SADDAM

WSWS: Bush calls for Hussein’s execution: a portrait of sadism and ignorance

Those who actually sat through the interview and who know Bush’s record, however, may not be so impressed. When he was governor of Texas, the “ultimate penalty� was altogether routine. He presided over 152 executions, more than any other governor in US history, and once allowed that he spent an average of just 15 minutes reviewing cases before giving the order to put human beings—including the mentally ill—to death.

After becoming president, he has resumed the use of the federal death penalty for the first time in the US since 1963, ordering the execution of a Persian Gulf War veteran on the very eve of launching the invasion of Iraq last March

This is a disgusting tyrant who deserves justice, the ultimate justice. But that will be decided not by the president of the United States but by the citizens of Iraq in one form or another,� said Bush, who defensively added, “You don’t want a kangaroo court.�

But that is precisely what Washington is preparing. The “citizens of Iraq� will decide nothing. They are subjects of a US military occupation, without an elected government and without even the prospect of a vote for years to come. The US will create the instrument that will render Hussein’s verdict based on the time-honored American principle of “give him a fair trial and hang him.�

The other advantage of such a procedure is that dead men tell no tales. Hussein can be denied the one defense he would inevitably make before an international court: that the greatest crimes of which he stands accused—the Iran-Iraq war, the gassing of the Kurds and suppression of the Shiites—were carried out with either the direct support or tacit approval of US administrations in Washington.