The CPGB-ML condemns the death sentence passed today on Saddam Hussein as totally lacking any shred of legitimacy, justice, legality or morality.
This farcical and cowardly ‘verdict’ was the inevitable outcome of what has been widely recognised and condemned as a show trial, staged by the occupiers’ quisling regime expressly for the purpose of perpetrating the Iraqi President’s ‘judicial’ murder.
This latest salvo in the imperialist propaganda war fails totally to hide the fact that Saddam Hussein remains the true President of Iraq, and that holding elections under the barrel of the gun of imperialist occupation can be nothing but a mockery of ‘democracy’.
The fascistic occupation forces hope to divert the attention of the workers of Iraq, US, Britain and the wider world from the truth that, far from being a campaign against ‘terrorism’, the war in Iraq is being waged by the principal terrorist force in the world today, namely US/British imperialism.
This most unscrupulous criminal gang (consortium) of monopoly capitalist interests (particularly oil and armaments multinationals) are motivated solely by their desperate need to dominate the oil wealth, labour-power and markets of the middle east, and to that end cannot help meddling incessantly in affairs that should be the sovereign affair of the peoples of the middle east.
The hypocrisy of the British and US establishments in this act may be judged from the fact that they were all too happy to give military and diplomatic support to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1980s, and overlook the very incidents for which they now condemn him, when they felt they could exploit the country’s resources on a favourable basis and manipulate Iraq’s foreign policy – particularly in waging war against its neighbour Iran, which continues to be a thorn in the side of US-UK imperialism.
Only when Saddam Hussein finally sued for peace with Iran, campaigned to increase oil prices through OPEC (effectively to re-distribute oil wealth from oil multinationals to the people of the oil producing countries), and led Iraq’s attempt to reclaim Kuwait (which historically has always been a part of the southern Iraqi province of Basra, and was only separated by British colonialism in the early 20th century to control the strategically important Persian gulf and subsequently maintained by the US to control its the massive oil reserves which rival the rest of Iraq’s in size), whose medieval potentate was acting as the willing tool of US imperialism in exceeding OPEC quotas, did the wrath of Anglo-American imperialism come down on the people of Iraq.
Certainly the entire stated premise of the latest US-UK invasion, the alleged threat of Iraq’s WMD, has been universally discredited as a bare-faced lie, manufactured to neutralise overwhelming domestic and international opposition to their illegal and mercenary war.
That it was not humanitarian concern that motivated the occupation forces is shown not only by their record in the middle east and elsewhere, but most blatantly by the sheer magnitude of the war crimes committed against those self same ‘innocent’ Iraqi people by US-UK imperialism, their self-appointed ‘protectors’.
In this regard we cannot but mention the 300,000 Iraqis killed in the first Gulf War of 1990-1991, the 1,000,000 innocent men and women and 500,000 children who succumbed to the slow torture of semi-starvation and disease inflicted by US-UK imposed sanctions in the following ten years, and according to the latest estimates published in the November 2006 Lancet, a further 655,000 (some two percent of the population) who have died as a result of shootings and bombings in the latest phase of the direct colonial occupation by US-UK imperialism.
The US’ flouting of the Geneva convention and official sanction of torture in the now notorious US flagship ‘correctional facility’ of Abu Ghraib, at Bhagram air base, on their ships and planes and throughout their state of occupation; their inhuman and illegal use of chemical weapons and depleted uranium, sending Iraq’s incidence of miscarriage and congenital deformity of newborn infants to unprecedented levels are all proof, if such be needed, that there is no crime this gang of ‘free’ market fundamentalists will not perpetrate to hang desperately to their senile and parasitic rule.
The portrayal of Saddam Hussein as an ‘Arab Hitler’ and his removal from power is the last and most flimsy source of legitimacy sought by the occupiers. It is also but the latest in a long line of disgusting propaganda campaigns set in motion against Arab and other progressive anti-imperialist leaders, from Palestine’s Yasser Arafat through to Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic. The common thread linking these leaders has been the effective opposition they have mounted against US/British imperialist exploitation and domination and their proxy in the middle east, the criminal Zionist regime.
We state unequivocally that the British people must make common cause with all who take up arms against our common enemy, the British ruling class, for there can be no hope of winning our own freedom while our brothers abroad languish in semi-colonial serfdom. We condemn this trial and its verdict in its attempt to legitimise the illegal and fascistic occupation of US/British imperialism and de-legitimise the struggle for independence and freedom of the Iraqi people and their heroic forces of resistance. We note also its sinister attempt to split the resistance and the Iraqi people along sectarian lines which we trust they will strive to overcome.
That even now the imperialists tremble at the thought of carrying out their sentence for fear of the Iraqi peoples terrible retribution is proof of the effective struggle being waged by the resistance who are close to scoring a famous victory, which will be not only theirs but a victory for the whole of progressive humanity and hasten the day when the true war criminals, the Bushes, Blairs, Allbrights, Condee Rices, Jospins, Solanas, Straws and Hoons shall stand in the dock of history and the international proletariat. And they may rest assured – our hand will not tremble.
Victory to the Iraqi Resistance!
Death to US-UK Imperialism!
