Saddam sentenced to death
While serving in Iraq in 2004 I asked several Iraqis about Saddam’s trial and its outcome. “Several” in this case was seven or eight — the subjects I most often discussed with Iraqis were elections, government formation, and families (as in, “do you have children?”, etc.). But every one of the half-dozen plus Iraqis “anecdotally polled” on Saddam’s trial said more or less this: He’ll be convicted and killed. One Iraqi (who worked as a translator and was very fluent) added that (and I’m paraphrasing) “We Iraqis should try him and not the UN. The UN would never reach a conviction. Besides, he committed his crimes against us.” By UN I believe the fellow meant the international court in the Hague.
I was at Camp Victory the day Saddam was arraigned. I was walking across the bridge to Al Faw Palace when suddenly a flock of helicopters begin to circle, including a CH-47 Chinook. I wondered if the CENTCOM commander was arriving or a political bigwig. I went on about my business. Turns out the chief visitor was a political has-been, Saddam. He was arraigned then flown back to his prison. (I learned this later in the day from one of the JAG officers.)
Today Saddam was convicted of mass murder and sentenced to death. The tyrant got a fair trial — a trial too fair in some respects, given his antics and theatrics. But antics and theatrics (designed to play to sensationalist media) and murder of judges and lawyers (traditional dictator and mob boss methods) were his best ploys, given the evidence he confronted.
The AP (extended excerpt):
Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced Sunday to hang for crimes against humanity in the 1982 killings of 148 people in a single Shiite town, as the ousted leader, trembling and defiant, shouted “God is great!”
As he, his half brother and another senior official in his regime were convicted and sentenced to death by the Iraqi High Tribunal, Saddam yelled out, “Long live the people and death to their enemies. Long live the glorious nation, and death to its enemies!” Later, his lawyer said the former dictator had called on Iraqis to reject sectarian violence and refrain from revenge against U.S. forces.
The trial brought Saddam and his co-defendants before their accusers in what was one of the most highly publicized and heavily reported trials of its kind since the Nuremberg tribunals for members of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and its slaughter of 6 million Jews in the World War II Holocaust
“The verdict placed on the heads of the former regime does not represent a verdict for any one person. It is a verdict on a whole dark era that has was unmatched in Iraq’s history,” Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shiite prime minister, said.
Read the entire AP bulletin.
PM Maliki makes the key point: “unmatched in Iraq’s history.” That can be extended a bit to read ”unmatched in Mesopotamia’s history.”
Is this a November surprise for the US election? I doubt it, because sensationalist media focus on the immediate moment, not historical context. I bet we’ll hear a few talking heads sob about “Saddam as victim” and “victors’ vengeance”, etc. We’ll get a “personality story” spin (ie, Saddam as a single person, a man convicted to death, and capital punishment, is it right?). We’ll get a “western judicial imperalism story” spin (even though the Iraqis ran the trial).
But this grand story is about belated justice, a justice once thought impossible to reach by the real victims, the Iraqi people. It’s also about the slow, difficult birth of a democratic society in a region caught in the terrible yin-yang of tyrants and terrorists — a nation moving from the whim of the Big Man and the fear of terrorist bombs to the rule of law and democratic polity.
I know, the NY Times and John Kerry have told us Iraq is a disaster. No. The US has already gotten about 90 percent of what it needed on September 12, 2001. There’s a democratically elected government in the potentially most powerful (predominantly) Arab Muslim nation, a government trying to learn to crawl under the most trying conditions. It’s a government that is learning by doing — and learning often by failure. However, as long as the US and coalition remain around to coach, train, and respond to crisis, Iraqi failures will be controlled failures.
Yup. Fostering the development of choice in the Middle East — a choice other than tyranny or terror– is a tough process.
But will we get that story? I doubt it.
Still, congratulations to the people of Iraq.
Excellent piece. The removal, trial and execution of Saddam will echo for tyrants in the middle east through the decades, when other momentary aspects of the situation are long forgotten.
Comment by MIke G — 11/5/2006 @ 8:39 am
SADDAM TO HANG… Saddam Hussein and Two Senior Officials Sentenced to Death by Hanging — Liveblog coverage SPECIAL FEATURE — The Day of Justice: Pajamas Media Baghdad editors Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, of Iraq The Model, write their first impressions after Saddam Huss…
Trackback by Pajamas Media — 11/5/2006 @ 8:47 am
excellent work! http://www.anamericanconservative.blogspot.com
Comment by an american conservative — 11/5/2006 @ 8:50 am
Fostering the development of choice in the Middle East To the American media, academia, and other elements of the political Left, the word “choice” is an exclusive synonym for “abortion.”
Comment by Robert R. — 11/5/2006 @ 9:09 am
[…] Austin Bay on the Saddam death verdict: I know, the NY Times and John Kerry have told us Iraq is a disaster. No. The US has already gotten about 90 percent of what it needed on September 12, 2001. There’s a democratically elected government in the potentially most powerful (predominantly) Arab Muslim nation, a government trying to learn to crawl under the most trying conditions. It’s a government that is learning by doing — and learning often by failure. However, as long as the US and coalition remain around to coach, train, and respond to crisis, Iraqi failures will be controlled failures. […]
Pingback by Dinocrat » Blog Archive » “Long live the glorious nation, and death to its enemies!†— 11/5/2006 @ 10:07 am
This is splendid news. The best thing the Iraqis can do now is to carry out the sentence as quickly as possible. Of course, we can expect the Times to do a Sunday magazine “human interest” story on this monster.
Comment by Rich DiNardo — 11/5/2006 @ 10:20 am
Maybe this is a moment when we should reflect on something former Secretary General of the UN Dag Hammarskjold said in the late ’50s: “The pursuit of peace and progress cannot end in a few years in either victory or defeat. The pursuit of peace and progress, with its trials and errors, its successes and setbacks, can never be relaxed… …and never abandoned.” Dag Hammarskjold was killed in 1961 when his plane crashed in the Congo. He was attempting to help bring an end to that nations bloody conflict. It seems 45 years later we’re still trying to work that one out.
Comment by G. Hamid — 11/5/2006 @ 10:23 am
Lovely example of right-wing PC (and conservatives are much more politically correct than liberals nowadays). It’s indisputable by any yardstick that Iraq is worse off now than it was in 2002: more loss of life than when Saddam was in power. And it’s indisputable that the U.S. is worse off with a pro-Iranian Iraqi government than with Saddam, enemy of the Islamists (evil man, but enemy of the Islamists) in power. But PC people don’t care whether something is true, they just care whether it offends their sensibilities. Just as lefties used to insist without any evidence that there’s no such thing as differences between races or sexes, righties now insist that Iraq is better off even though all evidence shows that it’s in fact worse off. Saddam sentenced? Great. He deserves to die; hell, he deserved to be shot when captured. But that doesn’t change the fact that Iraq is worse off now than it was when Saddam was in power.
Comment by M.A. — 11/5/2006 @ 11:27 am
Germany was worse off after WWII than before the Allies flattened it to get rid of the Nazis. Ditto Japan. At least Mussolini got the trains running on time, right? Get a grip on what is being attempted there. If Iraq is “worse off” after a generation, then it will have been a mistake. I find that most of the opponents of the war in Iraq actually fell to believing the “rosy predictions” that they put in the Administration’s mouth.
Comment by craig — 11/5/2006 @ 11:41 am
The good news about Saddam Hussein was when we captured him. His fate was inevitable at that point. But in my mind, there’s nothing to be celebrated over his death by hanging. It’s uncivilized and remenent of Saddam’s own policies while he was in power. More importantly, there’s nothing that could ever “right” his wrongs. This changes nothing to the “course” we’re on in Iraq. Not even the fact that this was a scheduled parade before our mid-term elections. Perhaps Iraq will have a chance after the delusional, incompetent leadership is gone. I know the neocon architects of this war, not to mention the military, share these sentiments. Get over the ideology and listen to the wakeup calls.
Comment by kevin — 11/5/2006 @ 11:51 am
Craig - it doesn’t matter whether Germany was worse off, because we were better off. That’s not true with Saddam; America is much worse off now that he’s out of power (because we are, as Kerry said about Bush, “stuck in Iaq,” and because we’ve removed a dictator who didn’t threaten us and who was an enemy of those who actually did threaten us, like the Islamists). The only possible justification for the Iraq war — the only one most right-wingers use now — is that it’s improved things for Iraq. But it hasn’t. And if Iraq is wonderful in “a generation” I don’t think that really makes up for the hundreds of thousands of dead people. The American Conservative, BTW — my favorite political magazine when it comes to war, immigration, etc — has a great editorial on why Republicans must go: http://amconmag.com/2006/2006_11_20/feature.html Faced on Sept. 11, 2001 with a great challenge, President Bush made little effort to understand who had attacked us and why—thus ignoring the prerequisite for crafting an effective response. He seemingly did not want to find out, and he had staffed his national-security team with people who either did not want to know or were committed to a prefabricated answer. As a consequence, he rushed America into a war against Iraq, a war we are now losing and cannot win, one that has done far more to strengthen Islamist terrorists than anything they could possibly have done for themselves. Bush’s decision to seize Iraq will almost surely leave behind a broken state divided into warring ethnic enclaves, with hundreds of thousands killed and maimed and thousands more thirsting for revenge against the country that crossed the ocean to attack them. The invasion failed at every level: if securing Israel was part of the administration’s calculation—as the record suggests it was for several of his top aides—the result is also clear: the strengthening of Iran’s hand in the Persian Gulf, with a reach up to Israel’s northern border, and the elimination of the most powerful Arab state that might stem Iranian regional hegemony. The war will continue as long as Bush is in office, for no other reason than the feckless president can’t face the embarrassment of admitting defeat. The chain of events is not complete: Bush, having learned little from his mistakes, may yet seek to embroil America in new wars against Iran and Syria.
Comment by M.A. — 11/5/2006 @ 11:51 am
“It’s indisputable by any yardstick that Iraq is worse off now than it was in 2002″ Slavery is Freedom.
Comment by Knemon — 11/5/2006 @ 12:37 pm
Mike G, you have it backwards. The nightmarish violence, radicalization of the population and collapse of the state of Iraq will echo in the Middle East for decades, while the momentary removal, trial and execution of Saddam will be quickly forgotten.
Comment by jon galacek — 11/5/2006 @ 1:10 pm
[…] Update:Â Austin Bay predicted this would happen this morning. […]
Pingback by Jack’s Newswatch — 11/5/2006 @ 2:25 pm
Both Saddam and Bush are political has-beens. Celebrating the death of one particular murderer is rather pyrrhic considering how the country is now awash with thousands more murderers. 1.5 million Iraqis have fled the country since the war began and thousands more have died at the hands of these mini-Saddams. For them, Saddam’s death is too little too late.
Comment by EmbersFire — 11/5/2006 @ 6:51 pm
Nice work Austin. We need a Repubican Senate. I have some arguments on why at http://holdthesenate.blogspot.com/ where I also enjoy poking funny at Kerry.
Comment by Ian — 11/5/2006 @ 7:52 pm
HANG HIM! HANG HIM! HANG HIM!
Comment by Tember Harward — 11/5/2006 @ 8:44 pm
[…] Instapundit quips that concerns of increased violence in Iraq are mere “spin,” but you’d have to be an idiot not to think it. Afterall, while the Shia are praising the decision, the Sunnis are protesting in huge numbers. Instapundit favorite Austin Bay sees this in a much more nuanced light (though he makes a similar quip), thinking it is very much a just decision. But this grand story is about belated justice, a justice once thought impossible to reach by the real victims, the Iraqi people. It’s also about the slow, difficult birth of a democratic society in a region caught in the terrible yin-yang of tyrants and terrorists — a nation moving from the whim of the Big Man and the fear of terrorist bombs to the rule of law and democratic polity. […]
Pingback by The Conjecturer » Saddam Sentence — 11/5/2006 @ 8:45 pm
Great article. I wish it were not true about the dinosaur media (and maybe it would be different if a Democrat were in office?), but such is the case. Thank God for the Internet and cable news! Thank God, also, for the justice metted out for the Iraqi people. Let Freedom Ring.
Comment by Rosemary — 11/5/2006 @ 11:10 pm
Rosemary, “Freedom” is a relative concept. From reading accounts of the travails ordinary Iraqis must endure just to live their lives- even compared to what they could do under the tyrant Saddam- it’s ridiculous to think we’ve liberated the Iraqis in any meaningful sense. But the removal of Saddam is still a cause for celebration. It won’t change much, but he gets what he deserves.
Comment by matt s — 11/6/2006 @ 12:58 am
I believe that the record of Sadaam’s human rights abuses, which can be found in numerous documents published by Amnesty International, the U.N. the U.K. etc. (google ‘human rights iraq saddam’) indicate that the number of deaths directly attributable to his actions averaged out, during the course of his rule, to approximately 200+ deaths per day. On some days, he was known to clear out the prisons, presumably to make room for the incoming group, by beheading up to 4000 prisoners in one day, using a specially designed matrix of guillotines that beheaded 12 x 12, or 24 prisoners per minute, to speed up the process. He and his sons also enjoyed feeding people feet first into woodchippers, shredding their entire bodies to make fish food. Did Sadaam support global terrorist activities? Well, he paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers up to $35,000. U.S. after the deed was done. I’d call that support. He had a thing for building big weapons, starting with the SuperGun. Remember that project? Did he have WMD’s? Well, some captured, and translated, Iraqui documents were recently pulled off a US public website because they gave detailed plans for building a nuclear trigger. Saddam’s scientist had all of the information they needed to build a bomb. A former Iraqui General also recently testified that he witnessed major transfers of weapons out of the country, to Syria and some to Hezbollah in Lebanon, by transport and by air, all under the umbrella of ‘humaitarian’ missions. Remember the (corrupt) UN Food-for-Oil scam that Sadaam orchestrated, in order to generate huge personal revenues? It’s not hard to connect the dots. There is no question that Saddam was dangerous, and that his influence and reach was not diminishing, but was expanding. He gave refuge in Baghdad to Abu Nidal, one of the vilest of ‘paid-to-kill’ terrorists on the planet. He was making links with Al-Queda and other terrorist organizations. It’s a sad comparison to make, but the average number of deaths is now down by at least 1/2, to about 100 a day. And much of this ‘bodycount’ and bloodletting is due to internal unresolved hatred between Sunni and Shia over an incident that occurred in the year 680, when those loyal to the Caliph Yazid, the predecessors of Sunni Islam, brutally murdered Prince Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, who was the new Prophet and successor to Mohammed designated by the founders of Shia Islam. Hussein’s head was cut off in battle, and his body was trampled by horses. This historical event still fuels the hatred within Islam, unablated to this day. This hatred is cleverly exploited by a warped group of political and religious leaders, with some of the finest minds of the 10th century, each with their own agendas. This hatred also feeds the global fundamental Isalmic jihadists who just want to rule the world, and convert us to Islam or kill us. They have declared war on all of us, on the U.S., the West, the Jews (Zionists, the ‘entity’, descendants of pigs and apes), Christians (the Crusaders), Buddhists, Hindus, then presumably the rest of humanity. It very instructive to check out the MEMRI.org website, to see the messages broadcast dailty on their television and other mass media by Arab and Islamic leaders, to us and to their own peoples. The lies and the distortions, the filth, and also some of the more articulate voices of sanity and reason within their own culture, religion and society. Yes, Iraq is a better place than it was before Saddam was toppled. Today, in Iraq, justice has been served, under a democratically elected government. This is, at least, another little ray of light, of hope, and a little taste of human rights and freedoms, if not yet of security, among the Iraqui people. Rights and freedoms of which we are complacent, and take for granted. And which cost our forefathers in much blood, over a long period of time. Much blood is spilled at a birthing event. And it takes time, and patience, to be able to stand on one’s own two feet. Iraq, and Afghastan are good places to start, to help that part of the world to achieve human rights and freedoms, for a start. Unless, of course, we’d rather carry on the fight here on our soil, in defense of what we so take for granted. Let’s give them a helping hand, and stay in for the duration, as long as it takes! And, good luck to Saddam in his next incarnation, whatever that might be!
Comment by Ted — 11/6/2006 @ 1:24 am
Read The Shia Revival by Vali Nasr. It presents all of this in a different light than I’ve seen anywhere else and it suggests that our intervention in Iraq has already had the effect that Bush wanted in that it has made Shiites in other Muslim countries begin to demand rights of self determination, but this also makes how to play our hand in Iraq more complicated. We are basically supporting the Shiites majority, their voting rights, and their religious rights. Most of their religious ceremonies were banned by Saddam. They consider themselves Arabs, and that makes an Iranian puppet state not very attractive to them. Muqtada al Sader probably would like to become an Iraqi Khomeini, but I doubt that he will get too far with the Southern Iraqis. Nasr believes that the differences between Sunnis and Shiites has been underestimated in the West and that the struggle between them. I don’t know how to evaluate Nasr’s scenarios, but he certainly has good credentials. and the book was quite educational about the roots of the two main divisions among Muslims. If he’s right, the situation is much more complicated that anyone here seems to appreciate.
Comment by AST — 11/6/2006 @ 1:25 am
“The US has already gotten about 90 percent of what it needed on September 12, 2001.” What on Earth does that mean? Surely you don’t think that Iraq had something to do with 9/11? ED NOTE: In terms of fostering strategic, productive, change in a region trapped in the ying-yang of terrorist and tyrant. Please read the post closely before commenting.
Comment by Martin McCallion — 11/6/2006 @ 8:48 am
By any yardstick? How about cell phones? During Saddam’s reign, there were a few, state controlled cell phones. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of cell phones used by ordinary Iraqis. Why is this important? Free and open communication. Also, newspapers, television. Sure, there is some pro-American influence on some of the media, but there’s CHOICE. There’s a marketplace of ideas. This is what the jihadis find disturbing and why they want to disrupt the process–you can’t have people thinking for themselves, soon they may find they don’t need their mullahs telling them what to do. State Dept puts out a weekly briefing on Iraqi reconstruction (http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rpt/iraqstatus/). See the yardsticks for yourself before you buy into the MSM line. -cp ED NOTE: An excellent practical example of what I mean by fostering choice. Thanks for the comment.
Comment by cold pizza — 11/6/2006 @ 10:43 am