Saddam Death Penalty: Will More US Troops Die?
by James Buchanan
It has been predicted for the past few weeks that Saddam Hussein would be sentenced to death just prior to the November election. It was a foregone conclusion that Hussein would be executed even before he was dragged out of his spider hole and taken prisoner. Announcing the death sentence could inflame some of the insurgents into retaliating against our troops. This raises the question: Did Karl Rove and the neocons choose to announce Hussein’s death penalty in the hope of getting a few more votes at the cost of the lives of US soldiers?
Some especially naive individuals may assert that the new Iraqi government is controlling Saddam’s trial and that this announcement and our November election are coincidentally happening at the same time. I guess that would be the same Iraqi government that asked us to leave their country and we simply ignored them. Yup, that’s a government with a lot of sovereignty. And don’t forget that Saddam was actually held OUTSIDE Iraq for a considerable period of time after he was first captured. Perhaps it was feared that he might be freed by the Iraqi rebels and then we’d have to spend another couple years looking for him. If Saddam were on trial in America, he would already have grounds for a mistrial given the considerable number of defense lawyers, who have wound up gunned down during the trial so far. (more…)