Defending Saddam

Ansilla Nyar, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Civil Society, lives in a strange and warped world. Commenting in today’s Mercury on the “kangaroo court-style execution of Saddam Hussein” Nyar waxes polemic in what amounts to a defense of Saddam (despite protestations to the contrary – ussually when someone claims that they don’t intend to defend person x, they proceed by defending person x!).

Now he is most emphatically dead and Bush`s so called path to "democracy" is no more certain than it was before his execution. In no way am I attempting to excuse Saddam. But it is fundamentally wrong and hypocritical to simplistically demonise him. For one thing, in doing so, we miss all the complexities of this story of oil, wars and dirty politics. A fair application of justice under the law would demand that many world leaders be similarly hauled off to The Hague for a war crimes trial. Fidel Castro rose to power around the same time as Saddam by murdering his political opponents, but the US and the UN are not calling for Castro to answer for his crimes. In 1979 the war waged by the Soviets against Afghanistan was as brutal as anything waged in Iran. But Gorbachev and Castro escape the wrath of the international community. Should we now not be calling for Ariel Sharon to answer for his crimes?

Ariel Sharon continues to be demonised as one of the worst villains of our time despite the fact that he wasn't even involved in the Sabra and Shatilla massacres but was only found indirectly responsible for failing to foresee the chances of the massacre. 

How often do you ever see a mainstream media article speak of former Syrian President Hafez-al-Assad as a barbaric murderer? Why is Sharon so often described in these shades when Assad, who massacred up to 25,000 Muslims in the Syrian town of Hama, always ignored?

Perhaps this is what you expect from an academic who stoops to the low levels of defending Saddam Hussein.

The trash we find in our mainstream media never ceases to amaze me.

Comments

[Joel Pollak]

Uh... the US is totally calling for Fidel Castro's head. The problem is that the American-backed attempt to invade Cuba was a spectacular failure. The author of the article combines ignorance with (im)moral equivalence.

[Gary]

See my review of the book Saddam by con Coughlin which can be used as a refutation of Nyar's article.
http://www.infoisrael.net/cgi-local/text.pl?source=4/b/viii/020520072