'Collateral Damage' or Targeted Killing, the Effect Is Much the Same

All kinds of horrors flop on to my Beirut doormat. There's The
Independent's mobile phone bill, a slew of blood-soaked local Lebanese
newspapers - "Saleh Aridi's blood consolidates [Druze] reconciliation",
was among the goriest of the past few days - and then there are files
from the dark memory lane through which all Middle East history has to
pass.

The repulsive Baath party archives of Saddam
Hussein are the latest to find a place on my coffee table, all marked
"Secret", unpublished - though they formed the basis for the old man's
trial and for his depraved hanging by the Iraqi government more than
two years ago. I reprint them now without excuse, for they have a
bitter taste in the "new" Iraq and in the "new" Afghanistan about which
we still fantasise as we send more Nato troops into Asia's greatest
military graveyard.

The documentary evidence of Saddam's brutal
inquiry into the killings at the Shia Muslim village of Dujail in 1982
provides frightening, fearful testament to the earnestness and cruelty
of totalitarianism, the original files of Saddam's mukhabarat security
services in their hunt for the men who tried to assassinate the Iraqi
dictator more than a quarter of a century ago. Saddam was then the
all-powerful leader of a nation at war with Iran - an eight-year
conflict that would cost the lives of more than a million Muslims on
both sides - and whose most ruthless enemies were members of the
Iranian-supported Al-Dawa Party (including a certain Nouri al-Maliki).
Saddam's closest allies at this time were the Gulf oil sheikhdoms - and
the United States, which was sending military supplies, chemical
precursors and satellite reconnaissance photographs to Baghdad to
assist Saddam in his war against Iran, a nation he had invaded two
years earlier.

On his passage through Dujail, Saddam's heavily
armed convoy was attacked by 10 villagers armed with Kalashnikov
rifles. All were killed at the time or hunted down and murdered later.
In their subsequent investigations, however, the mukhabarat - in this
case operating under the ominous title of the "Regime Crimes Liaison
office" - were able to use the system of tribe and sub-tribe in Dujail
to tease out the names of everyone associated with the attackers.

The
patriarchal lineage - wherein all males carry their father's,
grandfather's, and great-grandfather's names, sometimes back eight
generations - enabled the secret police to trace the male line of
entire families and thus to liquidate them all. Their womenfolk were
tortured, many of them raped. The men were butchered. One grandfather
lost all his sons and grandsons. His "treacherous" family line came to
an end. The ruthlessness of Saddam's "Crimes Liaison Office" comes
across in their surviving reports.

"Subject/Information Report

We were assigned by the party to submit the names of the opposing and malig-nant members of the treacherous Al-Dawa Party ...

A
comrade's greeting. Dun Shakir to the Comrade Member of the State
Command. Subject/Security report: Through the fact that the criminals
from Al-Dawa Party have attacked our Great Commander the Secretariat of
the State, the Striving Comrade Saddam Hussein, we raise the names of
the hostile families that are against the party and revolution, knowing
that we already raised several reports and surveys on these criminals
whose names are below."

And there follows a sheaf of files
listing the accused families and their menfolk. Of the Al-Tayyar
sub-tribe of the Abu Haideri tribe of Dujail, for example, there is a
great grandfather called Abdullah with three children - Asad, Mohammed
and Suheil - who themselves have nine children - Sabri, Ali, Nayif,
Jasim, Hassan, Qadir, Kabsun, Yasin and Hani. Saddam's secret police
fell upon their sons: Ammar, Abdel Salam, Qasim, Sahib, Sa'ad, another
Qasim (son of Qadir), Hashim, Ali, a second Ali (son of Yassin) and
Thamir.

All of the latter were executed on Saddam's orders. So
was another of Jasim's other sons - Nabil - and four more of Hassan's
sons - Hussein (who was indeed involved in the assassination attempt on
Saddam) and Fatih and Salim and Mohammed and Mahmoud. Five more of
their first cousins - Ahmed, Abdullah, Mohammed, Mahmoud and Abbas -
were also done to death. Thus only one male issue of great-grandfather
Abdullah's entire family escaped Saddam's execution squads. But these
were just the male children of one family. Saddam's murderers were
after many more. The investigators at Saddam's trial noticed one
telling trait among his secret police officers. If they were reporting
an execution, they would scribble their signature. If they were sending
intelligence information, they would sign their names in full. After
the fall of Saddam, of course, it was not difficult to match up the
full names with the scribbled signatures.

But now I ask a
question. When US troops massacre Iraqi civilians in Haditha because
their buddy has been murdered, what is the difference between their
revenge and that of Saddam? When a Taliban attack on Nato forces in
Afghanistan provokes a US air strike on a village and leaves women and
children torn to pieces in the ruins - this now seems the inevitable
result - what is the difference between those innocent deaths and the
destruction of the families of Abdullah's grandchildren in Dujail?

Yes,
I know that Saddam's thugs selected the relatives of his enemies and we
merely kill anyone in the area of our enemies. And yes, I grant you the
outcome is not the same. The Iraqi dictator was hanged in Baghdad in
2006, cursed by his hooded Shia "Al-Dawa" executioners as he stood on
the scaffold. For us, there will be no hangings.