Late last night the news began to come through that Saddam Hussein was to be hanged. By morning he was dead, killed in a frantic rush to get him out of the way before the Gregorian new year or the Muslim Hajj festival.

Many will be wondering why I’m wasting digital ink on this man. While I abhor capital punishment, I can muster up little sympathy when those who lived not only by the sword, but by the ruthless command of a thousand swords, guns and planes die by similar means – especially if their fate has been decided by a fair and open tribunal. Indeed, what’s the death of one undisputedly guilty man amongst all the butchered innocents of Iraq? The truth is, I do not care one iota for Saddam Hussein the man, but neither did any of those who led him to the gallows. In killing Saddam, the puppet government and its kangaroo court were trying to kill off all the inconvenient truths of recent Iraqi history, leaving room only for one officially-sanctioned lie.

When the Third Reich was brought down in 1945, the mighty British war-chief Churchill wanted all those in charge rounded up, taken outside, and shot. Not for the first time, Churchill was saved by the restraining hand of America. They saw the value of a trial, and forced those Nazi leaders who had failed to kill or expatriate themselves were forced to watch, and take part in, the dismantling of their brutal legacy. Unlike Saddam’s trial, the Nuremberg trials were about truth and responsibility. When Goering tried to rally the others around Hitler’s legacy, to become a martyr for the country in whose interest he had always claimed to act, he was never silenced. All his claims were listened to, investigated, and exposed as fraud for all the world to see. By the time of the Nazis’ executions, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that they had led Germany to ruin while murdering Jews, Gypsies, dissidents and occupied peoples on an unprecedented scale.

Saddam could have been brought down in the same way. His crimes were lesser, but that’s not saying much. He did, as all dictators do, no matter how benign they start out as, slaughter those who dared oppose him, their families and their neighbours, and with the most horrifying weapons at his disposal. He could have been tried for these crimes in a legitimate, fair court, and he might well have received the same sentence, but no such court can come into being while Iraq is under occupation. Because unlike Goering’s Germany, Saddam’s Iraq is occupied by his former masters, who have more interest in shutting him up and getting him out of the way than in exposing the truth behind his misdeeds.

Though Saddam Hussein was a brutal Muslim dictator, his was a brutal secular dictatorship. At a time when Islamic theocracies were popping up all over the Middle East, Saddam kept religion strictly out of his government. The West thought this was fantastic, especially after the rise to power of the Ayatollahs in Iran. Islamaphobia is nothing new and the US, UK and friends decided to support this bastion of secularism, even if it had to be as violent and intolerant as the theocracy next door. They even provided Saddam with guns, and maps the better to target those guns, and badgered him into invading Iran. This WWI-style war of attrition took a heavy toll on the Iraqi and Iranian peoples, and was perhaps the greatest crime Saddam committed (the other main contender being his treatment of the Kurds with the weapons he had left over), but it was not fully his. If someone ordered the death of someone I cared about, I would not be satisfied with the incarceration of the hitman. For me, justice would not be done until the someone who hired him was brought to trial.

In this case, that someone was the British and American governments, and they payed Hitman Saddam with British and American taxpayers’ money. They may claim that they did what was necessary to defend the world (read: the West’s political and economic hegemony) from fundamental Islam (read: Third World nations’ delusions of indepence). If they do advance that claim, there is no reason why they should not have to defend it before an international court of law. Britain, America, and their Iraqi stooges will never let this happen, and want Saddam dead and incinerated long before the international community (or even, decades from now, a re-emergeant Iraqi nation) gets their hands on him, and his story.

With his prosecutors too squeamish too probe his deepest, dirtiest secrets, Saddam has been able to make this about more recent history – in which he comes of as a defiant, almost heroic, champion of the Iraqi underdogs. For ten years, economic sanctions crippled the economy he had carefully built during his time as vice president (for of course, if Iraq could even be suspected of developing and hiding weapons of mass destruction, it had to have a well-educated and socially mobile population), not an economy of war machines – which we gave him for free – but of bridges, schools and hospitals. Baby-food was kept out because it could have been used to feed adults, and plastic surgery equipment for burns victims was kept out on the baseless suspicion that it would be used for Saddam’s cronies’ wives’ nose-jobs, and one of the very very few nations to have turned oil wealth into real wealth was prevented from selling oil, bombs came down whenever British and American politics deemed they should… and Saddam’s Iraq, like Churchill’s England, remained defiant.

By blotting out the bigger picture, and by staging an over-censored farce of a witchhunt, the courts have played right into Saddam’s hands. That bedraggled old man who was dragged out of dirty hole and pathetically probed, examined and photographed has recovered more dignity than he had to start with. This monster was hung in smug martyrdom while those who created him bask in the smug glow of victors’ justice.