LEAVE IT TO BUSH TO TURN A UNIVERSALLY DETESTED TYRANT INTO A MARTYR

Iraq has more Shi'a than Sunni. Iran is basically all Shi'a. Lebanon has a lot of them. The world has 120 million Shi'a. That's a lot. The world also has 940 million Sunnis-- a lot more. Bubble-bound Texas politicos-- be it a clueless Republican named Bush or a clueless Democrat named Reyes-- may not know a Shiite from a Sunni, but that didn't stop the from sending the Texas Rangers (as well as the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corp, Air Force as well as a whole lot of codeless mercenaries) into the middle of a bloody and vicious civil war that started in 680 AD-- right there in Iraq. And Bush picked the Shiites to ally himself with, the guys our friends the Iranians have been fighting to install in power.

I'd say that pretty much every Shiite with an opinion on the matter, and that would be about all of them, loathed Saddam Hussein. A lot of Sunnis did too. So how did Bush turn him into a martyr whose stature will grow in death?

Today's Guardian claims the kangaroo court and the mob execution/lynching make Arabs feel humiliated. And they blame Bush. The writer, Ghada Karmi, is a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at Britain's University of Exeter. "The spectacle of Saddam Hussein's execution," he writes, "shown in pornographic detail to the whole world, was deeply shocking to those of us who respect propriety and human dignity. The vengeful Shia mob that was allowed to taunt the man's last moments, and the vicious executioners who released the trapdoor while he was saying his prayers, turned this scene of so-called Iraqi justice into a public lynching. One does not have to be any kind of Saddam sympathizer to be horrified that he should have been executed-- and, so obscenely, on the dawn of Islam's holy feast of Eid al-Adha, which flagrantly defies religious practice and was an affront to the Islamic world."

Karmi points to the haste in bundling Saddam off to the gallows and claims that "in their unseemly haste to kill him, the judges ended up looking mean-minded, bloodthirsty and vengeful, while Saddam retained a dignity to the end that drew the reluctant admiration of many of his enemies." People all over the world-- but nowhere more than in the Middle East-- are convinced that the Bush Regime wanted him out of the way so that he wouldn't reveal secrets that tied him to Republican Party mainstays like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush's father...

For the Arab world, this has been a shameful, humiliating event that underlines its total surrender to western diktat. The execution was carried out under the auspices of a foreign occupying power, and with a clear western message: we give ourselves the right to invade a sovereign Arab state and remove its leader because he offends us; we think you Arabs are incapable of sorting out your own affairs in accordance with our interests, so we will do it for you.

Saddam was held in US custody right up to the end and only handed over to the Iraqis for the distasteful deed, his body whisked away immediately afterwards by a US helicopter for a hasty burial. Yet this was billed as an independent decision of a "sovereign state", as if any such thing were possible under occupation. The fact that this was the act of an Iraqi government dominated by Saddam's Shia enemies made the final outcome a foregone conclusion. Yet the Arab states stood by, swallowing their humiliation in silence and letting US/Iraqi "justice" take its course, hoping no one would notice how some of them had supported Saddam's war on Iran in the 80s, fought to a large extent on their behalf.

The nature of the kangaroo court forces Arabs to ask themselves what western leader has ever been treated this way. Even al-Maliki's puppet government is claiming to be embarrassed. Although you would never guess from the tightly, if subtly, controlled American mass media, most papers around the world, and especially in the Arab world, have condemned Saddam's lynching. Bush has two more years as president. One has to wonder if he will ever get anything right before he is unceremoniously tossed onto the scrap heap of history in 2009.