Letters to the Editor

Saddam: The death of a dictator Through the bumbling of the U.S.-backed regime, justice becomes revenge, and a despot becomes a martyr. By Juan Cole [2006-12-30]

• This isn't American Justice

  Most of the posters here are discussing how this fits (or mainly doesn't fit) with our conceptions of American justice. But this isn't about the American people. I suspect Saddam's death at this point is little more than a footnote to this unhappy episode in most Americans' mind. It's about the Iraqi people.

  To be sure, the USG is happy that Saddam is gone now; and the logistics of the trial and execution were largely orchestrated by the US since the Iraqis don't have the wherewithal to do it themselves. But this trial and execution was never about the US seeking "revenge;" many senior American officials hoped Saddam would just die from his multiple ailments shortly after his capture to avoid this whole mess. It's about Iraq, and the nightmare that millions of Iraqis went through during Saddam's brutal two-decade reign.

  It's easy for the left in the States, caught up in criticism of and loathing for the Bush Administration and it's failed adventure, to forget that missing WMD notwithstanding, Saddam Hussein was a monster. He killed people on a mass scale. The crimes of Latin American strongmen like Pinochet, for example, pale in comparison. He created and ruled over a system that destroyed the lives of countless Shia and Kurd Iraqis, and many Sunnis too. The US didn't have to force or cajole the shaky new Iraqi regime and its imperfect, nascent judicial system into trying Saddam. If anything, US influence was used to exercise a measure of constraint so that he was not tortured and then strung up in a public square for the cathartic edification of the Iraqi people.

  The US will still have to deal with the pereception that this was an American-driven process culminating with a kangaroo court and execution; witness the responses on this page. It will be even worse in some quarters in the Middle-east, where it really matters. But as soon as Saddam was captured, he was a dead man, and not because of the US; it was because of the Iraqi people, and the demand from a strong majority of Iraqis from all backgrounds that some sort of justice--belated and imperfect as it may be--be meted out to their oppressor. In the end, we were just observers to this final, shabby, and inevitable act.

  -- David Schlaefer
  Permalink Flag Saturday, December 30, 2006 12:50 AM
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