Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Of course I’m talking about the PR strategy that seems to have backfired in the face of the Bush junta and the poodle otherwise known as the Prime Minister of Britain. Bush hoped that executing Saddam Hussein would add to the numerous “milestones” which serve as a measure of success in the absence of real achievements, except his bloodthirsty allies in the Vichy Iraqi government furnished him with a new PR disaster.

Iraq, in Robert Fisk’s words, is a hell disaster. Bush, under the sagacious patronage of the neocons, has already sauntered across the Rubicon. In so doing, he has even left behind his traditional constituency — conservatives and the military. But events caught up with him, and the dreaded 3,000 mark was right across the corner. How could he possibly deny his detractors the propaganda coup that would accompany the imminent rounding of the figures than to submerge it under a headlines of his choice?

Unfortunately for Bush, the desire of his allies in the Iraqi puppet government for a grisly soveneir trumped any pretense at sophistication. The irony of the medieval execution was lost on no one which made even a tyrant appear dignified next to the thuggish executioners who, with US-UK blessing, made a spectacle of their primitive blood lust.

In Patrick Cockburn’s words “Bush and Blair’s choices have led to disaster in Iraq, culminating in a chaotic execution that is fuelling civil war”. It was

an execution which vied in barbarity with a sectarian lynching in the backstreets of Belfast 30 years ago is elevating [Saddam] to heroic status in the eyes of the Sunni – the community to which most Arabs belong – across the Middle East.

Friend and comrade Haifa Zangana points to the obvious irony,

The unofficial recording shows Saddam looking calm and composed, and even managing a sarcastic smile, asking the thugs who taunted him “hiya hiy al marjala?” (“is this your manliness?”), a powerful phrase in Arabic popular culture connecting manliness to acts of courage, pride and chivalry. He also managed to repeatedly say the Muslim creed as he was dying, thus attaching himself in the last few seconds of his life to one billion Muslims. Saddam had literally the final say.

More colourfully still, Robert Fisk adds:

Only the president-governor George Bush and Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara could have devised a militia administration in Iraq so murderous and so immoral that the most ruthless mass murderer in the Middle East could end his days on the gallows as a figure of nobility… in his last seconds … reminding the thug who told him to “go to hell” that the hell was now Iraq.

“Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,” Malcolm reported of the execution of the treacherous Thane of Cawdor in Macbeth.

The sight was so macabre, that now the Brits and the Americans – who have rarely issued a word of sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of the victims of their war – feel obliged to express outrage at the manner in which the execution was carried out.

This reaction, however, is a cause of embarassment only because of how it is playing out in the rest of the world. In the US and Britain, the media couldn’t stop gloating. As a matter of fact, Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World even wished its readers a happy new year superimposed on a frontpage spread of the execution scene. Inside, there was a picture of Bush, with the word “Justice” summing up everything he represents to the Murdoch audience. The British newspapers (with the exception of the Independent, Guardian and Herald) make even the shit-rags in my own country look respectable.

After centuries of intellectual endeavour uninterrupted by foreing invasions or colonization, isn’t it sad that this is what represents Britain to the expat?

As for Iraq, Haifa sums it up the best,

It is hell in Iraq by all standards, and there is no end in sight to the plight of Iraqi people. The resistance to occupation is a basic human right as well as a moral responsibility. That was the case during the Algerian war of independence, the Vietnamese war of independence, and it is the case in Iraq now.