In fact, no surprises for quite some time now.

Saddam is going to be hanged. This is the least surprising news of the day but before we get to that and for anybody that missed the highlights of his "glittering" career, let me refresh your memory...

On April 28th 1937, Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majidida al-Tikriti was born. According to Jerrold M. Post who was the founder of the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior at the CIA (pinch of salt at the ready!) Saddam had a pretty rough start to life. His mother, Subha Tulfah al-Mussallat, four months into her pregnancy with the unborn future dictator, had seen her husband her 12 year old son both die, probably from cancer, at which point she decided to take her own life and that of her unborn little tyrant.

She failed but she gave her baby, named Saddam which, somewhat ironically, means "confrontational one", to her brother, Khairallah Talfah, where he stayed until the age of three when his mother, remarried and seemingly ready to take on the responsibility of motherhood, collected him and took him into the home of her and her new husband, Ibrahim al-Hassan.

Al-Hassan reportedly treated the young Saddam very harshly indeed and, at the age of ten years old, he decided to flee, returning to his uncle's house where he would learn about the Sunni Muslim religion from his devout uncle.

However, that was not the only thing that his uncle passed on to him. Saddam himself claimed that the influence of his uncle, a member of the failed Nazi-backed coup of 1941, was the main driving force behind his joining and eventually leading the Ba'ath party and thus Iraq itself.

His rise to power was, with hindsight, somewhat predictable as we shall see.

He had only been a member of the Ba'ath party for a year when General Abdul Karim Qassim overthrew the reigning king of Iraq, Faisal II and proceeded to follow his nationalist, populist rhetoric and push through a system of massive financial reform, redistributing the vast amounts of wealth held by a tiny minority of monarchists amongst the rest of the nation.

Iraq was now an oil-rich nation with a populist president who was keeping his promises...So what went wrong?

The United States decided that this sort of behaviour had Communist overtones and so organised a military coup to overthrow Qassim, a pattern that has since become all too familiar.

In 1959 Saddam himself was involved in the failed CIA-backed coup during which he was shot in the leg. He fled to Syria with the help of both the CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives and, via a CIA training camp in Beirut, moved on to Cairo where he was given luxury accommodation and granted regular audiences at the US Embassy.

A second CIA-backed coup attempt saw the successful removal of Qassim in 1963 and a Ba'athist government put in its place with Abdul Salam Arif becoming president. The situation changed swiftly as later that year Arif dismissed and arrested all of the leading members of the Ba'ath party.

In 1964 Saddam returned to Iraq where he was promptly arrested and thrown into prison where he spent three years before escaping in 1967 and quickly rising to the highest ranks of the Ba'ath party. In 1968, after the CIA had decided that their most recently installed puppet leader had become unpredictable and thus dangerous to their cause, Saddam helped to direct another coup which saw no bloodshed but did result in the removal of Arif who was replaced by Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr who chose Saddam as his deputy.

Saddam (or is it Borat?!) with President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr

At this point it is worth taking a quick breather to think about some of those key moments in world history. Saddam gets involved with the Ba'ath party, almost immediately takes part in a CIA-backed coup during which he is shot, flees Iraq and runs into the open arms of the CIA who then train him and groom him for power. Whilst he is gone a second CIA-backed coup takes place and, this time, it is successful. Saddam then returns to Iraq, is locked in a prison cell for 3 years, escapes and takes part in yet another CIA-backed coup which is successful and enables him to become the deputy president of Iraq at the age of only 31 with limited political knowledge or experience and with no military experience other than the CIA training that he had received.

A spectacular rise to power, huh?! It is almost as if somebody had decided long before he came to power that he should do so, isn't it?!

Anyway, enough conspiracy fact already, what happened next?!

Saddam worked hard to create and maintain party unity in an effort to stave off the problems that had befallen the first Ba'athist government. Strangely, at the same time as the first Ba'athist government had been in power and experiencing all of these problems, Saddam had been out of Iraq and working for the CIA. He had then spent three years in prison so one has to wonder where his acute knowledge of the political situation came from.

Saddam also worked very hard to ensure that Iraq itself was a good country to live in. During the late 60's and early 70's he implemented various policies that would be welcomed in most nations today:

• Free education to very high levels including a "War on Illiteracy" which saw Iraq's adult literacy rate soar to one of the highest levels in the world.
• Re-nationalisation of Iraq's oil to ensure that the nation and its people received all of the benefits of its major resource rather than the international oil companies that had control of the oil fields up to that time.
• Free health care via a public health system that was so good it even garnered him an award from the UN!
• Massive farming subsidy programs were instigated giving Iraq an agricultural base that was unrivalled throughout the region.
• He instigated programs to create an industrialised infrastructure for the country including a state of the art road system, the promotion of mining as well as the development of many other industries in an attempt to make Iraq less dependent on foreign money for its oil and, perhaps his finest achievement, he oversaw the provision of electricity to nearly every city in Iraq as well as many other areas.

In the mid to late 70's Saddam was busy giving massive swathes of land to peasant farmers as well as helping them to mechanise their farming practices and thus increase output and prosperity. People were becoming wealthier across the board and poverty was, in a nation that had been two-thirds peasantry, almost totally eradicated. The economy became so strong that during the 70's over 2 million people came from other Arab nations to Iraq to help fill the massive employment needs of a nation that had more jobs than people!

Saddam was clearly destined for greatness, or at least that was the general feeling in Iraq and much of the Middle East when, on July 16th 1979, Bakr resigned and Saddam formally took over the presidency of Iraq, having been the de facto president for many years.

He immediately called for a meeting of the entire government on the 22nd July during which he named 68 members who were, he claimed, conspirators and thus disloyal to him and the party. All 68 were led away and into custody although, considering his reputation as such a fearsome dictator who summarily tried and executed people at will with total control over a corrupt judiciary, only 22 were actually sentenced to death for treason.

He quickly became known as a socialist leader who was opposed to both Communism and Islamic extremism, who gave women more freedoms than any other nation in the region including full education rights and high-ranking positions within his government and and powerful jobs in industry.

Saddam also began a massive programme of archaeological exploration in a bid to promote Iraq as the cradle of civilisation arising from Mesopotamia and to unite all the Arab nations with Iraq as its centre. Had he achieved this it would, of course, have led rise to him becoming the "President of Arabia"!

Having signed an aid deal with the Soviet Union in 1972, Saddam had ensured a steady influx of weapons and medical supplies. This relationship became strained in the late 70's due to the execution of a group of Iraqi Communists and trade shifted towards the west although the bulk of weapons still came from the Soviet Union.

After the Islamic Revolution took place in Iran under the leadership of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam was very much befriended by the west. The United States and the United Nations even went as far as supplying weapons and medical aid to Iraq to enable the invasion of Khuzestan whilst Saddam had spent months telling the world that Iraq and Iran must not engage in a battle but must instead engage in dialogue with a view to a lasting peace! Once the invasion was complete, Saddam declared the region a province of Iraq.

By 1982 the now full blown war with Iran was going badly for Iraq. Little were they to know that this was, at least in part, due to the US supplying weapons to Iran as well as to Iraq in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair!

Towards the end of the war, on March 16th 1988, a deadly mixture of mustard gas and nerve agents was used to kill over 5,000 Kurds in the town of Halabja. Whilst this is now touted by the US State Department as the first use of chemical weapons by a government against its own people, the attack was widely attributed, including by the very same US State Department, to the Iranian government at the time.

Saddam shakes hands with Donald Rumsfeld

Saddam maintains to this day that the attack was the work of the Iranians using US-made chemical weapons that were the same weapons that the US via a certain Donald Rumsfeld had also sold to Iraq. He also points to the fact that all of the photographs of the massacre were taken by Iranian journalists and immediately published in Iranian newspapers whilst the government of Iraq was still investigating claims that this had taken place. One should ask what Iranian journalists were doing in a Kurdish area at this point of the war when the Kurds had managed to stay away from the combat zones for over 3 years.

A tip-off possibly?

After a stalemate was called Iran and Iraq were both left in a state of total chaos with their once booming economies, superb infrastructure and growing populations devastated almost beyond repair. Saddam had already borrowed over $75 billion to fund the war and was now left to go "cap-in-hand" to any nation that would hear his pleas for further financial support.

Once the program of rebuilding began, albeit with very limited access to funds and equipment, Iraq found that Kuwait was "slant drilling" into its southern oil fields. Saddam reported this to the UN and demanded that the Kuwaitis were made to stop. The UN did nothing and so, after many warnings, Saddam sent the Iraqi army to the border as a more forceful reminder. This was taken by the Kuwaiti government as an act of war and a call was made at the UN for full support in retaliation. The UN offered no such support but did request that the Iraqi army withdrew from the borders.

Saddam met with the US ambassador to Iraq in a bid to garner support for a full scale invasion of Kuwait to put a stop to the oil theft, something that the ailing economy could not withstand. Whilst the full support was not forthcoming, the general message from the US government was that they did not want to have any part in the conflict and that they were happy to stay out of the way.

Saddam sent his troops into Kuwait and, in a complete about-turn and with all the reasons that they needed, the US under George H.W. Bush and the UK under Margaret Thatcher invaded Iraq, somewhat strangely returned Kuwait to its anti-Israel/pro Soviet Union government and destroyed what little infrastructure had been rebuilt by this time in Iraq leaving it in a worse state than it had been at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. To add insult to injury, the US demanded that Saddam give up all of the chemical and biological weapons that they themselves had supplied him with and, when he refused, a regime of some of the most vitriolic sanctions ever conceived was instigated by the US and the UN.

With millions dying from the problems caused by the sanctions, popular support for Saddam was slipping although general hatred of the US was growing at a much faster pace. In 1993 an alleged plot to assassinate Bush was apparently foiled by Kuwaiti security forces whilst he was on a visit there. The US responded with a massive missile attack on the Baghdad intelligence headquarters, reports of the casualties of which range from none to over 2,000 depending upon who you believe.

The question here that must be asked is was Saddam's reaction to the attempted assassination on him any different to the US's reaction to the allegedly planned assassination of Bush? Certainly worth thinking about.

After the invasion of Iraq there followed 10 years of almost arbitrary attacks on Iraqi towns and cities. The fiercest of these was Operation Desert Fox, which came after UNSCOM weapons inspectors had been allegedly coerced into acting as US agents supplying the US government with details of sites that had nothing to do with the weapons decommissioning program that they were supposed to be enacting. This opinion has been both vehemently denied by the US government and equally vehemently supported by a number of weapons inspectors including Scott Ritter.

Further contradictory statements have been issued regarding the removal of the weapons inspectors as the inspectors themselves claim that they were told to leave the country to ensure their safety during the attacks whilst the US government, including as recently as the George W. Bush "Axis of Evil" address in 2002, have consistently stated that Saddam threw the inspectors out and this gave rise to the requirement to carry out the mission.

The fact that a three-day bombing mission was extremely unlikely to change the situation in Iraq after many years of sanctions and attacks seemed to be ignored by the US press who also did not appear to notice that the attack took place at exactly the same time as Congress was considering impeachment proceedings against President Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinksy and his subsequent denial of it. Even more coincidentally, the bombing campaign was halted on the the very same day as Congress decided that impeachment proceedings should go ahead.

The next few years saw Saddam falsely linked to 9-11, falsely linked to Osama the Bogeyman, falsely linked to al-Qaeda, falsely accused of having a nuclear weapons program, falsely accused of having Weapons of Mass Destruction and falsely accused of trying to buy "yellowcake" from Africa to make a dirty bomb.

The trial that has just sentenced him to death was set up by the US government, staged in Iraq itself by Iraqi prosecutors and judges, all of which are from religious and political groups that are in violent opposition to Saddam, the Ba'ath party and Sunni Muslims on the whole. It was conducted without any of the defendants being given private access to legal counsel and with witnesses hidden behind screens regaling the courtroom with hearsay evidence that should not have been heard in the first place let alone be considered admissible. Saddam was forbidden from calling any of his poltical party as witnesses even though, as president of the nation for almost 15 years, one assumes that he spent a great deal of time in their company and probably did not spend much time with people outside of his "circle". How would you defend yourself against charges that question your actions, thoughts and decision-making if you were not allowed to call on the few people who may have been aware of those processes to give evidence?!

And, just like Operation Desert Fox, is the timing of this not a little too good for the Republican party to be true?!

Nobody here is going to tell you that Saddam was a good man who just got caught up in a political mess that was not of his own doing and nobody here is going to tell you that he does not deserve to be tried for crimes against humanity. But with all of the information above, do you honestly believe that justice has been served? Not justice in the context of "he was bad so he should be executed", but justice in the context of a fair trial in a fair courtroom with fair judges and the ability to present witnesses to defend himself with?

Clearly the US have always had a problem with their creation and, should his appeal fail as it undoubtedly will, he will be executed and the history books will always state EXACTLY what the US have always stated...

Saddam is the bad guy, we are the good guys and justice was served.

I, for one am not so sure.

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