Saddam Hussein sentenced to death ...

Finally the court trying Saddam has pronounced judgement and sentenced him to death.
The newspapers were agog from yesterday about a possible death sentence and they have
been proven right. Looks like this is the time of capital punishments - first Afzal, then the
lawyer in the Maattoo case and now Saddam Hussein.

I guess opinion is divided on whether Afzal should be put to death or not, with our own
Arundhati Roy using up quite a few pages of the latest Outlook mag for his cause. I am
not sure I really buy her theory though. Regarding the lawyer, general opinion is that
justice has been done, though delayed. The crime was pretty heinous and would look
like it deserves the punishment doled out.

Coming to Saddam Hussein, the crimes attributed to him, have been committed by many
a dictator, and in most cases with the active support of the US & other western countries,
that are working behind the scenes to have him crucified.

This is not to say that he is innocent. The guy has quite some blood on his hands and needs
to be punished. But then, do not Dubya and Blair deserve the same or more stringent punishment for killing so many innocent Iraqis (6.5 lakhs as per latest reports) ? And that
too without any real reason. They invaded a country just like that, bombed it to dust, killed innocent men/women/children and in short turned it into a mess. Agreed that Saddam was
no just ruler, but atleast the people had the basic necessities and there was no chaos like
what is seen today.

The 1st Gulf war was started due to Saddam invading Kuwait and which was a blatantly
wrong thing to do. However, if reports are to be believed, he had an informal go-ahead
from Bush Sr., who later went back on his commitment. Either ways, it was wrong to
invade another country and Iraq paid for it, along with Saddam. However, there was no justification for invading Iraq the 2nd time. Even if he did have WMDs, they would have
been sourced from the US only.

So it has been such a sorry joke - first arm dictators, then invade them after accusing them
of having WMDs which you only provided them in the first place.

I was in college when the 1st Gulf war happened and people in Kerala keenly followed the happenings as it had a large number of its people working in the Gulf countries, who would
be affected by war breaking out. Even as I conceded that Saddam was at fault, I admired
him for taking on the world's bully. He might have lost the war, but no one can accuse him
of not putting up a fight. The Yankees might have won finally, but the world got someone
who could stand up to a bully.

The 2nd time around, there wasn't much to fault Iraq/Saddam of and still the US and UK
invaded it. The Americans have seen a thousand odd of their soldiers returning home in
bodybags and many more maimed. The way these guys are bogged down in Iraq, this does
not seem to be the end of casualties. Sentencing Saddam to death is only going to add fuel
to the fire.

The US is already aware of the grave mistake it did by getting into Iraq and this is one misadventure they are not going to forget for a long time. But then, I am not betting on
that possibility either. They forgot Vietnam, didn't they ? As someone aptly put it, "The
only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history".