Saddam goes on trial

From a leader in today's Times:

It is a case of enormous importance - for justice, for the countries that were victims of the Iraqi dictator's aggression, such as Kuwait, and above all for ordinary Iraqis. A country that lost hundreds of thousands of its people to torturers and murderers will be given the chilling judicial details of the events during the 35 years since the Baath party seized power. Without such a trial, there can be no reconciliation, no political emergence from Saddam's malign shadow and no justice for the victims in Iraq and in Iran.

Inevitably, the trial of Saddam will focus on Iraq. The crimes he perpetrated were directed largely against his own people. The society he attempted to destroy and the values that he violated were those of his own country and culture. Attempting to internationalise the proceedings would seem an unwelcome foreign intervention to many Iraqis. Baghdad does not need the shrill grandstanding of Western celebrity lawyers or the bureaucratic indulgences that have effectively paralysed the trial of Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague for the past two years.

Still less does it need the patronising assertion that no fair hearing is possible because the Iraqi judiciary has been too corrupted by the previous regime or lacks the relevant experience.

For my own part, I'd want to say that had Saddam been tried before an international tribunal I wouldn't have seen any problem with that. But the idea that an Iraqi court is not a proper place for him to be tried is bizarre as well as insulting. Given the gravity of the crimes for which he is being tried, given their character as crimes against humanity, they can be tried under any jurisdiction - so the most relevant one would seem quite fitting

For another view - that the trial is 'illegal' - see here.

And then there's this:

The US launched military aggression against Iraq under several pretexts, occupied it and ousted its legal leadership by force...

The US then admittted none of the pretexts used, such as weapons of mass destruction, actually existed.

I advise the American people to pressure their president into withdrawing their troops and to restore the legal leadership.

Aggression - check. Pretext - check. No WMD - check. Questioning the legality - check. Something from the Guardian's comments or editorial pages, then? Actually, no. It's from The Sunday Times of October 16 (but not available online), and it purports to be a comment passed to the paper from the old butcher himself, via Khalil al-Dulaimi, his lawyer. There's a nuance that gives this away, in that he speaks of himself as 'the legal leadership'; and Guardianista, 'illegal-war' types tend not to do that - though it isn't clear why they don't.