Rattled America will find it can't spin itself out of this one

Rattled America will find it can't spin itself out of this one

Bob Ellis

GEORGE Bush will be hard put persuading three, four or five thousand American soldiers, marines and reservists who have already been there to go back to Iraq this year, to face 4 million Sunnis displeased by the Saddam hanging. Hard put too to persuade Nuri al-Maliki to stay in office, and stay alive, till they get there.

In the meantime the spinning of the killing of Saddam continues. The US had nothing to do with it; we merely guarded him for three years, then took him to the house of death and flew his coffined body to Tikrit. We tried to stop it happening so soon. We would have "handled it differently". What's all this fuss? The last 60 seconds of a tyrant's life matter less than the first 60 years. We've killed his two sons and his 14-year-old grandson and we'll kill his half-brother tomorrow, so the "process of national healing" can begin. Has any "process of national healing" been so mismanaged in world history? Has any filmed event won fewer hearts and minds? JFK's killing perhaps, though it pleased a good few Southern schoolboys, who cheered at the news.

If we only look at the politics of lynching a warrior-hero, abusing him on the gallows, keeping him awake the night before by banging on his cell door and flaunting before his bleary eyes the hangman's rope, we can see just how dim the whole plan was. What Sunni will pose beside Maliki now? What Arab leader, Sunni or Shiite, will praise his political skill?

And who will trust the Americans now, after this and Abu Ghraib and hurricane Katrina, to get any process right in any country including their own? Not the British soldiers on the ground in Helmland Province, Afghanistan. Not the Australian "security guards" in downtown Baghdad. Not the Iraqi dentists, doctors, nurses, restaurateurs and university lecturers daily fleeing the country. Not the children with toothache. Not the pregnant women with nowhere to go to give birth. Not the grandmothers of dead babies in humidicribs whose electricity gave out. Not the middle-class parents afraid to put their children on school buses lest they never see them again.

...http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/01/04/1167777215118.html

It sounds like something they would have done to insure the chances he would break when confronted by the abusive (and probably paid) operatives waiting by the gallows.

He held together amazingly well. You may recall that a few American media sources attempted to claim he had lost it at the last moment. It was CLEAR the absolute scum in the propaganda mongering departments intended to sell the idea he had become unhinged, a true coward at the moment of his death.

Well, tough luck for them. It surely didn't materialize, and their first efforts to try to ram that image through fell through when the actual film was broadcast everywhere to the point you actually had to avoid looking at tv, like me, in order to avoid seeing it.

This was brought to you by the same people who published those photos of his sons after they'd been slaughtered. I've heard in some cases they were loathesome enough to publish the photos of the dead faces surrounded by picture frames. Anyone who has the intelligence to see what kind of people we've got in our own government who use this kind of imagery to pump themselves up knows these people are not moral. They live somewhere far beneath the sun-lit world where human beings stay.

the US weren't responsible for the execution. That was the nasty, savage Iraqis, running off with the chief witness for the prosecution and killing him in uncivilised ways. The US only kills in the most dignified and respectful ways of course.

"It sounds like something they would have done to insure the chances he would break when confronted by the abusive (and probably paid) operatives waiting by the gallows."

Which in itself would suggest the purer than the driven snow US knew what was going to happen.

I forgot to add - I had to close my eyes repeatedly for several days too. I loathe violence, but unfortunately it seems not to offend our values more generally. That grotesque footage turned up on every news bulletin on every channel, even before the 9pm watershed. How many kids saw it? How many saw adults watching it and reacting with approval and satisfaction? How many heard our leaders failing to condemn it? What messages have we sent them?

is that it will turn out just the opposite of what was intended.

Now we have the Sunnis pissed at us as well as the Shia.

Helluva job George.