Saddam Hussein: A Dictator Created Then Destroyed By America

By Robert Fisk, The Independent UK. Posted December 30, 2006.

Hussein's execution will be remembered as a case of America destroying an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington.

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold -- that crack of the neck at the end of a rope -- than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed -- by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans -- on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.