A Fantasy Apology by Mad, Sad Saddam

I come before this court as the victim of an aggression committed by the United States and a few of its dwindling allies that it was able to bribe and cajole into joining forces against my sovereign nation of Iraq. The killing of thousands of Iraqis and dumping them in mass graves, documented torture, Iraqis killing Iraqis and heading towards civial war, looting and a humiliating occupation are the direct result of the illegal atrocities committed by the United States of America. The United Nations did not endorse this unprovoked attack, yet they claim they are just following a U.N. resolution. If that were so, the U.N. would be here, but they are not. Most nations of the world are not with the U.S.

I am the democratically elected President of Iraq, though the U.S. would claim that our Iraqi elections are a sham. Yet I have been attacked by a country that required that the son of a wealthy oil family go to their Supreme Court, ruled mostly by appointees from his father (under both Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush Sr., who was both vice president with Mr. Reagan as well as president himself) and other Republican Party presidents, in order to declare him the president. This so-called democracy anointed Mr. Bush, son of a prior president, to the presidency after a highly contested election in which the entire country's votes didn't matter except for those votes from the State of Florida. Interestingly, that State is run by Mr. Bush's brother, and voter fraud and irregularities were well documented. Mr. Bush did not win the democratic election as he did not even win 50 percent of the people's vote. He did not even win more votes than Mr. Gore. But it was through convoluted laws and systems that amazingly managed to allow the son of a president to win. I, on the other hand, won the popular vote overwhelmingly. But they assert my election was a fraud while theirs was fair.

Mr. Bush asserted that I had weapons of mass destruction. Yet for a decade the U.N., with U.S. watch dogs, searched my country for such weapons. None were found. Not then, and not now after years of violent occupation. We opened our country for such search, but were told we somehow needed more proof that weapons do not exist. It is impossible to prove something does not exist. This reasoning clearly was a ruse in order to keep the Iraqi people down.

During this past decade, our great country was denied its rightful place in the international community, in which our oil was locked down and trade was severely limited. The U.S. denied access to our borders and denied our ability to patrol our own airspace. The U.S. denied trading with us and wouldn't allow us to trade with our partners. This created incredible hardships on the people of Iraq, causing great physical and economic suffering and humiliation.

Mr. Bush also asserted that Iraq was involved in their tragic 9/11 attack by al Qaeda, a terrorist organization that was determined to destroy my country, too. We ourselves were victims of bombings by al Qaeda. They despised our country because we are a secular nation, allowing Muslims and Christians and others to live peacefully together. They wanted a country ruled by Islamic law, and I fought hard to ensure that competing factions of Islamic groups did not tear this great nation apart under the guise of religious holy war or jihad. Mr. Bush talks of the horror of imposing Islamic Law over mostly Islamic people in Islamic nations, yet uses God to defend his imposition of "freedom and democracy" in foreign lands under extreme and violent force. Mr. Bush has never produced evidence that we were involved in 9/11 because we were not involved. But the U.S. is killing every day, trying to keep these extremists in control, but I'm afraid my nation is closer to civil war than at any time since the Kurdish revolt.

Mr. Bush's cabinet, on the other hand, includes Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Wolfowicz. These men are all members of the neoconservative group called the Project for the New American Century. They published policy papers during Mr. Clinton's presidency urging an attack on Iraq for many of the same reasons that Mr. Bush gave for attacking us now. Clearly, this attack was not related to their so-called War on Terror, but was simply an attack against Iraq for long held political reasons, including the removal of a strong Arab leader and to gain greater access to our precious oil reserves, one of the largest in the world. His second term head of diplomacy is a woman who lied about our weapons and presented false evidence and was previously in the position of planning wars, not peace.

Mr. Bush has changed his story since learning that they could not produce any evidence that my country was their enemy or a threat to others. Now he says he is here to liberate our people from their elected leader and to bring democracy, though we already elect our leaders. If Iraqis wanted to be liberated, would they not have started a revolution? If Iraqis wanted to be liberated, would they not have welcomed American warriors, joining forces with the Americans? After two years, violence is a daily occurrence, and Mr. Bush allows non-Iraqis to vote. In what other democracy are people who do not even live in the country allowed to vote? This is not democracy. This is the installation of a new regime under the force of destruction, misery and death.

What I see is that my people are fighting against these so-called liberators, fighting valiantly against a much larger aggressor that has weapons like no other nation on earth has. My people have to fight with rifles, homemade bombs, RPGs and fierce bravery and skill. The American war cowards fight our people using attack helicopters called "gun ships," jets, radar jamming planes, bombers, tanks, satellites, unmanned drones, battleships, submarines, night vision systems, laser guided bombs and many types of missiles. My people cannot stop the beast, but it is trying hard to pester it, hoping it will go away and again leave Iraq to the Iraqi people.

The Americans do not have any intention of leaving this land. They even claim to support freedom, yet they have closed the one newspaper that was providing Iraqis with accurate news about their cause. They proclaim freedom of their press, but they don't want their own people to see the coffins of their dead soldiers, and they certainly don't show all of the dead Iraqi women, children and men. Perhaps they are truly ashamed of their soldiers who are unjustly killing and being killed in our country. The Americans claim a new puppet regime is in power, but the regime cannot pass laws or control its own military. It was not elected by Iraqis, but was installed and selected by the invaders.

As for charges against me that include war crimes and crimes against humanity, I offer the true story that the Americans do not want you to consider.

Yes, I did authorize the horrible and sad attacks against the Kurds in northern Iraq. Many innocent people died, and for that I am truly sorry. Naturally, the Americans and illegal Iraq government apparently do not see the mass graves of their own making outside Falluja. Killing those fighting to protect their nation against invaders was authorized by Mr. Bush. But the Kurds were rebels incited by the Americans after I left Kuwait, and that threatened the stability of a free Iraq. Note that the Americans did nothing at that time and failed to support the Kurds at that time, yet today they claim they attacked my country 10 years later because of those very things. The Kurds wanted their own "homeland," meaning that they wanted to take for themselves the land and oil that rightfully belong to all Iraqis. Yes, I authorized those attacks in order to quell that disturbance, and it was successful. The country remained in tact. Did not the US fight its own civil war? Did not millions of Americans die at the hands of other Americans? Was not this war over the right to brutally enslave the majority of the people who lived in the southern areas? Yet that war they call great, whereas our internal struggle was a crime. Our struggle was over ethnic and tribal control of land and oil, not over something as disgusting as the enslavement of people forcefully taken from another continent in order to enrich a white minority.

The U.S. says I had weapons of mass destruction, which indeed I had at one time. I believe my nation has a right to protect itself with such weapons. But the U.S. has manufactured and owns more such weapons than any other country in the world. Many of our weapons were purchased from the U.S. or the Soviet Union, two superpowers who sell their obsolete weapons to poor nations in order to enrich themselves further and then claim that our having them is a crime.

While the chemical attacks against the rebelling Kurds was awful, is it not true that the U.S. dropped two nuclear bombs against its enemies, on cities that included millions of innocent women, children and non-military men? Do they describe their President Truman as a mad, evil tyrant? Did not the U.S. use chemical weapons in its war against the people of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos? Is it not true that the U.S. continues to sell weapons to Israel, who already is in possession of nuclear weapons? Is it not true that the U.S. provided weapons directly to al Qaeda in its zeal to defeat the Soviet Union's invasion, only to then invade and attack Afghanistan itself?

The sovereign nation of Afghanistan also has never attacked the U.S., but the U.S. has attacked them and has illegally jailed hundreds of Afghan men in distant Cuba without pressing charges or declaring them POWs, and has invaded Afghanistan, occupies their country and continues to kill more Afghans to this day.

Such weapons are extremely unpleasant, but their use is not evil unless the intent is evil. My use of such weapons has always been to protect Iraq and keep it whole. I believe the U.S. now understands first hand how hard it can be to control various factions within Iraq. Clearly, killing with far more powerful weapons, torturing people, arresting people without pressing charges, curbing freedoms, and killing people in a foreign country is God's will for Mr. Bush.

The U.S. points to my invasion of Kuwait as further proof that I am evil. Yet historically, the land called Kuwait was part of our great nation. The western powers, including the U.K., which has partnered with the U.S. in their attack against my people, after a previous occupation and colonization of our lands, drew borders that cut Iraq off from much of its historical access to the Persian Gulf, and taking away many of the rich oil lands that rightfully belong to the Iraqi people. Kuwait, on the other hand, is not a democratic nation and is ruled by a rich family.

It can be argued that I should not have invaded to reclaim our rightful lands, but all Iraqis have already paid heavily for that incursion. We left Kuwait and returned to our unnatural borders, being even further pushed back by the US and their "no fly zone."

We suffered great losses at the hands of the U.S. during that war in Kuwait, which then led to a decade of suffering under its embargoes and oppressive hand. But I think it's only fair to point out that the U.S. has taken more land from others than I could ever conceive, land that never belonged to them. They pushed many Native American tribes off of their land, as the U.S. was, in fact, an invading force on North America from the start, once again as the result of the U.K.'s colonization of foreign lands.

When the U.S. split from the U.K., it was not in its own land, but was in the land that it had taken from the indigenous people. Over nearly 200 years, the U.S. expanded its borders under the power of its military across the continent until it ran out of land and reached the Pacific Ocean. It fought wars against the U.K., France, Spain and Mexico, as well as numerous native communities in order to usurp and colonize those lands. More recently, it was the U.S. who dropped many bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, dropping chemical poisons to destroy the forests and waters, leaving an impoverished, war torn nation behind after it finally realized its incredible military power could not withstand the brave defense by the native people. It is this story that we hope will repeat itself as our brave countrymen fight to reclaim Iraq from this monstrous invader.

I beseech the world community to come to our aid and restore Iraq to its rightful place. Lift embargoes that have crippled our nation. Rebuild the destruction that has been wrought by this powerful enemy of the Iraqi people. Pay restitution for those murdered by the U.S., including my two beloved sons.

Every country has a different culture, a different perspective on how life should be led, a different history, a different set of problems and concerns. These different beliefs, cultures and needs do not make one country better than another country. If you wear designer suits and I wear a turban, you are not automatically better than I. Because you have more effective killing machines than I, you are not more righteous in the eyes of God, praise be to Allah. Iraq will be free only after the rightful government is restored and the occupiers have left our great nation.