According to the Arab-language newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi on June 29, anonymous sources close to Saddam Hussein and his lawyers have stated that the imprisoned Iraqi president has rejected to meet with US officials as long as he remains imprisoned.

According to the sources of the Arab daily, US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, proposed to the Iraqi president that he would avoid death sentence in the current so-called trial against him and 11 other high-ranking Iraqi leaders for crimes committed when they were in power if he would urge the successful Iraqi resistance to lay down its weapons.

Saddam Hussein should, according to his lawyers, have told the Americans that he would only negotiate “as the president of Iraq and after the American withdrawal” from the country.

In the light of the situation, probably the worst in which the US-led occupying power has been since the “taking” of Baghdad on April 9, 2003, it seems probable that the Americans try to use Saddam Hussein against the Iraqi resistance in all possible ways.

In April, Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported about a meeting between Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein, where the US aggressor “offered” that all imprisoned Iraqi leaders would get the possibility of either going into exile or participating in the present Iraqi puppet government if Saddam Hussein would go on television and declare that the resistance should lay down its weapons – and let itself be slaughtered, one could add.

This whole game is part of the process being promoted by the occupying power at the moment. The US wants and is provoking civil war between the different ethnic and religious groups in Iraq – the Kurds and the Shiites on the one side and the Sunnites on the other – in order to maintain its control over Iraq. At the same time, the Americans are trying to drag the most vacillating and opportunist forces within the resistance into the “political” process, a tactic that has no other objective than to split the resistance and subsequently liquidate the remnants of it.

But it looks like that the patriotic Saddam Hussein is continuing the struggle against imperialism from his US dungeon. For more than 12 years, he did not give in to the pressure of the imperialists, their stranglehold and genocide in Iraq, which killed more than two million Iraqis. He did not leave his country when the world’s biggest and most aggressive superpower attacked, while lying to the whole world. He remained in Iraq, telling the truth about the war to the peoples of the world and planning and organising the conditions for the resistance struggle. He was captured and tortured by the American oil robbers, put in a hole and humiliated in the world press and in front of the Iraqi people.

But today, in spite of the massive lies of imperialism about Iraq in general and Saddam Hussein in particular, the occupying power does not even dare to show its own illegitimate, censored show trial against Saddam Hussein with sound on television. Instead the occupiers are trying to use Saddam Hussein for weakening and breaking the resistance against their illegal occupation.

This shows how pitiful the occupiers are. But pitiful are also those, who here in the West are pretending to be against the occupation, and maybe even supporters of the Iraqi resistance, but nevertheless are not doing anything else than repeatedly attacking Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party because of all sorts of things, real as well as unreal, thereby being a cheap echo of the occupying power. To these pseudo-progressives, the struggle against imperialism is something, which is done behind a desk and with economic support from the imperialist state.

The fact is – whether one likes it or not – that it is thanks to Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party that there exists an organised resistance at all in Iraq today and that it is as strong as is the case. It is a fact that this Iraqi resistance, as no other force today, is dealing deadly blows to US imperialism and has hindered this blood-thirsty monster from attacking more countries. And it is also a fact that without this resistance there would neither exist international focus on Iraq nor the worldwide peace movement, which brings perspectives of another and better world for the vast majority of people in the world.

All this ought to give rise to a certain amount of humility and balanced descriptions when it comes to the Iraqi resistance and especially Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party.

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