Home » Don’t cry for Saddam and his “show trial”

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Don’t cry for Saddam and his “show trial” — 18 Comments

  1. I remember one anecdote from Svetlana Stalina memoirs: when she were a teenager, her father said to her. “You think you are Stalina? No. And I am not Stalin either. That is Stalin! – and showed her his portrait on the wall.

    Dictators of this kind are not just persons in flesh and blood; they are idols, and even their portraits have magic powers over their subjects. And to cast down an idol it is not enough just strip it of physical power, you must also desecrate it. Mark Steyn has good point about it:
    http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Sat…e? cid=116746764

  2. I haven’t heard much about Saddam’s execution being a “show trial”, however I have seen some criticism — and I believe it justified — concerning the way the execution was carried out (I assume everyone has watched the cellphone video, by now.) It was just a bad scene, but, more important, not likely to promote reconciliation. We’ll see.

  3. Furthermore, the hanging was definitely a show. I don’t see how anyone can watch it and consider it other than a Shi’ite lynching: and in honor of MOQTADA, who has American blood on his hands from the Spring of 2004, and who now commands probably the largest army in Iraq, next to ours. All in the name of fundamentalist theocracy. Frankly, it would have been better if we had hanged him.

  4. Congratulations from Spain. I have read some of your articles and I can only say that I am also a neo-neocom. Now you are into my favourites.

  5. I wonder how many of those who condemn Saddam’s trial also lament the fact that Pinochet escaped justice. Not a few, I suspect.

  6. International law needs some new genius on the order of Hugo Grotius to devise a legal framework for dealing with people like Saddam — not to mention Hitler, had he been caught alive. You can’t just kill ’em out of hand, since that’s just the kind of thing they’d do, and you want to be better. But giving them a trial with all the procedural protections of an “ordinary” defendant is just as bad. As you say, there can be no real presumption of innocence.

    Nor do we want a system (which unfortunately seems to be developing) in which any leader’s political opponents can go jurisdiction-shopping until they find someone willing to try them for “war crimes” or some such — as happened with Pinochet.

    We need a clear and realistic definition of criminal leadership. Something which covers the Hitlers (legally elected!) but doesn’t destroy the principle of sovereign immunity.

    Along with that we need a system for dealing with such monsters, so that they don’t go off to serene retirement. You want to hold out that chance, though, so that minor-league monsters won’t always fight to the death because there’s no alternative. I’d happily see Kim Jong Il pensioned off to spend his days in a Bangkok hotel working his way through the local prostitute supply if it means his people can stop eating bark.

    Unfortunately we seem to be moving toward the worst of both worlds — the civilized states are too civilized to get their hands dirty, so it’s left to brutes and thugs to deal with brutes and thugs. Which means that eventually there is nothing left but brutes and thugs because the civilized people have ceded them all power.

  7. Epitaph on a Tyrant

    Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
    And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
    He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
    And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
    When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
    And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

    –WH Auden

  8. neo: However, if the Left ever gets its chance to try Bush and Rumsfeld for war crimes,

    Having a “show trial” of a real tyrant is one thing — using political power to bend the justice system so as to attack one’s political enemies is quite another. I think if the left were ever in a position to indulge its vicious fantasies in this way, then that would simply mark the end of justice and legitimacy in the true sense, and the beginning of a reign of brute power — i.e., we would be effectively in a new civil war.

  9. “reconciliation” *snickers*

    Executions are to get rid of people, not to reconcile anything. Reconciliations are for the living, not the dead.

  10. Just another example of the propaganda apparatus of the Left, Neo. It’s been going full steam ever since the Republicans dared try to help the meek and weak.

    The Chalice of Righteousness rightfully belongs to the Left, you know.

  11. Steve, you never advocated in 2005, to kill Moqtada or any other harsh method used by the United States. Stop posturing as if you could have seen the future back a year or 2 ago.

  12. Real “show trials” can be conducted only in specific environment of totalitarian state, as Moscow trials of 1937. The most important part of them was not court proceedings per se, but their media coverage and organized campaign of meetings at all major factories, with mandatory participation of all workers, resolutions of these meetings and so on.

  13. All trials are “for public consumption”. People are only willing to forego private vengeance in favour of impartial justice if they are confident that offenders will be held to account, so the rule of law can only be maintained if justice is seen to be done as well as actually being done.

    In the case of dictators, a public trial is particularly important in order to destroy the mythological figure the tyrant has made of himself. The image of the superhuman leader is replaced with the image of a very ordinary-looking man, standing powerless in the dock like any common criminal.

    Trimegistus – the concepts of “criminal leadership” and “sovereign immunity” are mutually exclusive. If a leader can be prosecuted for his actions by some international court he no longer has sovereign immunity.

    In any case, there are so many despotic regimes in the world that it would be impossible to get international agreement on any definition of “criminal leadership” unless it was too narrow to be useful and/or impossible to enforce.

    At most you could get some nations to recognise the concept to varying degrees, inevitably resulting in “jurisdiction-shopping” and cynical attempts by political partisans to prosecute their opponents.

  14. The best summation of this trial gave Mark Steyn:
    “There can never be “justice” for murderous dictators – there’s simply too much blood. But there can be retribution, and a final line drawn under a dark chapter of history as he’s shovelled into his grave.”

  15. “The purpose? To show the superiority of court justice to the random murders the person in question has perpetrated.”

    Perfect. Such trials are in some sense as much an enactment as a judicial proceeding, but they are an enactment of the values the society hopes to have. At a superficial level, there is no difference between a show trial and an attempt to fit political crimes into some sort of identifiable structure. The difference is ultimately one of attitude and humility. The show trial must be defended as “real” in all accidentals. With this trial, there was universal understanding that this was an attempt to get as close to justice as possible.

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