The Iraqis not only hanged Saddam, tormentor of millions of them for so long, but they did so on the morning of Eid-ul-Azha. How could they be so callous, so crass? How could they not have the decency to show minimal regard for the sanctity of the day tracing its origin to the Patriarch of Prophets, Abraham?

But strange and grotesque are the ways of puppet regimes, like the one currently holding fort in Iraq at the beck and call of the White House in Washington, and taking its cues from the ‘royal’ American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad.

Executing a condemned man with such obscene haste—even one of such stellar notoriety as was associated with Saddam—on the morning of Eid-ul-Azha not only takes a big dollop of reckless bravado; it also takes the abject moral bankruptcy of a regime hanging there, in Baghdad’s American-protected ‘Green Zone’ by the skin of its teeth. And on top of it, the government’s deputy foreign minister marked a morbid insensitivity by saying the hanging was “a gift” of Eid-ul-Azha to the Iraqi people.

It stuns imagination, and common sense, that a government of a Muslim state would be so prone to pressure from outside as to willfully throw all caution to the wind and hang a former head of state on the morning of Eid-ul-Azha.; and that too in a Baghdad poised on the knife’s edge for so long, and where it takes only the faintest spark to trigger a bloodbath.

Had the Americans carried out Saddam’s quixotic execution by hanging him the entire Muslim world would have been howling foul by now. American flags would be burning across the Muslim capitals, along with the effigy of George W. Bush. But the Muslim world now finds itself in a stupor; what should it say about this wantonly un-Islamic temerity of a regime that is supposed to have a strong religious underpinning?

The Americans have no doubt used the client Maliki regime in Baghdad to do their dirty work. The whole operation, from beginning to end, carries American finger- prints all over it, just as Saddam’s sham and flimsy ‘show’ trial did, from beginning to end.

The criminal procedure under which Saddam was tried, in an all-Iraqi court by an Iraqi judge, was drafted by the Americans under Bush’s ‘viceroy’ Paul Bremer. The trial attorneys and judges were ‘coached’ into the intricacies of international law by a mercenary American jurist, Michael Scharf, literally on the run and in a jiffy. The ‘workshop’ on international trials and tribulations was packaged into a capsule of just two weeks. The defence lawyers were neither given access to the evidence presented by the state nor ample time with their client. Five trial judges figured into the equation; two were fired for being ‘sympathetic’ to Saddam; two others resigned in fear of their life; the fifth one proved up to scratch by being openly hostile and belligerent with Saddam.

The trial of Saddam was the closest thing to a kangaroo court, which had been given its mandate to hang the criminal even before the trial got under way. Its verdict was a foregone thing. The world knew that the Iraqi government had been ordered to hang Saddam and get done with him so that the occupiers could proceed on the rest of their agenda for Iraq.

Saddam wasn’t a saint, not by a long shot. He was an autocrat, a tyrant and everything else that goes into making a cruel and despotic leader climbing to the pinnacle of power through stealth, cunning and unabashed use of muscles. But, then, he wasn’t unique in that, especially in the prevailing Arab world where genuinely elected and democratic leaders are most conspicuous by their absence.

The ostensible alibi for putting Saddam in the dock was that he committed crimes against humanity. The latest, arbitrary, figure of the human victims of his gross and appalling crimes put out by the Iraqi government is said to be at least 2 million. CNN has been drum-beating this toll, just as it has of the 6 millions perished in the Holocaust. And one is not supposed to challenge or question whatever figures CNN, FOX, or the likes of these neo con mouthpieces should propagate, while beating their chest all the time in ‘sympathy’ for the victims of barbarity.

But criminals who may have committed horrendous crimes against humanity should be tried by an international court, or tribunal, such as the one sitting in The Hague to try ‘famous’ criminals like former Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic. This is the moral responsibility bequeathed to us since the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis. Why was Saddam not tried at The Hague, or some other neutral venue, by a court of transparency, if his crimes were indeed as heinous as they were claimed to be?

He wasn’t tried at an impartial, international and transparent court or tribunal for obvious reasons.

An open trial would have also bared a lot of embarrassing closets, of those who were responsible for making a monster out of Saddam during his ascendancy as a ‘strong leader’ when he was doing their biddings and was acting as ‘their man.’ He was then a blue-eyed boy of theirs and was hailed and eulogized by the likes of Donald Rumsfeld, who kowtowed to him as the special emissary of Ronald Reagan.

A real court would have allowed witnesses and documents to establish the facts of Saddam’s grooming as an agent of repression, torture, murder and mass executions. It would have become known that the technology for the chemical weapons that were used against the Iranians, and Iraq’s own Kurdish population, was given to Saddam by the Germans as a gift from one friend to another.

It would have established that the expertise for making biological weapons—luckily never used—came to Iraq from U.S., and that the actual ‘stock’ or ‘culture’ for those weapons was provided by the bosom American ally, U.K.

So the victors, hiding all the self-incriminating evidence against them in their cupboards, decided, very early on in their occupation of Iraq, that Saddam had to be tried in Iraq where a death sentence could be passed, and carried out, against him with impunity.

The victor’s justice has no doubt prevailed. But it raises more questions than it answers.

For instance, why wasn’t the second trial of Saddam, begun recently, regarding the mustard gas used, at his command against the Kurdish civilians of Halabja—in which thousands perished—allowed to run its course with Saddam in the dock?

The Halabja massacre, with its carnage well documented by the international community, was, in real sense of the term, a crime against humanity. Its victims were the Kurds, a people pampered and molly-coddled by the Americans since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. The logic says their cut-and-dried case against Saddam should have been given top billing by the current guardians of the Kurds, and Saddam should’ve been made to pay the price for it with his head.

But Saddam was tried and sent to his grave for the Dujail incident, of July 1982, which, by comparison was a localized crime. An attempt was made there, in broad daylight, on Saddam’s life. So, in a sense, the state authority was used in retaliation for a kind of provocation. It wasn’t a crime to fit the description of ‘a crime against humanity.’

What does it tell the world: ignoring the larger interest of one victim ethnicity, which suffered grievously at Saddam’s hands, and give precedence to the suffering of another ethnic or sectarian group, whose suffering was, comparatively, lighter?

President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd otherwise close to the Americans and enjoying their patronage, has distanced himself from Saddam’s execution. He refused to sign the death warrant. The warrant was signed, instead, by Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki, in clear violation of the Iraqi constitution.

But the Kurds would be entitled to nurture a genuine grouse that their brief against Saddam was relegated to the back burner while the Shiia’s case against their tormentor was given top priority. This could result in a split in the ruling Shiia-Kurdish coalition, while on the other hand still further flaming the sectarian cleavage between the Shiias and the Sunnis. But, the cynic might argue, isn’t that what the occupiers of Iraq precisely want?

From the moment Saddam was hauled up in that kangaroo court—and until he was hung at the end of a judicial charade, a clear miscarriage of justice in more senses than one—everything in his trial was done to accommodate the convenience of Bush & Co.

The death sentence was pronounced, carefully calibrated to lend maximum leverage to the beleaguered Republicans at the mid-term polls in November. It’s a different matter that it didn’t help. Now the hanging itself has been timed to end the year on a triumphal note for Bush, who has been cornered into reviewing his whole strategy in Iraq by the Baker-Hamilton Group, and is expected to come up with something new.

But he doesn’t want to give up his pipe dream of ‘winning’ the war in Iraq. Like a broken record he’s stuck in his groove and wants to try yet another war tack by beefing up his military in Iraq.

However, the new Congress is going to be a different ball game; if not exactly a hostile one it would be, at the very least, not so accommodating to underwrite his war agenda. He may run into heavy weather. How does he wriggle out of it? How does he make the best of a bad situation?

The neo cons come to his aid. All is not lost, they console him: ‘hang Saddam and that should unleash a confrontation between the Shiias and the Sunnis bloodier than anything seen so far. But keep the Kurds out of it; they’re useful to us and to our Israeli allies. They would come in handy, whenever needed.’

That prescription might still work, for a while. A conflagration—call it a civil war or anything else—would convince Congress to let Bush inject another hefty dose of American military muscle into Iraq. That’s already on the cards. What happens to the Iraqis, and Iraq, is of least concern to Bush or those still subscribing to his warmongering. Like a bankrupt gambler, Bush doesn’t have any other chips left with him but still insists on a last throw of the dice.

Saddam had a lot of Iraqi blood on his hands, for the duration he ruled the land with an iron fist. But those who claim to have ‘liberated’ the oppressed Iraqis have much more on their hands, too.

Saddam wasn’t given a fair trial, contrary to what Bush has claimed in his initial remarks from the Texas White House, at Crawford, on his hanging. But would those guilty of the ongoing mayhem in Iraq ever be hauled up before a court of law, or face any kind of murky or transparent justice? One doubts if they ever would.

Bush, the man who has been the cause of so much suffering and senseless slaughter in Iraq is entitled to whatever spin or gloss he may choose to put on his latest ‘victory’, against an old foe, whom he has meted out a typically Texan justice. His enmity to the world of Islam needs no further elaboration.

But this sordid episode adds yet another feather of ignominy and shame in the cap of the Muslim world.

Since the end of World War II, the honour of hanging their fallen ‘heroes’ belongs, exclusively, to the Muslim world. The list includes Adnan Menderes of Turkey, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan and, now the latest, Saddam Hussain of Iraq. Only the Muslims know the art of making martyrs out of controversial leaders whom history may, otherwise, judge differently