Another U.S. war crime in Baghdad

The U.S. government has committed another war crime against the Iraqi people, one of many, with its execution of President Saddam Hussein. In reality, this is an assassination of the head of state of the nation of Iraq, which is currently occupied and ruled by U.S. imperialism.

Forget the fiction that this killing is a sovereign act of the current Iraqi "government," a puppet regime set up by the U.S. occupiers that can't even control the Green Zone of Baghdad.

U.S. forces arrested Saddam Hussein. They have kept him on a U.S. air base—Camp Cropper—since his arrest. They tried him with no legal basis in a kangaroo court under U.S. tutelage. They sentenced him according to the Bush administration's schedule to attempt to influence the November 2006 elections in the U.S. And now they have executed him to fit Bush's propaganda offensive aimed at re-escalating a war the U.S. has already lost.

This act only adds to the suffering of the Iraqi people and of those young soldiers sent by the politicians to do the dirty work of U.S. imperialism.

Bush will attempt to use this murder of the Iraqi president to show that he is back in control of the situation. The leader of the world's largest imperial power is now parading the head of his adversary on a pike in an effort to obscure the fact that U.S. military deaths are about to top 3,000. He hopes to obliterate the Iraq Study Group's judgment that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has been a disaster.

The Pentagon, which in fact is against any Iraqis who fight for their sovereignty, has also launched an offensive against the Shiite-based Mahdi Army. The Bush gang is scrambling to come up with a way of sending more troops to Iraq than those available in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, National Guard and Reserves.

Washington, not Saddam Hussein, is responsible for the deaths of over 2 million Iraqis during 16 years of wars and sanctions. No one should be fooled by Bush's statements of sympathy with any sector of the Iraqi people. No one should be fooled into thinking that the U.S.-ordered murder of Saddam Hussein will end the Iraqi resistance to Washington's occupation or will put the U.S. occupation forces or the puppet Iraqi regime in greater control.

The future of Iraq will be determined by Iraqis who are free from U.S. control and who now are fighting against the occupation.

Whatever one's evaluation of Saddam Hussein's role as president of Iraq, his role in history has been set by this murder. He died as an Iraqi leader who stood up to invaders from the most powerful empire the world has known.

Only when George W. Bush and the other war criminals in Washington are put on trial will the Iraqi people begin to obtain justice.

Workers World, Dec. 30, 2006