Look at what are not the reasons for the US destroying Saddam Hussein and Iraq. First, it saw him as an Islamic fundamentalist. Even today, the mother of all fundamentalist Islamic nations in the world, Saudi Arabia, is America's greatest ally. Here the only consideration for the US is whether Islamic fundamentalism is useful to US interests or not. In fact, Saddam was a secular pan-Arab leader. He was the only ruler in the Persian Gulf region who ruled not according to the traditional Islamic principle of Sharia law but on Western principles of jurisprudence! More, he had abolished all Sharia courts except for personal injury claims! So he was not even an Islamist in the formal sense.

Second, the US did not destroy Saddam for collaborating with terror. In fact, the US had no issues with Islamic terror till it hit the US. It is actually comfortable with Islamic terror that is friendly to US, like Pakistan's. If the US had targeted Islamic terror as a danger to the world, it should have destroyed Pakistan which shaped the philosophy of terror and forged terror modules for the world, not Iraq. It should have sacked Musharraf, not Saddam. That Saddam was no terrorist or linked to terror was proved by that fact that the US with all its power could not produce a shred of evidence to link him to any terrorist or any act of terror. Actually the Islamists themselves never owned Saddam as a true Islamist!

Third, the US was not driven by its obsessive commitment to freedom and democracy to sack Saddam, the dictator, who was butchering his opponents within his country. On the contrary most of the dictator regimes of the world have been close allies of the US. Fourth, the US did not punish Iraq and finish off Saddam, because they had developed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). It is proved now that the entire WMD debate was an alibi to enter Iraq. In 2002 Saddam submitted a 12000-page denial of WMD charges which could not be rebutted till date and yet the US destroyed him and Iraq on the very charges which are proved false.

Why then did the US destroy Iraq and exterminate Saddam? It does not need a seer to say why the US destroyed Iraq and Saddam. The reason is that together they constituted the single greatest threat to US dominance of the Middle East and its oil through its crony regimes. In 1989 Saddam seized Kuwait when it refused to waive the loan of $30 billions it had given to Iraq to fight the war against Iran. Finally, after the Gulf War, Kuwait received a bill from the US for an almost equal amount for defending Kuwait against Saddam! Had Saddam and Kuwait worked together, their combined oil reserves would be 25 percent of the global against Saudi Arabia's 23 percent. This would have made Saddam the ruler of global oil empire and marginalised the US in the Middle East. Till he seized Kuwait, Saddam was actually useful to the US. He was waging the most cruel war, involving chemical weapons, against Khomeini's Iran, the greatest enemy of the US in the 1980s.

Iraq's unacceptable war model then suited the US, his undeclared ally, for over a decade. The question whether Saddam was, in principle, good or bad arose only when Saddam was no more useful to the US. The agenda to destroy the defiant Saddam Hussein and Iraq started with the Gulf War in 1990 scripted by US President George H.W. Bush. And 13 years later in the year 2003, his son George Bush (Jr), completed the task. He invaded and vanquished Iraq, unseated and arrested Saddam Hussein and got installed a regime that was inimical to Saddam. A verdict of death for Saddam by a regime eager to finish him off followed and finally Saddam was hanged last week.

The crime for which Saddam was tried and hanged took place in 1982 when, in Dujali, a small town of Iraq, Saddam had ordered firing on a group that had attempted to kill him and this resulted in the death of over 160 Shia Muslims. At that time the US was a secret ally of Saddam! It is not the end of Saddam Hussein just, or the collapse of the state of Iraq. Saddam was reinventing and repackaging the ancient Mesopotamia to build the modern Iraq's personality. Saddam distanced Iraq from the Islamic abstraction that disturbs the idea of nation wherever Muslims are in majority or even minority, and relinked it to the great Mesopotamian civilisation. He made Mesopotamia's pre-Islamic heroes like Hammurabi part of Iraq's heritage.

This made Islam one of the two streams of Iraq's soul, not the sole one. His destruction meant not just the emasculation of a ruler who had a civilisational sense and pride, but the destruction of the civilisational revival itself. Far from being an Islamic isolationist whose world began and ended with Islam, he was a staunch cultural nationalist, an idea theologically alien to Islam. He was able to weld Iraq, which consisted a majority Shia Muslim population and a Sunni minority and Kurdish Muslims, into a powerful nation.

Now the destruction of Iraq is complete with Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims set against each other as private armies all over Iraq and in Islamic geographies everywhere. Iraq is now set for division as Sunni land, Shia land and Kurdistan! If this be the fate of Iraq, what about this planet? Now Saddam, 'the wrong doer', is gone. In his place, the ghost of Saddam, rid of all sins of Saddam, is now on the prowl. The Saddam ghost will ensure that there is no peace on this planet in the foreseeable future.

Courtesy: www.newindpress.com, January 13, 2007