Life After Saddam Hussein

So now that his fate is sealed what will change? Other than a political boost for Republicans and finally the end of an era of terror how will this affect our world? He has been out of the loop for quite some time now and it seams that since his capture terror has sprung up everywhere. Too bad his death will not end this era of terrorism altogether.
I say Good Riddance To Bad Rubbish!

[edit on 29-12-2006 by Digital_Reality]

apart from making him into a marter
and shore enough his supporters will use this opertunity to cause more mayhem which in someways will help Iran/syria since a more unstable Iraq means the US is bogged down even more there.

also IMO
his trial and excution its all politics and evryone knows that.
just a show nothing more

finally the end of an era of terror how will this affect our world?

Saddam an era of terror? Are you kidding? Saddam reign was a tiny part of the history of massacer and tyran all over the world.

The Bush's regime killed much more people than Saddam, and it's only the beginning, wait until they attack Iran or start to turn against their own citizens.

Or do you mean the end of the war on terror? I'll recall you that Saddam had no involvment at all in 9/11. No Al-Ciada cells in Iraq. No terrorist training camp. No WMDs. No nothing.

saddam is no great loss but his death wont have any effect on the security situation in Iraq.

Heres an interview with Judge Munir Haddad who was a witness to Saddam execution. The interview is a brief but interesting reading.

udge Haddad: One of the guards present asked Saddam Hussein whether he was afraid of dying.

Saddam's reply was that "I spent my whole life fighting the infidels and the intruders", and another guard asked him: "Why did you destroy Iraq and destroy us? You starved us and you allowed the Americans to occupy us."

His reply was, "I destroyed the invaders and the Persians and I destroyed the enemies of Iraq... and I turned Iraq from poverty into wealth."

BBC: There was no question Saddam was drugged?

Judge Haddad: Not at all. Saddam was normal and in full control. He was aware of his fate and knew he was about to face death. He said: "This is my end... this is the end of my life. But I started my life as a fighter and as a political militant - so death does not frighten me.

Link

Xpert11.

Some of the guards started to taunt him - by shouting Islamic words. A cleric who was present asked Saddam to recite some spiritual words. Saddam did so but with sarcasm.

From your link.
Its claimed he looked in fear at this stage, what Islamic words would of been shouted?
And what kind of sarcasm was said?

Denied I don't know what Saddam said but from the info that has been made public we can make an educated guess. Heres some info and links.

Mowaffak al Rubiae, Iraq's National Security adviser, who was a witness to Saddam's execution described Saddam as repeatedly shouting "down with Persians."[8] Sami al-Askari, a witness to the death, said, "Before the rope was put around his neck, Saddam shouted, 'God is great. The nation will be victorious and Palestine is Arab.'"[9] After the rope was secured, one executioner shouted, "Muqtada! Muqtada! Muqtada!" in reference to Muqtada al-Sadr; Saddam repeated the name mockingly.[10] He made a few more undetermined remarks after this, and was speaking at the moment the platform dropped. There were no U.S. representatives present in the execution room

Link

Maybe Saddam was using sarcasm when he referred to god being great.

Other possibility's are listed below.

The shahadah (Arabic: شهادة (help·info) translit: Shahādah) is the Islamic creed. It means "to testify" or "to bear witness" in Arabic. The shahadah is the Muslim declaration of belief in the oneness of God and in Muhammad as his final prophet. Recitation of the shahadah is one of the Five Pillars of Islam for Muslims and is said daily.

Link

The takbir is an Arabic name for the phrase Allāhu Akbar (الله أكبر), a common Arabic expression, which can be translated as "God is Great,"[1] "God is Greater,"[2] or "God is the greatest."[3]
Contents

Link

Takbir might tie in with the God is Great comment.
I would welcome members input into this matter.

Saddam was sunni muslim
he was killed on one of our holiest days so he went out with the words of god. (like most muslims who know they are condemed to death would)
so i dont see it as sarc

also

its abit like the last rights when a criminal is exutited and they have a bishop or priest read them their last rights or what ever it is.
except no priest or anything

They’ll be less statements coming from behind prison bars urging Iraqis not to hate the people of the West… www.abovetopsecret.com...
And they’ll be less Arabs who favours Muslim Secularism over Muslim Fundamentalism.
And I never saw on TV that they’d executed the need for Saddam. So that won’t change ether. And the fact his death is a plus for anti American Muslim fundamentalists like radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr www.cnn.com... speaks volumes. (In this link Saddam used his last words to “mock him”).

And this link www.msnbc.msn.com... deals with Iraqi reaction to the initial death sentence and observed the following detail…

A jubilant crowd of young men carried pictures of radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and handed out candy to children.

Well too bad for Cleric idiots like him, that they never had the pleasure of murdering Saddam for the apparent crime of killing those who tried to kill him. Instead it was the United States and its somewhat (already) anti-American government that delivered this blow to itself.

Xpert’s right about the execution making little difference to Iraqi violence; but what little difference the execution has made has increased Iraqi violence (about 70 Shiites we almost certainly killed by Ba’thists after the execution).
All of Iraq has been like a case Karma in the way it has so far backfired against our interests and objectives. How ironic then, that the death of Saddam should be another (quite foreseeable) case of Karma?

[edit on 090705 by Liberal1984]

Originally posted by bodrul
apart from making him into a marter

A martyr to whom?
A minority of the population?
His martyrdom will be irrelevant, as irrelevant as he has become.

Originally posted by spacedoubt
A martyr to whom?
A minority of the population?
His martyrdom will be irrelevant, as irrelevant as he has become.

all to their opionion

Saddam even after his death has people out there in Iraq that are still attacking US forces and shias
his death and the way he faced is it he has become a martyer to them and a couple of million people (may be a small) is still a lot

Originally posted by spacedoubt
A martyr to whom?
A minority of the population?
His martyrdom will be irrelevant, as irrelevant as he has become.

Exactly.

Only a very small slice of the Iraqi population benefited from Saddam, most were brutally repressed.

He's dead, most people are happy, he's never coming back, let's move on with the new democratic government!

Originally posted by bodrul
[all to their opionion

Saddam even after his death has people out there in Iraq that are still attacking US forces and shias
his death and the way he faced is it he has become a martyer to them and a couple of million people (may be a small) is still a lot

If they cared about him, they should try to fight for his release. Not just say he died a martyr.

Originally posted by deltaboy
lol: If they cared about him, they should try to fight for his release. Not just say he died a martyr.

source

Before he fell from power, Saddam Hussein left specific instructions to his supporters.

He knew that they could not defeat the American-led invasion force on the conventional battlefield, so he ordered his men to loot and disrupt the civilian infrastructure and join forces with Islamists rebels.

Those tactics continue to prevent the effective stabilisation of Iraq, and the insurgency now has a momentum of its own that will outlive Saddam.

'Victor's justice'


If anything, his death will tend to strengthen the hand of Sunni insurgents in recruiting people to their cause.

They ask: "What do we have to lose?" as they see their Shia rivals running the armed forces and the police.

[edit on 31-12-2006 by bodrul]

Originally posted by bodrul

Originally posted by spacedoubt
A martyr to whom?
A minority of the population?
His martyrdom will be irrelevant, as irrelevant as he has become.

all to their opionion

Saddam even after his death has people out there in Iraq that are still attacking US forces and shias
his death and the way he faced is it he has become a martyer to them and a couple of million people (may be a small) is still a lot

Bodrul, sorry if my response seemed abrupt..
But I just don't think there are many more that can join in the fray.
Unlike other groups that are coming across Iraq's borders, Saddam has a limited number of supporters, mostly within Iraq. I don't believe the number will grow at all. Thats the price of secularism in that region.

Whereas supporters of religious sects are innumerable. Their numbers can even grow via recruitment.

Originally posted by djohnsto77

Only a very small slice of the Iraqi population benefited from Saddam, most were brutally repressed.

A. Do you mean the 30% secular Sunni minority?
The 92% who had access to free education?
The 93% who had access to free healthcare (of a first world standard pre 1991)
The GDP that brought the average Iraqi living standards to near western ones (pre 1991)

1. www.unknownnews.net...

They had free water, free garbage pickup and sewage, subsidized fuel (gas was 10 cent's a gallon), subsidized food, free healthcare, and a free education.

2. www.haleakalatimes.com...

everyone got free education (kindergarten through University) and free healthcare. They had power 16-24 hours a day, clean water and food.

3. www.commondreams.org...

There were some good things, however. Free education for the people, free healthcare, and he gave every family food every month under the oil-for-food program. It was not enough, but it was better than nothing

4. www.multiplay.co.uk...

While spending prioroties may change are we to believe Saddam went from providing the best free healthcare for miles, to deliberately killing his loyal population?

5. www.wagingpeace.org...

Prior to the Gulf War, the UN deemed Iraq an emerging first-world nation. It had eradicated all childhood diseases, provided free healthcare to the entire population and education up through university studies was completely free.

6.www.northamericanpatriot.com...

Bush is most definitely carrying on this tradition - he took a people who had no freedom, but who had education, food, free healthcare, jobs, clean water, safe streets and a reasonably good social infrastructure and transformed them into people who have no

7.www.etext.org...

a nation that once had the highest standard of living in the Middle East before the first Gulf War, and continued to provide its citizens with free education and free healthcare up until the recent U.S. bombing

B. The Christian minority whose numbers have halved since 2003
www.aina.org...
www.thenewamerican.com...
www.accessmylibrary.com...
www.telegraph.co.uk.../news/2006/12/24/wchrist24.xml
www.christiansofiraq.com...

The Iraqis who enjoyed security (i.e. being able to walk from end of Baghdad without being shot at).
C. The estimated 650,000 Iraqis who have lost their lives (often in the most disgusting ways) by the political and sectarian anarchy liberated since our invasion.
1. www.democracynow.org.../10/12/145222
2. www.washingtonpost.com...
3.www.lse.co.uk...
4. www.telegraph.co.uk.../news/2006/10/11/uiraq.xml

Or just the 180,000 Kurds killed by the anfal campaign; because their tribal leaders allowed themselves to be bribed by the Iranian enemy, armed by the Iranian enermy, and fight with the Iranian enemy; at a time when Iraq was low on resources, fighting for it very survival, in its own world two situation because they were fighting the Iranians and America was pushing up the death toll by supplying weapons to both sides in order to prevent ether side gaining an absolute victory.
Funny the group that caused the entire Iran Iraq war to happen should suffer so badly when it was they who continued to fight on behalf of the Iranian bribes; in spite of a Iranian favourable just being done, with Iraq 6 months before the Iran Iraq War in exchange for ending this Iranian sponsored Kurdish terrorism.

Do you mean the estimated 60 to 150,000 dissidents who lost their lives in order to prevent the kind of religious extremism we see today in Iraq?
If you do I would not be surprised if you don’t support the human rights of Osama Bin Laden; or working him. I believe you are working for the likes of Muqtada al-Sadr (whether you intend to or it).

Iraqi democracy is an insult to democracy as a force for good; given that its government represents the sectarian and terrorist differences in Iraq almost perfectly; and its proof that those who advocate it in the wrong parts of the world, to solve the wrong kinds of problems are siding with the enemies of West (from within).

P.S I hope most of those who still support Saddam’s removal are Muslim or Jewish, or some other faith, because otherwise your supporting a move which has led to the Muslim Fundamentalist being liberated to kill your own kind.

[edit on 090705 by Liberal1984]

Originally posted by bodrul
source

Before he fell from power, Saddam Hussein left specific instructions to his supporters.

He knew that they could not defeat the American-led invasion force on the conventional battlefield, so he ordered his men to loot and disrupt the civilian infrastructure and join forces with Islamists rebels.

Those tactics continue to prevent the effective stabilisation of Iraq, and the insurgency now has a momentum of its own that will outlive Saddam.

'Victor's justice'


If anything, his death will tend to strengthen the hand of Sunni insurgents in recruiting people to their cause.

They ask: "What do we have to lose?" as they see their Shia rivals running the armed forces and the police.

That don't mean anything. He had supporters like the Saddam's Fedayeen that would die for him, defending him and so on. 2 years in prison and they didn't do anything. Yeah maybe the Baathists and his foreign hired mercenaries, but the Iraqi people in the whole didn't love him. Especially the Kurds and Shiites.

bodrul
I wish that BBC article had given a link to those “specific instructions” to loot.
But I believe its Donald Rumsfeld’s fault that the looting was allowed to happen so extraordinarily uncontrollably. And ironically enough the only ministry the U.S protected from looting was the oil (on the grounds it was instrumental to Iraq’s reconstruction) (and no doubt also the global oil market price?).
I’d be surprised if Saddam left such instructions because if had wanted it to happen he could have guaranteed it by allowing it in his final days of power (after all it would make little or know difference to him).
The people responsible for the looting seem to have been manly Shiite peasants (many of whom had been impoverished by U.N sanctions against Saddam’s invisible WMD’s). They did things like set fire to Iraq’s national library which contained things like scrolls thousands of years old. The museums were looted and no doubt many of the artefacts are now sitting in some rich persons mansion (it would be ironic but perhaps not surprising if that person was even American).

But if Saddam’s supporters were responsible for the looting I'm sure Donald Rumsfeld would have been far more keen to have killed a few of them; and therefore make the necessary examples to bring this anarchy to a close.
Trouble was they didn’t really want the image of strung up peasants on our TV screens when the country had just been “liberated”. So perhaps it’s the medias fault


deltaboy
It’s certainly true that the Kurds were never big fans of Saddam Hussein; at least ever since negotiations broke down due to Iran simply increasing their leader’s bribes. It’s also true that there region is just about the only successes story going in Iraq.

But many Shiites will now admit that they were safer under Saddam; and judging by the facts (such as the record unemployment of 55%) also less impoverished too (not to mention the pre-1991 situation I showed up in my last reply).

Yeah .. killing Saddam will further polarize the sects.. Shia vs Sunni even more. In fact, dont be surprised if the Sunnis refuse to stop no matter what now, their insurgency.

Don't be surprised if more Sunnis jump on the wagon, including Governments of prominent Sunni countries.

Theres going to be a Civil War among Muslims. Shia's in Iraq allied with Shia's in Iran versus the Sunni's in Iraq and the Sunni supporters from Saudi, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and North Africa. Iraq will become the warzone for this, even after U.S forces leave.

U.S. forces will draw down their number, then the Sunnis will make their move, and the Iranians will come in to assist the Shia Government in Iraq. Thats how I see it starting full scale, after U.S. forces leave.

Theres going to be a Civil War among Muslims.

I wonder which side the U.S will support?
If (like today) we side with the (largely) Shiite Iraqi government; then we will effectively be siding with the forces of Iran. But maybe at (about) the same time we will be going to war with Iran?

Impossible or unlikely?