Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti ruled Iraq from July 1979 to April 2003, as leader of the Arab Socialist Ba\u2019ath (\u201cResurrection\u201d<\/em>) Party. He was put on trial by a tribunal established by the US-led occupation authorities. On November 5, 2006, Hussein was convicted of crimes against humanity over the 1982 killing of 148 people in the town of Dujail, following an attempt on his life. He was hanged at dawn on December 30, 2006, on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a testament to the Iraqi people’s resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial,\u201d<\/em> US President George W. Bush said in a statement following the execution, adding: \u201cFair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The White House was not always so adamant about Hussein. In 1980, the Iraqi president received the keys to the city of Detroit after making a generous donation to the Chaldean Sacred Heart Church.<\/p>\n Washington also approached Hussein as a potential ally against neighboring Iran, where a monarchy allied with the US had been overthrown by Islamic revolutionaries. With US support, Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, but was quickly forced to go on the defensive. The Iraq-Iran war officially ended in August 1988, having claimed over a million lives and more than $1.2 trillion in combined economic losses, without any change in the borders.<\/p>\n Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait in August 1990, after US Ambassador April Glaspie told him that Washington \u201cdoes not have an opinion\u201d<\/em> on that conflict. In response, the US assembled an international coalition to defend Saudi Arabia (Operation Desert Shield) and launched Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait in January 1991. Iraq remained under UN and US sanctions after that, with hawks in Washington unhappy that President George H.W. Bush refused to continue the war until Hussein was deposed.<\/p>\n In 2003, President George W. Bush invaded Iraq, claiming that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and was working with terrorists who had attacked the US in September 2001. Neither of those claims was true. The same Donald Rumsfeld who met with Hussein in December 1983 as President Ronald Reagan\u2019s special envoy organized the invasion 20 years later as Bush\u2019s secretary of defense.<\/p>\n While the 1991 war to liberate Kuwait was legal under the UN Resolution 660, there was no such cover for the 2003 invasion. The occupying force disbanded the Iraqi military, banned the Ba\u2019ath Party and offered bounties on the top 52 officials of Hussein\u2019s government via the infamous \u201cIraq\u2019s most wanted\u201d<\/em> card deck. Hussein was depicted as the ace of spades.<\/p>\n Read more<\/p>\n The former president was captured in December 2003 in Ad-Dawr, some 10 miles (16 km) south of his hometown of Tikrit. Western media described his hideout as a \u201cspider hole.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Hussein was tried by the Iraqi Special Tribunal, established by the Coalition Provisional Authority in December 2003 and composed of five Iraqi judges. He was found guilty, and sentenced to death by hanging. His request for a firing squad was denied.<\/p>\n \u201cThis dark page has been turned over,\u201d <\/em>Mowaffak al-Rubaie, national security adviser in the government of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, told the Iraqi television after Hussein\u2019s execution. \u201cSaddam is gone.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Iraqi-Americans celebrated the news by dancing in the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, CNN reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 2008, Rubaie was one of the main authors of the US-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, under which the Obama administration conducted the US withdrawal from the country.<\/p>\n This week, Rubaie gave an exclusive interview to RT Arabic, which will be aired in full later on Friday. Speaking on Selam Musafir\u2019s program, \u201cIn One Word,\u201d he provided some interesting details about Hussein\u2019s behavior at the trial and of those around him.<\/p>\n Rubaie insists that Saddam \u201cwas not beaten or humiliated, neither during the trial, nor at the execution.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n As for Hussein, he never asked or prayed for forgiveness, Rubaie noted, citing his near-death slogans as \u201cLong live the nation,\u201d \u201cLong live the people,\u201d \u201cHail to Palestine\u201d and \u201cDeath to America!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Rubaie said he did not get an impression that was a man who feared God. Indeed, for the leader of the country often painted by the West as being mired in sectarian conflicts, he did not seem religious at all. Rubaie says that they even had to remind Hussein to utter Shahada, the ultimate statement of the Muslim faith, on the verge of his execution. He believes Hussein only used religion \u201cfor the purpose of propaganda and to deceive people.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Read more<\/p>\n As for George W. Bush, he was clearly in support of Saddam\u2019s execution, Rubaie recalled.<\/p>\n \u201cBush asked the Iraqi PM: \u2018What are you going to do with this man?\u2019 Al-Maliki replied: \u2018We are going to execute him.\u2019 In response, the US president raised his thumb up in approval. It is hard to imagine a more obvious sign of support,\u201d<\/em> Rubaie said.<\/p>\n As the last convoy of US troops left Iraq on December 14, 2011, President Barack Obama said that they were \u201cleaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n It was not so, however. By 2013, Al-Qaeda in Iraq \u2013 established only after the US invasion and the insurgency against the occupiers \u2013 had been transformed into Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS or IS) and exploited the discontent of Iraq\u2019s Sunni Muslims under the Shia-dominated Al-Maliki government to seize much of the north and east of the country.<\/p>\n In June 2014, IS was able to take the city of Mosul after some 30,000 Iraqi troops trained and equipped by the US simply fled the battlefield, leaving their weapons and gear behind. Some 5,000 US troops have returned to Iraq since, to \u201cadvise and assist\u201d the reconstituted Iraqi military in its struggle against IS. Currently, the Iraqi military is slowly advancing on Mosul with US air support.<\/p>\n In his recently published book, Debriefing the President: The Interrogation of Saddam Hussein,<\/em> the former CIA officer who interrogated Hussein in 2003 argued that IS could not have arisen under his rule.<\/p>\n \u201cSaddam felt that Islamist extremist groups in Iraq posed the biggest threat to his rule and his security apparatus worked assiduously to root out such threats,\u201d<\/em>wrote John Nixon<\/a>. \u201cIt is improbable that a group like ISIS would have been able to enjoy the kind of success under his repressive regime that they have had under the Shia-led Baghdad government.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cIn hindsight, the thought of having an ageing and disengaged Saddam in power seems almost comforting in comparison with the wasted effort of our brave men and women in uniform and the rise of Islamic State, not to mention the \u00a32.5 trillion spent to build a new Iraq,\u201d<\/em> Nixon wrote.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Via RT<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A decade after Saddam Hussein was tried, convicted and executed, Iraq is struggling to defeat Islamic State and cope with sectarian strife and other consequences of the US-led invasion. Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti ruled Iraq from July 1979 to April 2003, as leader of the Arab Socialist Ba\u2019ath (\u201cResurrection\u201d) Party. He was put on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":287829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-287828","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=287828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287828\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/287829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=287828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=287828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=287828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Once an ally<\/h2>\n
Ace of spades<\/h2>\n
\n ![\"A](\"https:\/\/img.rt.com\/files\/2016.07\/thumbnail\/577ceacec36188f57e8b456f.jpg\")
\n <\/a>\n<\/div>\n\u2018Not a religious man\u2019<\/h2>\n
\n ![\"US](\"https:\/\/img.rt.com\/files\/2016.12\/thumbnail\/5851a016c36188847d8b45b0.jpg\")
\n <\/a>\n<\/div>\nUS out, ISIS in<\/h2>\n
\u2018Almost comforting in comparison\u2019 to ISIS<\/h2>\n