Sun, 14 Dec 2003
Saddam captured ...
... in Tikrit. And they're going to put him on trial.
While shedding no tears for the beast of Baghdad -- who
climbed to the top of the Ba'ath party of Iraq over a pile of
corpses, by way of the secret police -- I can't help wondering
whether this is a good thing for the west. I suspect his being at
liberty may have been a restraining factor on the various Iraqi
factions jockeying for power -- and taking pot-shots at the
occupiers. Now he's out of the way, the spectre of a revived
Ba'athist dictatorship has lifted from the followers of
al-Sadr and the various other Shi'ite factions and the
communists and the nationalists and the just plain pissed-off
that their country has been invaded. The factions who suffered
under Saddam no longer have to worry about that stuff: we may
just have released the brakes on the armed resistance.
Moreover, if Saddam is smart enough (and I hope he isn't) and
the military authorities stupid enough (and after Gantanemo
Bay I fear that they are), he
may use a trial as an opportunity to wrap himself in the flag
of Iraqi nationalism and turn himself into a martyr
to the anti-American cause.
Saying "ding dong, the wicked witch is in custody" is a
dangerously naive reaction to this kind of news. By way of a
thought experiment, I suspect a good metaphor is this: imagine
it's November 1945, and Adolf Hitler has been dug out of a
cellar, alive, in the US occupied sector of Germany, where
he has been coordinating sporadic resistance attacks.
He goes on trial at Nuremburg and is in due course
sentenced to hang. What, sixty years later, would his
historical record have been like? And more importantly,
what, twenty years later, might the German people have made of
a leader who put up a spirited defense in a kangaroo court,
rather than taking the coward's way out of the consequences of
his actions by shooting himself?
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posted at: 11:59 | path: /wartime | permanent link to this entry
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