Saddam Hussein is Executed, North Korea Tests Its First Nuclear Weapon, Democrats Win Back the US Congress and the Iraq Study Group Demands a Change of Course

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 January 2007 | Reporting Period: 3 October – 2 January 2007

Quarterly Briefing

• North Korea conducts its first nuclear weapons test on October 9, detonating a device with a yield estimated at less than one kiloton in Kilju County; the UN Security Council passes Resolution 1718 imposing sanctions; the test ends all ambiguity about North Korea’s nuclear status and triggers an urgent review of non-proliferation strategy by the United States, Japan and South Korea.
• Democrats win control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate in the November 7 midterm elections, ending twelve years of Republican Congressional dominance; the election is widely interpreted as a referendum on the Iraq War; Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the war’s principal architect, resigns the day after the vote and is replaced by Robert Gates.
• The Iraq Study Group — a bipartisan commission co-chaired by James Baker and Lee Hamilton — reports on December 6 that the situation in Iraq is “serious and deteriorating”; it recommends a phased withdrawal of US combat troops by early 2008 and direct diplomatic engagement with Iran and Syria; President Bush receives the report publicly and privately signals he will reject its main recommendations.
• Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi president convicted of crimes against humanity for the Dujail massacre of 1982, is executed by hanging in Baghdad on December 30; the execution, conducted hastily and chaotically, is filmed on a mobile phone; the footage of his taunting by Shia guards and his dignified final moments circulates globally and becomes a propaganda gift to his Sunni sympathisers.
• Iraq’s sectarian violence continues at catastrophic levels through the quarter; the bombing of Sadr City in November kills over 200 people; estimates of civilian deaths for 2006 as a whole approach 35,000; the Iraqi government lacks the security forces, the political will or the administrative capacity to halt the killing.
• The Lebanon-Israel ceasefire of August 14 is holding but fragile; UNIFIL’s expanded force is deploying; Hezbollah is rebuilding its military infrastructure in southern Lebanon; the Lebanese government, weakened by the war and divided between pro- and anti-Syrian factions, faces a political crisis that may bring down Prime Minister Siniora.

Prologue: The Year That Changed the War

The last quarter of 2006 brought a political reckoning with the Iraq War that its proponents had long deferred. The Democrats’ midterm victory was the electorate’s verdict on four years of an occupation that had produced neither the democracy it promised nor the stability it required; Rumsfeld’s same-day resignation was the administration’s acknowledgement that a change of face, at least, was politically necessary. The Iraq Study Group report’s language was the most direct official assessment of the war’s failure that had yet been published: “serious and deteriorating” was a description that brooked no optimistic gloss. And Saddam’s execution on December 30 — rushed, chaotic and filmed — managed to extract from a moment of undoubted legal justice the maximum possible political cost, confirming to many Sunni Iraqis that the new order was indistinguishable from sectarian retribution. For the Caribbean, the year’s end was a moment to assess four years of a war that had dominated American foreign policy and distorted the international community’s capacity to engage with other crises.

North Korea’s Nuclear Test and Non-Proliferation’s Crisis

North Korea’s nuclear test was the culmination of a trajectory that the Bush administration’s policy of refusing direct negotiations had failed to prevent. The collapse of the 1994 Agreed Framework in 2002, the withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003 and the reprocessing of spent plutonium fuel had all been announced steps; the October 9 test was their logical conclusion. The yield was small — consistent with a partially successful first test rather than a deployed weapon — but the precedent was enormous. A second country, after India and Pakistan in 1998, had crossed the nuclear threshold outside the international community’s control.

For the Caribbean, the North Korean test mattered primarily as an indicator of the non-proliferation regime’s fragility. The regime’s credibility depended on the belief that nuclear weapons acquisition would be met with effective international response; North Korea’s test demonstrated that this belief was not well-founded. If North Korea could test a weapon and survive, the signal to Iran — watching closely — was that the costs of nuclear ambition were manageable. The broader stability that the nuclear non-proliferation system was designed to maintain was the bedrock of the international order on which small states depended; its erosion was a Caribbean concern even if the weapons pointed in entirely different directions.

Saddam’s Execution and Its Aftermath

The timing of Saddam’s execution — on the first day of the Muslim feast of Eid al-Adha — was widely regarded as a deliberate humiliation by a Shia-dominated government whose senior officials had waited decades for this moment. The mobile phone footage, taken inside the execution chamber against all regulations, showed guards chanting the name of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia militia leader, while Saddam maintained his composure. The footage circulated globally within hours. Whatever the legal verdict on Saddam’s crimes — and the crimes themselves were not in serious dispute — the manner of his killing confirmed that Iraq’s new government was operating according to sectarian logic, not the rule-of-law principles whose establishment was the war’s stated justification.

Looking Ahead

President Bush, who is understood to be preparing a new Iraq strategy to be announced in January, faces a Congress whose new Democratic majority is committed to forcing a withdrawal; the constitutional confrontation between executive war-making authority and Congressional control of funding will define 2007’s American politics. North Korea’s post-test diplomacy will determine whether the Six-Party Talks framework can be revived; the February 2007 meeting already scheduled in Beijing will be a crucial test. Lebanon’s political crisis — with Hezbollah demanding more cabinet seats and threatening to bring down the government — may produce a confrontation that reignites the country’s always-latent civil tensions. And Venezuela’s President Chávez, re-elected in December for a further six-year term, has announced intentions to accelerate his “Bolivarian socialist” revolution, with implications for Caribbean states whose relationships with Caracas are simultaneously economic and ideological.

---

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

Follow Jamaica Homes on Youtube @jamaicahomes and Instagram @jamaica_homes and on Facebook @jamaicahomesnews Send us a message or email us at onlinefeedback@jamaica-homes.com or editor@jamaica-homes.com