| James N. Markels | ||||
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by
James N. Markels We’ve
got him! Now, what are we
going to do with him? That
seems to be the problem these days, as the euphoria of capturing Saddam
Hussein and dealing a serious, if not fatal, blow to the Iraqi
resistance gives way to the practical question of where to go from here.
While it is good for Iraqis to see their former tormentor reduced
to a disheveled bum, and there may be great value in the information he
may yet disclose during interrogation, now that he’s been captured
alive we can’t just kill him. Because that’s what Saddam would do. The whole point now is to prove that we’re not like
him, and that means a trial—a trial before we kill him. Yes,
let’s be honest about this: Whatever trial is given to Saddam, it will
just be a formality. No
matter how fair the trial is, there’s no way he’s getting past the
voluminous evidence of his atrocities against fellow Iraqis.
As much as Justice Robert Jackson was correct in saying, prior to
the trials at Nüremburg, that “[t]he world yields no respect to
courts that are merely organized to convict,” this is a case where the
world would have no respect for a court that could let this oppressor
get away. The only real
question is, which court gets the honor? We
could go the Nüremburg route, whereby the leaders of a deposed regime
are tried for war crimes by the conquering powers—in this case, the
United States. While the U.S. has one of the fairest judicial systems in the
world, there would be a feeling that no American could judge Saddam
fairly, regardless of the evidence.
Worse, the trial would also give Saddam a chance to speak out
against us on our own turf where he could more easily galvanize
anti-American sentiment that already believes America to be an
insufferable bully or Zionist stooge. Besides, in Nüremburg the victors were themselves
the aggrieved parties, putting unrepentant Nazis on trial to pay for
violating the peace. Aside
from Kuwait and Iran, Saddam’s crimes were mostly against his own
people. We invaded not because he had committed crimes against us,
but because he would inevitably help terrorists who would commit crimes
in the future. We don’t
have a grievance to grind, just a relief that the world is a bit safer. Putting
Saddam before the International Criminal Court is another option, but it
too has its flaws. For one,
why give the ICC a respectability that it doesn’t deserve?
The United States has been smart enough to not sign on to its
charter because of its lack of due process procedures and questionable
jurisdiction, so why trust it to handle the tyrants we’ve gone through
the effort of apprehending? But
more important, there is something inherently odd about prosecuting
Saddam for “crimes against humanity,” as the ICC would do—it
presupposes that humanity, as some amorphous mass, has rights that we as
individuals do not have. One would think that with any true tyrant, the evidence of
them ordering or being complicit in the murder or oppression of their
own people would be enough to convict, but no!
It’s humanity itself that the ICC defends.
But when the ICC only requires that some governmental body
oppress a single person for a crime against all humanity to lie, it
becomes clear that the ICC’s core concern is giving itself some
important-sounding work to do. There’s
no need to inflate the magnitude of Saddam’s crimes, and there’s no
reason to countenance the fuzzy notion of “group rights” in the
process. So
barring Nüremburg and the ICC, we could let the Iraqis themselves
handle Saddam’s trial. Much
has been made in the media about the shambles that Iraq’s judicial
system has been left in after decades of abuse, and I will assume that
most of it is true. It
would be ridiculous to expect the rule of law to sprout suddenly from a
people so long neglected under the rule of one man. But the Iraqi people have the best claim to deserving
satisfaction from Saddam’s trial, and they are the ones who need this
chapter of their history settled. Saddam
should be held accountable to the people he terrorized for so many
decades, and he will not be able to claim that he has been the victim of
U.S. internationalism when it is his own former subjects who are in
control of the proceedings. A
U.S. court and the ICC would leave the Iraqis on the sidelines, yet
again denied control of their own future.
Don’t they deserve the chance to start their new path by
convicting the old one? It
seems to me that letting the Iraqis handle Saddam is ultimately the best
option, although it would be best to wait until their judiciary is able
to handle it. Until that time comes, let him cool his heels in jail while
we savor our early Christmas present.
There’s no rush—although every day he is alive in Iraq is a
chance that his followers succeed in breaking him out and revitalizing
the resistance. And if the
Democrats are smart, they’ll be all for postponing Saddam’s trial.
After all, not much could be worse for them in Election 2004 than
to have daily coverage of prosecutors reciting the litany of abuses and
terrors Saddam inflicted upon his nation, while implicitly putting
Democratic foreign policy on trial at the same time. |
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