others in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, let us have our own hangings to show the world that mass murdering criminals in government cannot go unpunished.

I believe billions of people would feel safer knowing the Bush et al paid the highest price for the injustice that their crimes have brought upon us all.

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that the video of the hanging had more impact than Saddam's capture, trial, and actual hanging combined.

(It must have been wild to be on the receiving end of the cell-phone filming.)

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I have not read one protest or questioning of the fact that Saddam was not turned over to a World Tribunal for justice. We sat by while they took pictures of him in his underwear...we sat by while his attorneys were murdered...and we sat by while he was executed without appeal. He should never have been imprisioned in his own country by his sworn enemies. His trial should heve been moved to an impartial venue.
I personally am against capitol punishment in any case but I would feel a lot better about it if it is done humnanely as possible. I feel ashamed about his execution.

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but the video on YouTube currently has 1508 comments, more than I've ever seen on any YouTube video up to now. And they're increasing by the minute. Some disgusting. Some furious. Some sick. But people are obviously highly disturbed. Some of the comments against Muslims are more than disheartening -- they're frightening. So much hate!

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Stopping the execution or refusing to turn him over to the new government, shoddy though we may think it is, would have been more interference, not less. Had we pulled out a year ago, this still would have happened. One bad action does not make another copasetic; just because Bush acts the dictator doesn't mean Saddam didn't deserve to die.

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Take note people.

This is what happens when you cooperate with the US government. Look back into history and you will see that this is a repeating pattern. Oh, go ahead and play with the US...make gobs of dirty money and have POWER...but don't expect to live long enough to retire.

THE U.S. USES, ABUSES, and now EXECUTES.

I don't suppose any of you foreign countries are looking for wannabe expatriate Americans? I've just about had it with this shit!!

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Few westerners know that about 20% of Iraqi marriages are Sunni-Shia unions.

Just as few know that Saddam´s Baath party had a large membership of Shia as well as Sunnis and even Christians, like the vice minister.

When Saddam distributed weapons to civilians before the war, he gave them to Sunnis and Shia alike.

I watched a documentary on German TV, where a Shia woman from a poor neighbourhood in Bagdad was interviewed. She, a school teacher, wore traditional Shia clothing and in her free time she trained other religious Shia women in the use of fire arms.

At the beginning of the American occupation of Iraq, right after Bush´s "Mission accomplished", I read articles on Moqtada Sadr and his militia, and how admired he was in the poor areas of Iraq across any sectarian borders.

His people were doing the social work and ran clinics. His organisation was seen as non-corrupt similar to Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine. Even Sunnis had his picture on the wall, especially after he offered to join the resistance in Fallujah.

When the Shia mosque was bombed, it was Sadr who blamed the Americans for it.

It would be very much out of character if it really were Sadr´s militias who were indiscriminately mass-murdering their Sunni neighbours.

According to many Iraqis, while there was a division between Kurds and Arabs in the north of Iraq, there never was a division between Sunnis and Shia before the war.

And although now, the Sadr militias are blamed for the sectarian violence, a few months back there came reports out of Iraq that the violence originated from some Badr brigade units, connected to Ahmed Chalabi, the ex-CIA assassin and neo-con agent responsible for the WMD lies.

In "Crime fighting or Crime Cover-up", the German blogger "Freace" asks if the bombing of the Basra police station really was what we were told in the mainline media.

According to BBC reports, it was apparently the same police building in which last year 2 special unit Brits wearing Arab clothes and driving a car full of explosives had been detained and arrested after they had shot several policemen. The building was then stormed by British troops to free those obviously false flaggers.

This time around, more than a 1000 Brits attacked this one building with only "very few police officers" in it. Then out came those contradicting accounts on the number of prisoners supposedly freed, from 178 to 127 to 76.

Nothing was mentioned as to where the supposedly tortured prisoners were hospitalized, and instead of using the building for other purposes, like a different police unit, it just was blown up.

Could it be that this supposedly rogue police unit was not so rogue after all, but just doing its job in finding evidence and witnesses as to who really is behind the "sectarian violence"?

Whatever the truth is about the Sunni-Shia divide, and the sectarian violence, the only parties profiting from a civil war, are Israel and her Zionist supporters in the west.

The plan to divide Iraq and all the other surrounding countries along sectarian and ethnic lines has been a Zionist dream stated in several policy papers for decades now.

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... but Saddam wasn't "essentially handed over to a Shi'ite militia to kill their enemy", as you put it.

Like it or not, Iraq is a majority Shi'a country, and the government is therefore dominated by the Shi'a. Whoever the identities of the men in the video who conducted the actually execution, they are representatives (perhaps not formally, but in reality) of the government in power.

That the Shi'a and Sunni are engaged in a sectarian conflict doesn't make the majority Shi'a government just another militia. There certainly are large and powerful Shi'a militias, as everyone knows, but to dismiss the government itself as just another militia is to ignore the simple fact that democratic elections would result in a Shi'a-led government.

The whole civil war meme in the U.S. media is working to distort the basic reality of Iraq as a cobbled-together product of European colonial rule, and making the majority Shi'a out to be no better — or even different — from the much smaller (in terms of percentage of the population) minority Sunni militias.

Yes, the official Shi'a government is tied to the Shi'a militias, with the state security apparatus thoroughly infiltrated by the militias themselves. But to dismiss an official government act as merely the work of one militia against another is to miss the bigger picture of Iraq as a whole: the Shi'a are in charge, as they would (and should) be under any democratic system, because they are the overwhelming majority of the Iraq population.

That they have formed themselves into militia to battle the Sunni majority that oppressed them under Saddam (and before) does not obscure that fact, or simply make this a militia vs. militia civil war in which every faction is equally illegitimate.

The Western media inevitably portray groups like the Shi'a in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, or Hamas in Palestine as terrorist groups with narrow sectarian/religious interests that Americans therefore see as fanatical and irrational, ignore or dismiss them on that basis, and make no effort to try to understand the legitimate and well-founded political motivations behind their formation and actions.

When the media put everything in terms of religion and sectarianism, people wrongly conclude that the conflict is merely the latest iteration in a "centuries" old struggle between groups that are violently and irredemably opposed to one another based on ancient religious rivalries — instead of looking at the much more recent political antecedents, many of them created or supported by U.S. allies and the U.S. itself that give rise to or exacerbate these seemingly intractable conflicts.

When it's all portrayed as religious groups fighting for dominance, it allows people to throw up their hands and dismiss the whole thing as unfathomable, and let their own countries policies off the hook for any responsibility for how things got this way, and how they can be solved. The same way liberals look at everything the Republicans do as the acts of Christian fundamentalists, when it's much better explained by plain old elitists using religion (and the religious) as a cloak for their quite secular political ambitions ...

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The man killed thousands. Justice needs only be metted out one time to the perpetrator of these killings. A single guilty finding of crimes against humanity is enough. Why? For the welfare of the Iraqi people who were terrorized by this man for thirty years. Every day he was allowed to live past the judgment that he WAS a perpretrator of Crimes Against Humanity, was another day that the Iraqi's lived in fear that he would somehow escape and hide for awhile - only to rise once again to power.

Only those who would deny history need it to be 'proven' to them that he perpertrated all of the other grizzly violent maimings and deaths. We know he used chemical and biological weapons. We know he used them against the Iranians and the Kurds. We know that he had thousands upon untold thousands of men and women mutilated and thrown into mass graves. We know that his goons buried their 'thought to be' enemies alive. We also know that he had WMD's that were ushered out of Iraq by the time the allied forces made their march into Baghdad. Our only miscalculation? Not to go in in September but rather go to the UN looking for support from an organization that has long ago outlived its usefullness...thereby giving Saddam and his minions the time the to take those weapons out of the country, bury smaller weapons and to destroy still others.

With Saddam now officially executed, the fear that hovered over the Iraqi people since his capture - and the introduction of insurgency - will begin to lesson and will eventually disappear. But it will take time. And the Iraqi's must stand up for themselves to bring any lasting governing body, police force, etc. to effectiveness and eventual fruition.

While he remained alive, the fear of his potential escape and return to power layed heavy on the indiginous population - on those that had endured 30 years of terror and brutal episode - one following upon another - until it affected every Iraqi - every family.

You continue to get it wrong. Bush is not and never was the enemy. Saddam was the enemy.

History will treat Bush in much the same manner as it has treated all decisive and unpopular Presidents - Presidents with a large dose of objectivity and honesty.
Objectivity and honesty turned turned Lincoln and Truman...both much more unpopular in their time than Bush is in his time ...into hero's for taking the tough stand. History will do the same for Bush.

Your incessant whining will have no lasting historical significance. You approach has no credibility in the longer run. History will be objective where you are just simply a whiner...looking for something new to blame on Bush with the passing of each partisan day.

Being alone and knowing the right things that need to be done is the stage of a small minority. Bush is in that minority. And history will treat him more kindly - with much greater understanding - and with a large dose of appreciation.

While Bush gradually becomes vindicated, you will go down in history as the partisan, vitriolic Bush-hater that you are. And any attempt to dress it up under a guise of virtue will not survive history's stringent historical standard.

Bush will go down as America's protector against a terrible, brutal enemy - and that he acted againt the enemy that lies in wait - from the outside of our borders as well as the enemy that lies in wait from within.

In the beginning, I didn't that Michael Savage was correct when he called liberalism a social disease based in insanity. But the longer we are treated to the mass hallucinations of disinformation, misinformation, lies, distortions and partisanship - the better I see that Savage is right.

God bless the USA. Let freedom ring.

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I post it so you can hear for yourself its most important aspect. Toward the end of the clip, you can make out deafening shouts of "Muqtada," indicating to the entire Muslim world and beyond that Saddam was essentially handed over to a Shi'ite militia to kill their enemy, a Sunni.

the chnting of Muqtada refes to the fact that Sadam had ordered the killing of both his father (although a Shia friend from Najaf tells me it was actually his uncle) and his aunt. It was saying this is justice for the killing of these two leaders who pacivly opposed sadam's rule.

why would you try and further the shia sunni divide by saying this is the 'most important' evidence of shia sunni revenge. sounds pretty similar to the whitehouse bullshit line to me. Are you trying to fuel an image that could further enflame the divide? what the hell are you trying to do?

Andrew Stromotich

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You might want to check out the most recent blog entry from Riverbend, an Iraqi woman with a clear perspective from her country. Reading the words of someone who is THERE NOW has a whole lot more weight (to me) than all this banter from Americans here.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

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