By Anna Bachmann
Voices in the Wilderness

As the Saddam’s first court appearance played on the BBC with commentary from the British newscaster, I was in a hotel room with an Iraqi woman named Alaa and two American journalists eating lunch. The journalists, between bites of kabob and lamb tikka, spoke very much like the newscaster on the television of the various reactions that the first footage of Saddam since his capture would take in Iraq. I just watched the woman’s face.

She watched the images of Saddam on the television intently for awhile. His words were reported in bits and peices by the female newscaster as Iraqi censors had cut the sound from the footage. I wondered what she could be thinking. She had grown up watching this man on television … Saddam Hussain, the President of Iraq (which is how he introduced himself at the trial we are told) … had been a figure of the utmost authority in this woman’s world for her entire life. This man had evoked fear, hatred, admiration, … any number of mixed and divergent reactions in the people of Iraq. Now look at him.

Earlier we were told that Saddam had said he had invaded Kuwait for “the Iraqi people.”

“That’s right,” Alaa said without hesitation, “For his family and his relatives.” Those Iraqi people.

She watched him on television now, focused but without expression. Then she furrowed her brow for a brief moment and turned away to eat her lunch. There was nothing there anymore that could hold her attention.

By Robert Fisk
Independent U.K.
Thursday 01 July 2004

Now it is time for bread and circuses. Keep the people distracted. Show them Saddam. Remind them what it used to be like. Make them grateful. Make Saddam pay. Show his face once more across the world so that his victims will think about the past, not the present. Charge him. Before the full majesty of Iraq’s new “democratic” law. And may George Bush win the next American election.

That’s pretty much how it looked from Baghdad yesterday. Forget the 12-hour power cuts and the violence and the kidnappings and the insurgency. Let’s go back again to the gruesome days of Baathist rule, let’s revisit once more the theatre of cruelty - back to all those war crimes and crimes against humanity with which the Monster will be charged. Let’s take another look at Tariq Aziz and “Chemical” Ali and the rest. Isn’t this why we came to Iraq - to rescue the Iraqis from the Beast of Baghdad?