What do you mean Happy New Year?

Follow us:WhatsappFacebookTwitterTelegram.cls-1{fill:#4d4d4d;}.cls-2{fill:#fff;}Google NewsWhat a miserable year to wake up to. It's a year where we're all talking child abuse and perversity and serial killing. But it's miserable on so many levels, I can't begin to deal. Not least because of the travesty of justice that's passing for legal proceedings in Iraq. Hanging Saddam was murder, no less...and compounded by the murder of a principle, in fact many principles, but then again who's listening?

In the name of freedom, under the benevolent torch of Lady Liberty, despot Saddam Hussein was hanged. Quickly. Too quickly, as it turns out. Why wasn't he made to answer for any of the other charges against him? Does the brutality of his rule mean he wasn't entitled to a fair trial? Then why did Pinochet get off scot-free? Did thousands of Chileans not have a voice that mattered? Or were they just not speaking in a liquid currency that mattered?

Why the hurry to hang Saddam? And what about the politics of now hanging, now not-hanging his co-accused? What marked out that one case...the massacre at Dujail? Kurds may be rejoicing that their arch-nemesis is gone, but this justice was not for them. Saddam wasn't made to answer for his attempts at genocide. Saddam never got to turn the tables on his former powerful ally with deep pockets who disastrously backed a war with their other Axis of Evil Enemy Number One (those days - these are interchangeable titles after all), Iran. Saddam wasn't made to reveal the whereabouts of his billions of dollars. Or was he? So who's pocketing the change? In a war that's leaking sticky coloured black blood by the bucket - oh I'm sorry, I meant barrel - a war that would not make sense in any timeframe besides this one, where the Empire's Strike Back is dominated by its own narrow geopolitical agenda...In such a war, history's being written by the moment, and even our feeble attempt at an objection is but a drop in the bucket of the human rights abuses we're perpetrating in the name of the Free World.

What's fair about a trial where two of his lawyers are bumped off, a judge seeks to recuse himself and an atmosphere of the farcical pervades? What's fair about a verdict that's upheld by a government that's been installed by Uncle Sam, and accused of being a lapdog? An inefficient lapdog, at that. What good does a trial and verdict do, when it makes a martyr out of an almost-monster? What good does a trial do when it spins the violence so out of the spiral it's in, that more than another 3,000 US troops will be at grave risk of death if their misguided leaders attempt to set things right. What kind of war is it, that we all know some 3,000 Americans have died in Iraq but how many thousands of Iraqis was it again? How many generations will grow up in Iraq bleeding and battered, and hating? You might as well give Osama and gang that damn torch of Liberty, because the fires aren't going out any time soon.
Where does the year go from here?
About the AuthorAmrita Tripathi Amrita Tripathi is a news anchor with CNN-IBN, and also doubles up as Health and Books Editor. An MA in Philosophy from St Stephen's College, Delhi Un...Read Morefirst published:January 04, 2007, 17:56 ISTlast updated:January 04, 2007, 17:56 IST
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