Bush Refused Saddam's Exile Offer

$1 Billion 'Exit Fee' Versus $1 Trillion War


Why Saddam wanted to go into exile...

For the more open-eyed, and open-minded, watchers of the Iraq War, the news that President Bush turned down Saddam Hussein's offer to go into exile, months before the Iraq War began, is hardly breaking news. Arch NeoCon, and key Iraq War cheerleader Richard Perle acknowledged before the war began that he was involved in negotiations regarding Saddam Hussein's offer to go into exile.

But BushCo. wanted the Iraq War, and they were going to go to war regardless of what Saddam Hussein did or did not do.

A story from the UK Daily Mail, claims Saddam Hussein wanted $1 billion to go into exile. But, back in early 2003, BushCo. refused. The War On Iraq was a go. How could it be stopped? The stock price for Boeing and Raytheon was climbing in anticipation of all the new 'defence' contracts to come.

$1 billion is a lot, but it's nothing compared to the $1.2 trillion bill the United States is already racking up in going to War On Iraq. And it's a small chunk of the more than $8 billion the United States "lost track of" in Iraq, when tons of cash was literally forklifted off the back of planes, before going missing.

War is first, and above all, a business. And business has never been so good for the American, Australian, British and Israeli war industries now supplying bullets, bombs, helicopter gun ships and other (some experimental) assorted human-slaying devices to the 'free fire' weapons range that is now Iraq.

Saddam going into exile in late February, 2003, would have made justifying the 'War On Iraq' all but impossible for President Bush, especially considering he failed to get a second resolution from the United Nations, and more than 10 million people around the world were marching in opposition.

The new revelations also render President Bush's demands that Saddam leave Iraq, only two days before the war began, to be nothing more than an utterly cynical, disgusting last ditch attempt to try and claim the moral high ground for an horrific, unprovoked war on an all but defenceless people. A large number of whom were children, many of whom are now dead. Or dying.

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"God Damn You, Persian Midget" - What Saddam And His Executioners Said To Each Other

A more detailed deciphering of the words exchanged between Saddam Hussein and his executions has been published online.

Before the noose was fixed around his neck, Saddam mocked one of his executioners with the line, "God damn you, Persian midget."

Saddam then smiled and made the first reference to powerful Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. This led to claims on Sunni/Baathist websites that the cleric was actually one of the masked executioners.

Officials in the execution chamber then drown out Saddam by shouting "ila jahanam". Which has been translated as "go to Hell".

Others insult Saddam. One man asks them to stop: "I beg you, I beg you, the man is being executed!" Saddam then says the Shahada, or testimony, that there is no god but Allah and Muhamad is his prophet. When he tries to say it again the trap door opens and he falls through to be hung. One man then shouts that "the tyranny has ended!" and others call out triumphal Shia chants.

2006 : THE YEAR IN IRAQ, IN REVIEW

A story from Stars & Stripes that supplies a remarkable timeline of events in Iraq, from a US military perspective, through 2006.

2006 was supposed to be the year of great change in the 'War On Iraq' and Iraq itself. When 2006 began, the new government was in place, oil production (the main source of revenue for the government) had been ramped up to almost 2 million barrels per day, and there were signs that the isurgency was falling away.

How incredible it is, then, to be here at the end of 2006, and to see just horrific changes in Iraq. Changes that no longer point towards a brighter future any time soon, but instead signal a far more deadly, more gruesome new reality for Iraq : all out civil/sectarian war, with tens of thousands more American troops set to pour into the war-savaged country.

From Stars & Stripes :

Before the year began, 2006 had been dubbed the “Year of the Police,” in which American trainers were to focus on bringing the Iraqi police forces up to speed. Officials had talked about a troop reduction in the second half of the year.

But when insurgents bombed a Shiite shrine in Samarra in late February, everything changed. The news became dominated by horrific sectarian violence and increasing attacks against American troops.

Some notable events :-

Jan. 5: More than 130 Iraqis and seven U.S. soldiers are killed in suicide bomb attacks and combat on one of the deadliest single days since the war began.

Jan. 6: The New York Times reports that a classified Pentagon medical study revealed that as many as 80 percent of the Marines who died of torso wounds in Iraq could have been saved if they had better body armor. Marine Corps officials say the newspaper took the study’s conclusions out of context. Side armor and other additions are widely distributed.

Jan. 20: Preliminary election results from the Dec. 15 Iraqi parliamentary elections are announced. The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance captures 128 of the 275 parliamentary seats but falls short of the two-thirds majority it needs to rule without a coalition. Eleven other parties win seats in the election. Weeks of negotiations ensue as the parties vie to name a prime minister.

Jan. 23: A report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction finds evidence of fraud and mismanagement.

Feb. 12: The Shiite-led coalition picks Ibrahim al-Jaafari to head the first full-term government since Saddam’s ouster. Months of political intrigue follow as Jaafari fights to keep his interim title.

Feb. 15: A Senate report finds the U.S. spent $16 billion on reconstruction in Iraq, but electrical generation, sewage service and water production lag below prewar levels.

Feb. 22: Insurgents detonate bombs inside the Askariya shrine in Samarra, touching off huge reprisal attacks.

Feb. 28: Canadian Brig. Gen. David Fraser takes command of coalition troops in southern Afghanistan from U.S. Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry.

March 15: Saddam Hussein testifies for the first time in his trial on charges of crimes against humanity.

March 16: American and Iraqi military forces launch Operation Swarmer, targeting insurgent strongholds near Samarra. It is the largest air assault mission of the war.

March 16: Time magazine reports that a criminal investigation into the deaths of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha, Iraq, is under way. The military originally said many of the civilians were killed by an insurgent bomb.

March 29: Abdul Rahman, who was sentenced to death in Afghanistan after converting to Christianity, is granted asylum in Italy.

March 30: U.S. journalist Jill Carroll is freed, 82 days after being kidnapped in Baghdad.

April 4: A second case is filed in Iraqi court against Saddam Hussein, this time on charges of genocide, for wiping out thousands of Iraqi Kurdish villagers in 1998.

April 22: Nouri al-Maliki, from one of the leading Shiite parties, is elected by parliament as prime minister.

April 30: Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general, is pursuing 72 separate investigations into alleged corruption by reconstruction firms.

May 6: Some 1,300 Iraqi and American troops launch Operation United Front, which sweeps through the Ameriyah district of Baghdad. Numerous weapons caches and insurgents are seized.

May 29: Violent riots break out in Kabul, Afghanistan, after an accident involving a U.S. military truck and civilian vehicles.

May 31: The military announces it has brought into Iraq some 1,500 soldiers of the 1st Armored Division. The troops had been in Kuwait since November 2005 as a “call forward force.”

June 7: Al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is killed when Air Force F-16s bomb a safehouse near Baqouba. Zarqawi was blamed for some of the most brutal attacks on military and civilian targets since the war began. His death is hailed as a major victory for the American military and fledgling Iraqi government.

June 14: Nouri al-Maliki announces the launch of Operation Together Forward, a plan to quell sectarian violence in Baghdad. The plan is to put some 70,000 extra U.S. and Iraqi forces on the streets of Baghdad.

June 20: The booby-trapped and mutilated bodies of Pfcs. Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker are recovered near Yusafiyah, four days after they were seized in an attack near a checkpoint. A third soldier, Spc. David J. Babineau, was killed in the attack.

July 3: Former soldier Steven D. Green is charged in a U.S. federal court of raping and murdering an Iraqi girl in Mahmudiyah before murdering her family and burning the bodies. Four other soldiers are charged in a military court of rape and murder on July 8.

July 11: The Army announces it is discontinuing its multibillion-dollar deal with Halliburton, responsible for contract services in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

July 13: Muthanna province in Iraq becomes the first to be handed over for full security responsibility by Iraqi forces. Gen. George Casey, commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq, hails the transfer as an historic event and an important milestone.

July 15: Coalition forces kick off a huge offensive in Helmand province, Afghanistan. U.S. forces push down from the north as Canadian and British soldiers push up from the south.

July 27: The first trial of Saddam Hussein ends after nine months.

July 27: The military command in Baghdad says it will extend the deployment of the 172nd Stryker Brigade and move it from Mosul to Baghdad, as part of Operation Together Forward.

July 31: NATO assumes command of coalition military units in southern Afghanistan, marking the “most dangerous and challenging” mission in NATO’s 57-year history.

Aug. 3: Army Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, says sectarian violence in Iraq could deteriorate into civil war.

Aug. 30: Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. general in Iraq, estimated that Iraqi security forces would need another 12 to 18 months before they could take over from American troops.

Sept. 3: U.S. and Iraqi troops capture a senior leader of the al-Qaida in Iraq. Hamid Juma Faris Jouri al Saeedi is alleged to have masterminded the shrine bombing in February.

Sept. 3: U.S. Marine Gen. James L. Jones, NATO’s supreme allied commander, asks for more equipment and troops against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. The request continues to go largely unfilled by year’s end.

Sept. 4: Two U.S. military aircraft accidentally fire on a Canadian platoon operating in southern Afghanistan, killing one soldier.

Oct. 5: The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force takes command in the east of Afghanistan, completing its command of all forces throughout the country.

Oct. 19: Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the top U.S. spokesman in Iraq, says Operation Together Forward has not reduced levels of violence.

Nov. 3: Newspapers report a last-minute insertion into the military authorization bill signed by President Bush will shut down the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction in 2007. The office reported millions of dollars in waste, corruption and poor project oversight.

Nov. 5: Saddam Hussein is convicted by an Iraqi court of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death for the execution of 148 men and boys in the Shiite town of Dujail.

Nov. 8: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigns. His final day at the Pentagon is Dec. 15.

Nov. 23: Car bombs kill at least 161 people and injure 257 in Baghdad’s Sadr City.

Nov. 26: The Iraq war now equals the length of the U.S. involvement in World War II.

Dec. 6: The Iraq Study Group recommends U.S. talk with Syria and Iran, focus on training Iraqi troops and scale down its presence drastically in 2007.

Dec. 19: Bush says of the war in Iraq: “We’re not winning, we’re not losing.”

Dec. 21: Eight Marines are charged in the slaying of 24 civilians in Haditha, Iraq.

Dec. 25: The deaths of six U.S. servicemembers in recent days push the Iraq war’s death toll beyond the number of victims in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Dec. 26: An Iraqi appeals court upholds Saddam Hussein’s death sentence in the Dujail case. He is executed on Dec. 30.

THE EXECUTION OF A DICTATOR

IN DEATH SADDAM WILL BECOME A LEGEND, BEYOND HIS WAR CRIMES

AND THE UNITED STATES WILL REMAIN GUILTY FOR GIVING HIM WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION

After spending far too many hours reading far too many stories on the reactions from across the planet to the news that Saddam Hussein has been executed, it's overwhelmingly obvious that while few regret the dictator is dead, there is a huge amount of dissent and anger at the method and timing of the execution and the 'justness' of the trial that preceded it.

While President Bush and Australia's prime minister John Howard crow about the "fairness" of the trial Saddam faced, there are few takers for such praise in the legal world. This wasn't a trial of justice, it was all about vengeance. As the fast-tracked execution shows.

It's also quite stunning to see just how many commentators, blog commenters, letter writers and opinionists, the world over, are going out of their way to point out that Saddam has been put out of Iraq's misery quick smart in order to kill off the future trial he faced for the gassing of the Kurds in the late 1980s.

Why?

Because in order for Saddam to have received a "fair and just trial" over that appalling massacre, there would have been much information going down on the public record about where Saddam actually got the toxic chemicals and the relevant delivery systems that made the massacre of more than 5000 Kurds possible. Not to mention the tens of thousands of Iranians killed in horrific ways by some of the very same chemical weapons that he used to massacre the Kurds.

The biological and chemical weapons that Saddam used on the Kurds and the Iranians were supplied by the United States, and there are US Senate records to prove it.

What this means is that a legend will now quickly form, and it's one that appears to be true, unfortunately, that Saddam was taken out before too much about the United States' complicity in arming up his regime with weapons of mass destruction during the 1980s is exposed to the harsh, unforgiving daylight of international legal scrutiny.

That Saddam was executed so publicly - via the leading nightly news stories and front page photos and Google and YouTube videos, and so brutally - being hung from the neck in a shabby room with gleeful voices mocking him - only showed just how callous and medieval the Iraqi legal system of today is.

It's supposed to be anything but. This is not the Modern Iraq fantasy that was, and continues to be, sold to the American and Western public.

The photos and videos are shocking of the execution are shocking. Probably more so because Saddam did not go fighting and screaming to his death, but managed to maintain a presence of dignity amongst his obvious fear. He did not beg for forgiveness, nor do did he apologise for his crimes.

He went down claiming he was a militant who was not afraid to die. The video shows that, while nervous, he was not terrified of the fate about to befall him. Most people would have a hard time imagining themselves meeting their death this way.

Again, this was a largely unforeseen fallout reaction for those whose job it is to market and sell the liberation of Iraq as taking that nation into the 21st century of fresh, new democracies.

Did America really spend half a trillion dollars and lose 3000 soldiers just so the Iraqis could go back to hanging people in dank rooms amongst cheering and mocking laughter?

It was never supposed to be this way.

Saddam was supposed to be served up a cold dish of justice for his crimes against humanity, and the world was supposed to learn the full extent of everything he was responsible for. Not simply just a small, (by comparison) massacre of villagers, some of whom had tried to kill him.

Compared to what Saddam did to the Kurds and to the Iranians (during the Iran-Iraq War), the massacre he was convicted for was almost the least of his crimes.

But Saddam is dead, and the the air will never be truly cleared of how the United States propped up and armed up his regime during the 1980s.

Instead, legends and conspiracy theories will flourish around the extremely disturbing facts of what happened back then.

The good news may well be that Saddam is dead.

The bad news is that he is set to become a dead legend of Hitleresque proportions.

And while Saddam hung from the thick rope for nine minutes, his neck broken, car bombs across Baghdad killed dozens of Iraqis and another seven (or more) American soldiers.

Saddam, it seems, got off easy in the end.

The Iraq Civil War is now set to become even more deadly in the year ahead. The insurgency is running rife and is smashing great holes in the US military, and the once holy strength of the America's Army. Just as Saddam promised before the war began.

Death has now claimed Saddam Hussein.

But death will now claim hundreds, if not thousands, or tens of thousands, more American and Iraqi lives.


The Last Minutes Of A Tyrant's Life - Prayers, Cry For Calm, Jeers And Mocking

"I Watched Saddam Die"

The Reaction To Saddam's Execution From Iraqi And Arab Media

Arab Haj Pilgrims Outraged At Execution, Viewed As An Insult To Muslims, Mostly For The Timing

United States And Iran Stand United....In Their Satisfaction At The Death Of Saddam

World Leaders Welcome And Condemn Death Of A Dictator

Europeans Denounce Saddam's Execution

Palestinians Say They've Lost A Leader, And Supporter

The Victory Of Vengeance Over Justice

Vatican Denounces Execution, Says Saddam's Death Was Tragic

India Condemns Execution, Protests Erupt

Taliban Says Saddam's Death Will Intensify Jihad

SADDAM HUSSEIN HAS BEEN EXECUTED



Incredible scenes of jubiliation are now being reported across Iraq as television screens fill with images of the execution of Saddam Hussein.

For millions of Iraqi Shiites, the news that this brutal dictator is dead will be greeted like a gift from God, particularly as it comes at the start of the Eid festival.


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