Those Who Hang Dictators

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Courtesy of: Media Monitors
By Edna Yaghi
Published: December 30, 2006

For Education and Discussion Only. Not for Commercial Use.Today, December 29, 2006, marks an event that will go down in history according to how we Americans portray it. Remember, history is always written by those who hang heroes. The death of any human being should not be made lightly of nor should there be celebrations over the demise of any individual no matter how terrible that person was deemed to have been.

What is disturbing is that as one Arab political analyst so aptly put it, it is all a “black comedy.” Former President Saddam Hussein was executed for crimes against his people. I agree that he was indeed a brutal dictator. I do not condone the violent acts that he perpetrated against the Iraqis. I do not even like dictatorships or the rule of tyrants. But there are many things that disturb me about this whole scenario. What first comes to my mind is that at least everybody knew that Saddam was a dictator. He himself did not pretend that his rule was determined by the choice of his people or that the laws he passed had the consent of the majority.

On the other hand, and very sadly, we Americans think that we have a democracy. We are not even aware that the government that we live under is indeed a dictatorship and that the tyranny we endure is just passed from the hand of one president to another. We were fooled in the first place into going to war against Iraq. What in the world do we have to do with what was going on in another country far across the ocean? We now know that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. We now are aware of the fact that Al-Qaeda had no base in Iraq as long as Saddam was president. He never would have accepted having anyone share his power with him. All the excuses that we were given to go to war against Iraq were false. We now understand that Saddam had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. We now realize that he was no threat to the American people and that his government in no way threatened American freedom. We let a devious man, George W. Bush, and his devious cabinet lead us into a war that had no just cause. If we want to claim that we were concerned about the democracy of the Iraqis, we cannot even pretend to believe such lies ourselves. Since when have the American people been genuinely concerned about the welfare of any Arabs? It was not so long ago that Saddam was even a friend of our former presidents because he helped us fight the war against Iran. Though, in fact, Americans supplied both the Iraqis and the Persians with weapons so that they could kill off one another and do the dirty work for us.

Until now, Osama Ben Ladin is still at large. But who cares? We have found our scapegoats, such as Saddam Hussein, elsewhere. We use despotism as an excuse to bomb, destroy, desecrate, invade, and plunder the homes, lives, countries, and civilizations of other people while assuming that in reality, we are the only people who are entitled to claim the right to homes, lives, a country, and a so-called civilization. Without a second thought, we pillage other countries not even considering the fact that it is in the very countries we so easily destroy that civilization itself began.

Even the American people who are so easily fooled most of the time, came to realize that something is terribly wrong with the whole idea of a war in Iraq. We demonstrated this by voting more for the Democrats than Republicans in a sullen stupefied but not yet verbal enough protest to what our immensely intelligent Bush is doing in Iraq. I remember that it was not so long ago that anyone who had the notion of criticizing the American invasion of Iraq was considered a traitor and unpatriotic. Have we cost the lives of so many American soldiers and the well being of so many more under the guise of protecting our country? Is it not obvious that we have in fact endangered our country so much more because of our arrogant foolishness?

We have been led to the Killing Fields in Iraq by our war mongers, George Bush, Richard Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention our fairy godmother Condolisa Rice. Of course, the fact that Iraq has a lot of oil should not even cross our minds as a reason to go to war against a people who had nothing to do with us, had no weapons of mass destruction, and had no inkling of 9/11. And lest we forget, Israel was becoming increasingly disturbed that Iraq had such a strong army and that Saddam just didn’t happen to like what the Israelis were doing to the Palestinians. So, we went to war to take over the oil and to kill off as many Iraqis as possible in order to please the monster that we created.

Now, more American soldiers have been killed in Iraq than those who were killed during 9/11. Of course, we don’t mention how many Iraqis have been killed because we really don’t consider them quite human. And we really don’t dwell on the idea of how many of our soldiers who do survive the insanity of our war come back physically and psychology messed up. Some of our soldiers who were told that they were fighting for our freedom are now homeless, can’t find jobs, and are so psychology scarred that they cannot function. We heard and talked of the Viet Nam syndrome, but we keep secret the even more horrifying Iraq syndrome.

In the meantime,we toppled a leader we had no business toppling, and we still claim that we are fighting terrorism. If we look into that mirror mirror on the wall, we will not find the image looking back at us the most beautiful of all, but rather the ugly face of the real tyrants and the greatest enemies of peace and tranquility. Let us face it my fellow Americans, we are the ones who have committed the crimes against humanity and we are our own worst enemies. We are the real terrorists.

Source:

http://world.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/39224