President George W. Bush could send up to 40,000 more American troops to Iraq when he unveils his revised Iraq policy, US media have speculated, cautioning that a final figure has not been determined. Various news reports agree there will be an increase of American forces in Iraq, giving estimates of between 9,000 and 40,000 extra troops. The move could be controversial as the Iraq war is increasingly unpopular with the American public amid a mounting death toll that now stands at around 3,000 US troops since the start of the invasion in March 2003.
It is also likely to be opposed by Congress, now in the hands of opposition Democrats, who have now taken control of both houses of Congress. There are currently 132,000 American troops in Iraq as well as 17,000 members of the US-led coalition from 25 other countries, the Pentagon said Thursday. CNN television said Bush was looking at sending 20,000-40,000 additional troops.
A "targeted increase in troop strength" is "an active subject of discussion", an unnamed senior Administration official told CNN, adding that Bush was "significantly along in the process". NBC News also reported a likely temporary troop increase, citing military officials that believe it will involve some 20,000 new US soldiers and marines. CBS News, citing military sources, said Bush was preparing to send some 9,000 soldiers and marines into Iraq, with another 11,000 on alert in Kuwait and the United States. In his Iraq policy speech Bush was also expected to ask Congress for money to provide more jobs for Iraqis, and to announce another plan to help bridge Iraq's bitter Shiite-Sunnite divide, according to McClatchy.
Bush wrote that he would be addressing the nation on a new Iraq strategy "in the days ahead" in an opinion column in The Wall Street Journal last Wednesday.
The president had previously said he was considering "all options", including a temporary increase of troops in Iraq.
Most Democrats, some prominent Republicans, and the senior US military commander in Baghdad, General George Casey, have warned against a prolonged expansion in the American military presence.
A troop increase is also opposed by Joseph Biden, the incoming head of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Violence continues
In Iraq itself, violence continued as usual.
On December 30, for example, insurgents killed at least seven people, including three Iraqi soldiers.
A group of gunmen in vehicles attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint in Hawija, west of the northern oil hub of Kirkuk, killing three soldiers and wounding another two, local police captain Atallah Mahmoud said.
Four more people were killed in several attacks in Baghdad.
Two were killed and another two wounded when apparent Sunnite extremists fired a Katyusha rocket in the capital's northwest Shiite district of Kadhimiya where former President Saddam Hussein was hanged on December 30.
Another Iraqi was killed and six others wounded in a car bomb attack in the northern neighborhood of Hurriya, a day after 37 people died in a triple car bomb attack in the same area.
In yet another attack, one person was killed and five wounded in a car bomb explosion in the Shawakha neighborhood of downtown Baghdad.
Meanwhile, four corpses two male and two female were found Sunday in the restive northern city of Mosul.
The two women were found dead in an industrial area while the two men were found in a car in a neighborhood, local police major Mohammed Ahmed said, adding all the four had been shot dead.
On December 30 nearly 80 people were killed across the violence-wracked country in a series of brutal attacks triggered within hours of Saddam's execution by the Iraqi government for crimes against humanity.
And on January 1 rebels shot dead an Iraqi family of five three children and their parents as they were driving home to Baghdad from the restive northern city of Mosul, police said Monday.
The family, believed to hail from the capital, had been visiting a relative detained in Badoush prison, 20 kilometers southwest of Mosul, police Major Mohammad Ahmad said.
Saddam Hussein
But far and away the most conspicuous single event of recent months in Iraq was the execution and burial of its long-time president, Saddam Hussein, an event likely to have unforeseen consequences in the Arab world and beyond, analysts speculate. They note that images of the ousted Iraqi leader being led to the gallows on one of Islam's most important feast days risk further alienating public opinion in an Arab world already bristling at perceived Western insensitivity and arrogance.
Even the West's leading Middle East allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, publicly spoke out against the choice of the first day of the Muslim Feast of Sacrifice to put Saddam to death.
The ousted president was executed in Baghdad at dawn (well before dawn, according to the Iraqi authorities) on December 30 as Muslims began celebrating the Eid al-Adha, in which a sheep is traditionally slaughtered in memory of Ibrahim (Abraham), who according to the Koran, was about to sacrifice his son Ismail at God's command, but was sent a sheep instead.
Grainy footage of a grey-bearded and calm-looking Saddam being prepared for the gallows was aired on Iraqi state television and re-broadcast across the Arab world.
"Saddam was being dragged away as if he was the sheep waiting to be slaughtered", said Emad Gad, researcher with the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Center for Strategic Studies.
"The main issue here is that the execution took place on the morning of the Eid al-Adha", Gad explained to journalists. "This will stir anger and humiliation in people, whether they supported him or not.
"Generally in the region, people's emotions are already anti-US, and these images will add to that feeling".
The executive editor of the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel, Nabil Khatib, agreed. "The pictures will re-create the anger and frustration among a large part of the Arab masses.
"Once more, ordinary Arabs felt that there is a conspiracy against their symbols".
The newsman said the impression was all the greater because Saddam was not the demon to most Arab public opinion that he had become in the West.
The ousted president had successfully projected himself among ordinary Arabs as the one leader in the region "who confronted external threats on behalf of the Arabs ... who fought Iran and launched missiles at Israel", Khatib said.
Samer Hamzeh, news consultant for state-run Dubai Media Incorporated, which groups Dubai Television and three other channels, warned that the graphic footage of the erstwhile Arab hero being led to the gallows risked sparking a violent backlash.
"This is not our daily news picture. It is a historic, very emotional picture... and the effect of emotional pictures does not show right away".
Hamzeh said the fact that Saddam looked composed as he was readied for execution would not diminish the negative impact of the footage.
"It is not about his behavior. The normal viewer will see the picture as humiliating", he argued. "Humiliation can provoke anger, violence", Egypt, the biggest recipient of US aid after Iraq and Israel, openly criticized the choice of execution date and voiced concern it might stoke further violence inside Iraq.
"Egypt regrets the fact that the Iraqi authorities carried out the execution of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and that it took place on the first day of Eid al-Adha", Foreign Ministry spokesman Alaa al-Hadidi told the official MENA agency.
The timing of the execution "did not take into consideration the feelings of Muslims and the sanctity of this day, which represents amnesty and forgiveness", Hadidi said.
"We hope that the execution of the former president at this time... will not lead to more deterioration in the situation and inflame the spirit of revenge, instead of efforts to ensure Iraqi unity".
The Saudi official media voiced similar criticism.
"There has been a feeling of surprise and dismay that the implementation of the [death] sentence came ... on the first day of Eid al-Adha during which... Muslims come together", said a commentary carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.
Saddam's execution has angered members of Iraq's large Sunnite minority and from other Sunnite Arabs, and triggered criticism from observers who felt he was humiliated minutes before being put to death.
A grisly unofficial video released after Saddam was hanged showed one of the members of the execution party shouting the name of the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, a bitter opponent of Saddam.
The two and half minute film shot on a mobile telephone camera has spread like wildfire on the Internet and triggered angry outbursts within Iraq's Sunnite Arab community and from international leaders.
One of those present at the execution could be heard shouting "Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!" at a sneering Saddam, inspiring some observers to compare the execution to a sectarian lynching.
Saddam was hanged after an Iraqi court found him guilty of crimes against humanity for his role in the killing of 148 Shiite civilians after an assassination attempt against him in 1982. Also found guilty and sentenced to death for the same offense were Barzan al-Tikriti, Saddam's former intelligence chief (and his half-brother), and Awad al-Bandar, former head of the "Revolutionary Court". The execution of the latter two was said last week to have been "postponed".
European comment
Commentators and the media across Europe expressed shock and unease at graphic television pictures showing the last moments of Saddam Hussein just before his execution.
Images of the fallen Iraqi dictator with a noose around his neck, surrounded by executioners in balaclavas, horrified a continent which does not use capital punishment, even though the actual death was not shown.
"The images of Saddam Hussein with a noose around his neck are extremely disturbing and unnecessary", said Sir Menzies Campbell, leader of Britain's second opposition Liberal Democrat Party, which opposed the Iraq war.
Segolene Royal, Socialist candidate for the French Presidency, spoke out against the danger that the images "create a feeling of sympathy for a dictator whose acts were indefensible".
Patrick Baudouin, honorary president of FIDH (the International Federation of Human Rights), said he was "repelled by images representing an extremely unhealthy voyeurism".
He added that it reminded him of the execution of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989.
"The footage of the execution shocked the whole world", the Austrian daily Oesterreich said, while El Mundo in Spain complained that the Iraqi government had "transformed Saddam's execution into a televised spectacle".
For George Galloway, the controversial British member of Parliament who has formed his own political party, Respect, on a platform of opposition to the Iraq war, the death was "a squalid little lynching".
A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman denounced "the hurried severity of the execution, which outside investigators were not ashamed to show on television to the whole world".
Commentators expressed a series of theories about why the footage was shown.
"I think they showed the pictures as a symbol, to show that Saddam Hussein is finished", surmised Nadim Shehadi, associate fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.
"Especially for European eyes, the pictures could be shocking, because the death penalty has been abolished, but not for American eyes".
Ann Clwyd, a British Labor Party MP who is Prime Minister Tony Blair's human rights envoy to Iraq, said that, even though she was against the death penalty, she could see why many Iraqis would be happy to see Saddam dead.
Many victims might see the execution as "part of the healing process", she mused.
Others, though, have warned of the danger of broadcasting the pictures with the Middle East in such turmoil.
Galloway, who was expelled from Labor over his opposition to the war and had met Saddam, took a less optimistic view than Clwyd.
He said that the video would allow Saddam to become in death what he had failed to be in life -- a "martyr and Arab hero".
This view was echoed by the Greek daily Kathimerini, which said the execution risked transforming Saddam into a "symbol of Arab nationalism".
European press: No problems solved
Other newspapers across Europe were largely pessimistic as to whether Saddam Hussein's execution would solve any of Iraq's problems.
The Sunday Telegraph in London said it would be "naive to think that his execution will end the growing sectarian violence that has gripped Iraq since the US-led invasion toppled Saddam in March 2003".
But it conceded that the hanging "might sow a necessary seed of separation between" loyalists of the secular Baath Party that had ruled Iraq for three decades and the Islamist extremists.
"The execution has definitively robbed the former group of a symbolic figurehead and any hope of a recognizable Baathist revival", the right-leaning newspaper said in an editorial.
The left-leaning Independent on Sunday said Saddam's execution defied moves worldwide in recent decades to scrap the death penalty and "can too easily be portrayed... throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds as victor's justice".
The Italian press also agreed that the execution had "divided the world" and would not "end the nightmare of the Iraqis".
The business daily Il Sole 24 Ore said "this is not the beginning of a new Iraq", while Il Messagero concluded that dialogue was urgently needed in Iraq but "the necessary conditions to do not exist, and that death of Saddam will not help this",
Only the Turin-based daily La Stampa saw Saddam's death as "possibly a turning point for a country finally united by the disappearance of the person chiefly responsible for its ruin".
Spain's respected daily El Pais said that in executing Saddam the Iraqi government "lamentably succumbed to an easy temptation".
The government "may or may not gain greater public backing, but thecountry is no better off today, nor is its future more promising with the elimination of the man from Tikrit", Saddam's home town.
"With the precipitate and quasi-clandestine hanging of the tyrant, Baghdad has not just lost an opportunity to show magnanimity that Iraq desperately needs if it is to have the least chink of hope. It has also lost the chance to carry on judging Saddam for his crimes against humanity and expose to Iraqis the truth behind his appalling reign in all its gore".
The German weekly Bild am Sonntag was similarly pessimistic, saying this was not a time for "joy or relief... because Saddam's death does not solve any of the problems that the military campaign against him created".
The French Sunday paper Le Journal du Dimanche asked on its front page "And now what?". "The condemnation of Saddam Hussein does not change anything on the ground", it wrote.
Egyptian press: 'American infamy'
The Egyptian press described Saddam Hussein's execution as "a sacrifice" made on Eid al-Adha, with one paper decrying the "American infamy" of Saddam's death.
"The United States cares nothing for Muslims' feelings: Bush kills Saddam on the day of the feast", headlined the liberal Al-Wafd daily, which gave extensive coverage to the of execution.
"The American government has apparently taken a lesson from Arab governments... which always choose the time of feasts to implement major decisions, thinking people are busy with the feast", wrote the paper's editorial.
"Executing Saddam like this proves how far the United States and the Iraqi regime, their ally, are afraid of the president", commented Al-Wafd, alongside photos of Saddam in better times, as a family man or chatting with an Iraqi farmer.
"The United States sacrifices Saddam on the altar of the Iraqi civil war", headlined independent daily Al-Masri al-Yom.
The paper did not comment on the hanging after Saddam was found guilty of crimes against humanity, but quoted Egypt's former Mufti Nasr Farid Wassel as saying Saddam "died a martyr because he defended his country against occupation".
"American infamy: they hanged Saddam on the day of Eid", the governmental Rose al-Youssef said on its front page, with the paper's owner Karam Gabr saying "Saddam doesn't deserve our sadness over his fate" while regretting "the moment of his execution".
"He was executed in a humane way that he did not afford tens of thousands of Iraqis he killed through all kinds of terror", Gabr wrote of the punishment handed down to Saddam and two others for massacring Shiite villagers following a 1982 assassination attempt.
The paper's editor, meanwhile, accused the United States of ignoring Israel's responsibility for massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 and of Lebanese civilians in the village of Cana in 1996 and 2006.
"Why did you execute Saddam for crimes against Shiites, without having taken similar measures against the [Israelis] who committed the crimes of Sabra and Shatila and at Cana in Lebanon?" he asked.
The two main government dailies, Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar, ran front-page photos of the dead dictator but did not comment in their editorials.
Sunnite anger
Hundreds of Iraqi Sunnite Arab supporters of Saddam Hussein, many of them armed, protested against his execution and blamed leading Iraqi Shiite politicians for carrying it out.
"Coward Moktada, traitor Hakim", chanted men, women and children, denouncing the radical Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr and former Iran-based rebel leader Abdelaziz al-Hakim for their hero's hanging.
The protestors marched through Dawr, the village north of Baghdad where Saddam was captured by US troops in December 2003 not far from his home village of Auja, where he is buried, firing guns in the air and carrying large posters of the ousted president. One such poster of Saddam, dressed in traditional Arab dress, was inscribed with the words "Saddam Hussein, hero and martyr".
Louhai Tayeh, a 27-year-old Sunnite among the protestors, said, "We denounce what [Iraq's Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki did", adding that Saddam was not dead but would "live in our hearts forever".
In the nearby town of Tikrit, a bastion of Saddam supporters, dozens of mourning tents were erected for the late leader even as the town was sealed off for a third straight day by security forces fearing angry reprisals for the execution.
Men, women and children sat in queues facing each other in the tents as volunteers served out the bitter black coffee customary during mourning.
Hundreds of mourners have sidestepped a vehicle ban to walk to his grave and pay their last respects in Auja, where Saddam was privately buried.
There were protest demonstrations in other Arab countries as well.
Satisfaction among Shiites, Kurds, Iranians, Kuwaitis
The anger of many Sunnite Arabs was not shared by Iranians or Kuwaitis, or by Iraq's Shiites and Kurds, who welcomed his passing with satisfaction, even rejoicing.
They remember Saddam's bloody war against Iraq (1980-88), with its tens of thousands of casualties on both sides; his brutal seven-month occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91; his merciless repression of the Shiite uprising against his regime in 1991 (when US President George H.W. Bush failed to protect them after he had called on the "Iraqi people" to bring him down); or his gassing of thousands of Kurdish civilians at Halabja in 1988.
© Monday Morning 2007
