Iran's supreme leader said Tuesday that all Iranians were "pleased" at the arrest of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, but said U.S. President George W. Bush and Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon should also go.

"The Iranian nation is very pleased with his [Saddam's]arrest," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech in the city of Qazvin carried live on state television.

He described the ousted Iraqi leader as a "wild animal", a "corrupt being" and a "bloodthirsty wolf", sparking chants from the crowd of "Death to Saddam", "Death to Israel" and "Death to America".

However, the leader also blamed Saddam's captors of hypocrisy, citing their support of Iraq during its1980 - 88war against the Islamic republic of Iran that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iranians.

"The same Americans who are now happy over his arrest were at the time shaking his hand. The current U.S. defence minister [Donald Rumsfeld] met with Saddam in Baghdad, promised to help him and helped him in order to put Islamic Iran under pressure," Khamenei declared.

"I heard the U.S. president told Saddam that 'the world is a better place without you'. I want to tell the U.S. president that he should know the world would be an even better place without Bush and Sharon," Khamenei said.

That notion was also expressed by former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, currently the head of Iran's top political arbitration body.

"Saddam did not have anything except wickedness for the people of Iraq and his neighbors and the destiny of America and Israel will be the same," he was quoted as saying by ISNA news agency.

"This is the promise of Allah: if the people do not follow the path of serving the people and instead follow the path of corruption, they will face no other destiny except humiliation," Rafsanjani added. (Albawaba.com)

As well he should.

If he weren't a repressive dictator hellbent on keeping his country mired in a 14th century theocracy, exporting terror, and desperately working on nuclear weapons with which to wipe Israel off the map, he wouldn't have anything to worry about.

An international trial should be held to determine how much of the vast damage and how many of the enormous number of Iranian casualties in the Iran-Iraq war can be directly attributed to aid given to Saddam Hussein by the US Government and to US pressure upon him to launch the invasion in the first place and to keep at it after years of bloody, World War I style stalemate. Obviously, Iran and the Iranian families of people killed in this war are owed astronomical damages by the US, and those damages should be payed by the US Government and by the various US corporations that made huge profits off this human catastrophe.

As a side note, the Iran-Iraq war is and indication of the cynicism and dishonesty of both Bush administrations in claiming that Iraq was a mighty powerhose posing a direct threat to the rest of the MIdeast and even to the United States. Iran, after the US stopped military aid in the wake of the Revolution, had antiquated military equipment, a decapitated officer corps, a dearth of spare parts, and pilots who were no longer able to take advantage of training facilities in the United States - yet it still managed to fight Iraq to a standstill and even to invade Iraqi territory in the course of the war. Yet the Bush buffoons still believed that iraq was a mighty power ready to take on the world? Come off it; even Bush 2 isn't that stupid. What they did believe was that Iraq was disturbingly independent of the US in its attitudes about oil and about Israel, and also that it was a potential source of many trained foot soldiers in any large confrontation between Israel and the Arab world. That is why Saddam Hussein had to go - forget the wmds, the allegedly horrified reaction of people like Cheney, Powell, and Rumsfeld when they learned that Saddam Hussein was executing communists, or Saddam Hussein's supposed (and apparantly suicidal) enthusiasm for Bin Laden, despite the awkward fact that the latter had Hussein on his execution list of godless secularists.

I'll support reparations to Iran when you advocate reparations to the families (those that weren't entirely wiped out, that is) of the estimated 100 million people killed by your murderous Marxist deathocracies.

I don't think I'm going to have to change my mind on the issue.