Im American and yes I think they should be punished but how to make that happen I havnt the first clue. Heres an interesting story along the same lines though...
Robert Fisk: A dictator created then destroyed by America
Published: 30 December 2006
http://news. independent. co.uk/world/ fisk/article2112 555.ece
Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more
deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck
at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the
Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of
innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies?
Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for
Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his
death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi "government" , but on behalf
of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of
the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.
But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and,
indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this
weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western
newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our
presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?
No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W
Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded
Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and
thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair
and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and
the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of
lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great
brutality.
In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of
2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and
killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to
Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget
these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the
dictator we created.
Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest
war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and
a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical
weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder
the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any
mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against
him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for
sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that
would also expose our culpability.
And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted
uranium shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous,
the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-
disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the
aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission accomplished" - who will
be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will
come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush,
written in comfortable and wealthy retirement.
Hours before Saddam's death sentence, his family - his first wife,
Sajida, and Saddam's daughter and their other relatives - had given
up hope.
"Whatever could be done has been done - we can only wait for time to
take its course," one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and
had already announced his own "martyrdom": he was still the
president of Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All condemned men face
a decision: to die with a last, grovelling plea for mercy or to die
with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in their last
hours on earth. His last trial appearance - that wan smile that
spread over the mass-murderer' s face - showed us which path Saddam
intended to walk to the noose.
I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I have talked
to the Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia who rose up against
the dictator at our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us -
and whose comrades, in their tens of thousands, along with their
wives, were hanged like thrushes by Saddam's executioners.
I have walked round the execution chamber of Abu Ghraib - only
months, it later transpired, after we had been using the same prison
for a few tortures and killings of our own - and I have watched
Iraqis pull thousands of their dead relatives from the mass graves
of Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted artificial hip and a
medical identification number on his arm. He had been taken directly
from hospital to his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I
have even shaken the dictator's soft, damp hand. Yet the old war
criminal finished his days in power writing romantic novels.
It was my colleague, Tom Friedman - now a messianic columnist for
The New York Times - who perfectly caught Saddam's character just
before the 2003 invasion: Saddam was, he wrote, "part Don Corleone,
part Donald Duck". And, in this unique definition, Friedman caught
the horror of all dictators; their sadistic attraction and the
grotesque, unbelievable nature of their barbarity.
But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At first, those who
suffered from Saddam's cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds
wanted to pull the hangman's lever. So will many other Kurds and
Shia outside Iraq welcome his end. But they - and millions of other
Muslims - will remember how he was informed of his death sentence at
the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be
sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the
ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners
from his jails. "Handed over to the Iraqi authorities, " he may have
been before his death. But his execution will go down - correctly -
as an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss
to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer
obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and
this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving
away of his crimes) Saddam died a "martyr" to the will of the
new "Crusaders".
When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency against
American troops increased in ferocity. After his death, it will
redouble in intensity again. Freed from the remotest possibility of
Saddam's return by his execution, the West's enemies in Iraq have no
reason to fear the return of his Baathist regime. Osama bin Laden
will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there's a
thought. So many crimes avenged.
But we will have got away with it.