Dubya, the executioner

Sukumar Muralidharan Delhi

There is a personality trait that President George Bush has never been able to shake off. As governor of the state of Texas, he won great eminence as the most prolific executioner in the US, sparing nobody who had been convicted under the state’s infamously lax judicial processes from the experience of the after-life. This quirk has lived with him since and is so strongly manifest at times that it could well be a pathological condition requiring professional, psychological assistance.

Saddam Hussein, the deposed president of Iraq who for all of a quarter-century, survived the adversities of war, neighbourhood hostility, and the most brutal regime of economic sanctions ever devised, was on November 5, 2006, sentenced to die on the gallows. The date of the verdict was chosen with deliberate attention to the midterm elections to the US Congress on November 7. It was in media parlance, designed to dominate the ‘news cycle’ before the balloting began, to enable Bush to gather a rich harvest of votes from a US populace grateful for the imminent demise of a dictator.

The US electorate, though, proved cussedly ungrateful and Bush and his republicans went down to face ignominious defeat. Shortly afterwards, the ‘boy-president’ was administered a stern rebuke by a group of elders in the business of international geopolitics, who told him that quite contrary to his blithe predictions of imminent victory just weeks before, the situation in Iraq was ‘grave and deteriorating’. The Iraq Study Group co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker, who has loyally served Bush senior through election campaigns and wars, also reprimanded Bush junior for his reckless, go-it-alone strategy, strongly urging him to bring major players in the region, like Iran and Syria, into the endeavour of pacifying Iraq.

Bush’s response was not to heed the advice of elders, but to fall back once again on the gratuitous excitement afforded by the spectacle of a judicial murder. On December 30, after an appeal process that failed to meet the most rudimentary standards of judicial fairness, Saddam Hussein was hanged in a dank and dingy chamber in Baghdad. The Eid Al-Adha observance was just beginning for the Sunni Muslim faith and the timing of the execution was a deliberate cultural affront, conspired by the US masters and a narrow clique within Iraq’s Shi’a community, intent on revenge for real and imagined indignities suffered under Saddam.

Even those who retained some residual faith in the bona fides of the Iraqi government, thought the decision to make a public spectacle of a hanging rather bizarre, though, in the final instance, they were willing to grudgingly accept it as a well-intended effort to establish that a page had been turned in a nation’s tortured history. The plot went awry when the man expected to play the part of the criminal brought to justice, refused to play by the script. The official video released soon after the hanging, showed a man who went to his death with the dignity of a warrior.

And a cellphone video recording – put into circulation on the internet shortly afterwards with the suspected complicity of the Iraqi government – gave a new definition to the term “gallows humour”. It showed the deposed president cordially engaging his hangmen in mutual insults as he stood with a noose around his neck, unequivocally emerging with the advantage in the exchanges, until the trapdoor opened up under him.