Iraq's Liberation: A Foretaste for the Entire World

Does the struggle for Iraq have implications for all of humanity?

by Scott Ashley

Many reports have confirmed that Saddam Hussein maintained his reign of terror through torture, murder and even the use of chemical weapons against Iraqi citizens.

In a startling piece in the April 11 New York Times, a CNN news executive admitted that he knew of a number of brutal murders of innocent Iraqis and the torture of others, and even the planned assassination of a neighboring head of state, but his network had refrained from reporting on them.

The coalition forces' destruction of many of Saddam's presidential palaces and compounds—lavish edifices constructed even as thousands of Iraqi citizens went hungry or died for lack of needed medicines—emphasized how much he had put his own interests ahead of those of his country. Shortly before the war, Forbes magazine estimated his personal fortune at $2 billion, most of it amassed through illegal sales of Iraqi oil and kickbacks on legal transactions. Other estimates put it even higher. As one of a number of the world's dictators-for-life, he considered himself accountable to no one.

The brutality through which Saddam Hussein maintained power is legendary. A pre-war report by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office titled "Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses" described Iraq as "a terrifying place to live," noting that 3 to 4 million Iraqis, some 15 percent of the population, had "fled their homeland rather than live under Saddam Hussein's regime."

The report recounted testimony from Iraqi exiles of many forms of punishment without trial—including systematic torture, rape and beheadings. It also noted that the penalty for "slander or abusive remarks" about Saddam Hussein or his family was amputation of the offender's tongue, with the punishment broadcast on TV as a warning to others.

Read the full article at www.gnmagazine.org/issues/gn46/liberation.htm

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