By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
31 December 2006

US president George W. Bush is clearly the biggest war criminal and most monstrous perpetrator of crimes against humanity in comparison to Iraq President Saddam Hussein in the period of 2003 to the end of 2006.

In violation of the UN charter, Bush committed the crime of aggression against Iraq. To justify the aggression, he fabricated lies about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and about Saddam’s al Qaida connections. He ordered the invasion of Iraq despite the fact that it had not made any prior attack whatsoever on the US nor did it present any imminent danger to the US. The US invaded Iraq without any approval from the US Security Council.

In the face of the US war of aggression, Saddam in sharp contrast valiantly stood for the national sovereignty and independence of Iraq even as he had flexibly agreed to allow the UN inspection teams to look around for nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He had gotten into trouble with the US because he defied the worst dictates of the US against Iraq’s national sovereignty.

In the course of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Bush inflicted on the Iraqi people death casualties of more than 655,000 and the destruction of their economic and social infrastructure.

He caused nearly 50,000 casualties among the American soldiers, including the death of 3000, serious injuries to 22,000 and the medical evacuation of 25,000 victims of depleted uranium, psychological problems and the like. He spent USD 350 billion on the war and diverted these from the social needs of the American people.

While alive in the underground and in prison, Saddam was a rallying figure for the Iraqi people’s resistance against the US occupation and the Iraqi puppets. His trial by the Iraqi puppet regime was the product of US aggression and was a sham. It violated the principle of due process and the standards of a fair and impartial trial.

The US kept Saddam as a prisoner and controlled the proceedings against him through puppets. It made propaganda that he would face more serious charges than that about 148 victims allegedly killed in retaliation to an assassination To complete the sole case for which Saddam would be hanged, the puppet court allowed all kinds of hearsay witnesses and irrelevant information and took no effective measures to stop the murder of the lawyers of the defendants. Seven months before December 30, Bush had declared publicly that Saddam would be executed before the end of 2006.

He depicts the hanging of Saddam as a part of building democracy in Iraq and even in the entire Middle East. But he is clearly lying in view of the so many authoritarian regimes (including monarchic and theocratic ones) in the region with which the US has good relations. The brutal US occupation of Iraq has nothing to do with democracy. What is important to the US is servility to the rule and profit-making of US monopoly interests.

At the end of his life, Saddam is acclaimed as a martyr by the people who struggle for national liberation and democracy against the US-led imperialists and the Iraqi puppets. The US is sinking deeper into the quagmire in Iraq as it inflames the Iraqi resistance with the martyrdom of Saddam and with the plan of the Bush regime to escalate military deployment and efforts to control the oil resources of Iraq. ###