And it would certainly have required avoiding the unseemly spectacle of death by hanging, projecting an ugly imagery around the world that will satisfy some unhealthy appetites for vengeance, but will also ensure that this terrible political figure will be revered as a martyr by many Muslims around the world. It is likely that the adjourned separate trial on the allegations concerning the Kurds will be continued, but without the presence of Saddam Hussein as the principal defendant, it will be Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark!
As the Nuremberg trial of surviving German leaders after World War II made clear, the main achievement of such criminal prosecutions is not punishment of the now disempowered leaders, but political education by way of compiling evidence of the terrible wrongdoing of those accused and showing that the contrasting way of the victors is one of fairness and due process.
Again, we need to ask why was this truncated and dysfunctional approach used, leading to the execution of the main culprit before the worst crimes of his regime were even considered. The only credible explanation is that such an approach conformed to the needs of the occupying power. Iraq was a strategic ally of the United States in the s, the decade in which the worst excesses of Baathist rule took place, including the persecution and execution of religious leaders. It was the United States that supplied many of the components of the chemical weapons used against the Kurds, and then relied on its diplomatic influence to shield Baghdad from censure in the aftermath of these shocking events.
And later it was the United States in that authorized the bloody crackdown of the Kurds in the North and the marsh Arabs in the South. Even aside from these considerations, it was never appropriate to rush the process. To move from prosecution to execution so quickly in a major political trial of this sort is unprecedented.
To organize such a trial process while the country is enmeshed in civil strife and a war of resistance is further delegitimizing. And if this is not enough, Saddam Hussein was removed from power and captured by an invading power that was guilty of waging a war in flagrant violation of the United Nations Charter, as well as in opposition to world public opinion. Rather than provide a milestone for the rule of law and Iraqi democracy, the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein raises high the banner of vindictive justice that obscures the very criminality that is supposedly being punished.
It shifts anger from the accused to the accuser, and incredibly cedes the high moral ground to the criminal voice of Saddam Hussein. If one believes judicial killing is wrong, then how is it possible to make exceptions? What price Ian Huntley's neck if especially horrible crimes justify temporary suspension of principled objections to execution?
About now, somebody from Downing Street will murmur: "Come on, get real. The White House is determined that Saddam will take the jump anyway, so where's the sense in Tony being seen to break ranks on something he can't stop? It looks shakier by the day.
Yet Blair would also privately justify his behaviour on the usual basis, that a satisfying proportion of Labour focus groups are untroubled about Saddam's fate. Why should he not hang? It may be crass of a US president publicly to prejudge the outcome of judicial proceedings, but nobody is likely to face the wrath of Sue, Grabbit and Runne for declaring Saddam to be one of the most unpleasant dictators of the past generation - a mass murderer whose crimes place him in the same historical category as Mao or Stalin, albeit with fewer foolish western sympathisers.
We can agree, perhaps, that Saddam Hussein does not deserve to live. It is a pity that he made no show of resistance when American soldiers found him, to justify tossing a grenade into his spider hole. But he did not fight, and was captured alive. Next year, some sort of tribunal will find him guilty of unspeakable crimes. Thereafter it will be inconvenient and expensive to guard him through a long captivity.
Yet those of us who reject judicial killing can support no sentence other than life imprisonment. The coalition's avowed purpose in Iraq is to change the political culture of centuries, above all the region's conviction that problems are capable of solution only by administering violent death.
Already, the Americans' tactical conduct of anti-guerrilla operations compromises this objective, by showing how little the US army esteems the lives of innocent Iraqis. Every British soldier deemed responsible for unjustifiably causing death by his own actions on opera tional duty faces at least disciplinary charges, and not infrequently criminal prosecution.
American soldiers, by contrast, are granted a wide-ranging dispensation for silly mistakes when they get their licences to kill.
A friend in the counter-insurgency business recently met some spooky friends in Washington whose organisation was responsible for the Predator strike in which a guided missile killed a group of innocent Afghans, in the mistaken belief that they were Osama bin Laden. They looked blank. Nobody does, of course. The neo-cons in Washington deserve credit for getting one big thing right. For too long, Europeans have acquiesced in the view that democracy is a luxury beyond the means of most second and third world countries.
Paul Wolfowitz and his friends are surely correct, that only democracy can offer hopes of building societies that behave towards one another with decency and moderation, whatever the evidence to the contrary in the performance of Ariel Sharon. The neo-cons fatally compromise their purpose, however, by placing their faith in force to impose democracy.
Even those of us who were deeply sceptical about US intervention in Iraq should acknowledge that the country is better without Saddam. But US policy since the war ended has emphasised firepower and cash, rather than hearts and minds. In the old days in Vietnam, I believed that the Americans would achieve nothing until they committed soldiers who liked and respected the place and the people, rather than loathing and despising them.
So it seems again in Iraq. Now, they want to execute Saddam. My wife, whose liberal instincts are normally much more reliable than mine, is bemused by my scruples. She believes the case is unanswerable for the dictator's cheap, permanent removal.
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