Saddam Hussein Hanged for Crimes against Humanity

Saturday in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikrit, the former dictator of Iraq, was hanged for crimes against humanity. While there is no reason to shed a tear, and indeed opening a bottle of Veuve Clicquot is more appropriate, the way the new government in Iraq played out his execution illustrated the general pointlessness of trying him. A summary execution would have served the same purposes with less nonsense.

The argument in favor of the show-trial was one of justice. The Iraqi people would fairly and openly confront the monster with his crimes and, after due deliberation, he would be punished. The new Green Zone government would prove its moral superiority by allowing him a defense (which his victims never had) and by following both the rule of law and the norms of human rights. This argument leaked like a sieve.

The decision to hang him came before he was ever captured, and such a trial, held in a country whose people were collectively abused by Saddam Hussein, could never have an impartial jury or judges. Some of his lawyers were murdered in the course of the trial, and the crimes for which he was executed, the murder of 148 people in Dujail in 1982, was not the greatest of his sins.

He should have faced charges of instigating two wars of aggression (one against Iran and another against Kuwait) and also for the use of poison gas against the people of Halabja in 1988. Indeed, a second trial will now have to reconvene on January 8 without a key defendant. Justice is poorly served when the course of a trial is changed because of the execution of a defendant on other charges occurs.

The process has merely served to take a political and military execution and provide it a legal veneer, and an entirely unnecessary one at that.. Those who feared making a martyr of him still have their unfounded fears realized (Iraq has much more to fear from Moqtada al-Sadr alive than Saddam Hussein dead). Those who wanted justice for Iraq were denied the trials for his many other crimes. Those who hoped to protect human rights were patsies of the Green Zone government that determined to kill him before he was arrested. Those who wanted him dead had to wait three years too long. Had he been shot on December 13, 2003 when he was captured, absolutely nothing would have been lost, and an additional three years of nonsense could have been avoided. Meanwhile, America lost its 3,000th warrior in Iraq a few hours ago, and no one knows how many Iraqis have died since the fall of the Saddamite regime. The violence continues.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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