The execution of Saddam Hussein was a travesty of justice. Not because he didn’t deserve to hang, but because he should have been hung for his genocide against the Kurds – a genocide that the United States silently condoned. The United States has only acknowledged Iraq’s Kurdish tragedy when it has become politically expedient. Both Bush administrations have used Hussein’s atrocities against the Kurds as justification for their respective Gulf Wars while ignoring American complicity in these crimes.

American public knowledge of Hussein’s genocidal campaign is limited to the Bush media highlights, like the chemical attack on Halabja in 1988, which killed 5,000 Kurds and wounded 7,000. But, Halabja was just one incident amongst many.

Hussein’s oppression of the Kurds reached fever pitch during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, during which he was funded with arms and money by the Reagan administration. During the war, revolutionary Kurdish groups openly sided with Iran, and, in retaliation, Hussein ordered the Anfal campaign to solve the Kurdish “problem.”

The Anfal campaign was conducted with subhuman brutality. Kurdish villages were bombarded with conventional and chemical weapons (including sarin and mustard gas) that, in some cases, were delivered by U.S.-supplied helicopters. Then Iraqi troops surrounded the villages, shipped survivors to concentration camps and razed the villages to the ground.

According to Human Rights Watch, the Kurds were separated by gender and age upon arrival at the camps. Men judged to be of fighting age (between 15 and 50) were taken into the desert and summarily executed.

The bodies of those executed – including women and children from areas that had sheltered resistance fighters – were then dumped in pre-prepared mass graves, many of which have only been unearthed following the fall of Hussein’s regime in 2003.

According to Frontline, 90 percent of Kurdish villages in the area targeted by the Anfal campaign were wiped out, and as many as 182,000 Kurds were killed. The countryside was then sown with landmines to make resettlement impossible.

The Reagan administration did nothing to rein their pet tyrant in; they didn’t even scold him. The Great Communicator forgot how to speak. The American representative in the U.N. Security Council even vetoed efforts to condemn Iraq for the use of weapons of mass destruction against the Kurds.

In an unusual show of concern, the Senate unanimously passed the “Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988,” which was intended to cut off all U.S. aid to Iraq including U.S. importation of Iraqi oil. The Reagan administration dutifully protected Hussein and blocked the act.

The Anfal campaign enabled Hussein’s regime to claim the dubious distinction of being the first country in history to use chemical weapons against its own people and the first regime since the Third Reich to use poison gas against women and children. And, America’s sixth favorite president helped it happen.

Hussein made Augusto Pinochet look like a Sesame Street character. The Reagan administration unquestionably supplied money and weapons to this lunatic for his war with Iran and by extension his genocidal oppression of the Kurds. It is unconscionable that an American government supported, let alone armed, such a man.

Saddam Hussein deserved to hang for what he did to his people and especially for what he did to the Kurdish minority; the question is, what do those American policymakers who colluded with him deserve?