 Max Hastings
The Guardian
There can be no doubt about the moral justice of yesterday's Baghdad tribunal judgment on Saddam Hussein. He was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people, chiefly Kurds and Shias, and arguably for many more killed in the Iran-Iraq war.
| Instead of a 'but' he uses a 'yet' ... |
Yet it is quite another matter whether it is right or politically prudent to execute him, after the shambles of a trial that he has undergone.
| Whether it's right isn't an issue: only a cloistered person secure in his rotting liberal land could question the right of a people hammered over the last thirty years to hang the man most responsible for the deaths of so many of their families, relatives and countrymen. |
Washington was always determined that Saddam should die - but at the hands of his own people rather than those of Americans.
| Which is as it should be -- the Iraqis suffered the most so they get the first opportunity to try the man. This is aproblem for Max. |
George Bush's handling of this issue restores one's respect for Pontius Pilate. The president has achieved the almost impossible feat of generating some sympathy for Saddam, at least in Muslim societies.
| Total nonsense: Pontius Pilate was about shifting blame. GWB handed responsibility, not blame, to the Iraqis and asked them to get it right. They did. |
The Iraqi judicial system is incapable of conducting a plausible hearing. Instead it staged a farce: judges changed, defence lawyers murdered, interminable rambling orations from prosecutors and defendants. Bush should have got some old Soviets to advise the locals about how to run a proper show trial.
At which point Max (temporarily ignoring the origins of his own political philosophy for convenience) would have complained about a 'show trial', and would have, of course, blamed Bush.
Any surprise that the Iraqis, denied the most elemental forms of justice over the past forty years, wouldn't run a perfect trial with clockwork precision? Any surprise that a people unused to calm deliberation wouldn't get that completely right the first time? That the Iraqi judicial system persevered to a verdict and a sentence is the point. |
The biggest American mistake was to capture Saddam in the first place. In the House of Commons in 1944, the foreign secretary was asked what instructions had been given to British troops on what to do if they encountered Hitler. Amid laughter, Anthony Eden said: "I am quite satisfied to leave the decision to the British soldier concerned."
There's one point where we can agree: a couple of grenades in the septic tank spider hole would have spared us a lot of nonsense. However, it would not have allowed the Iraqis the opportunity to establish a clear point of justice for their people -- that revenge isn't warranted, that justice can be done, and that the national conscience can be satisfied. |
Among the allied leaders, only Stalin wanted Hitler alive, for the pleasure of hanging him. Everybody else was appalled by the prospective perils and complexities of trying and executing a head of state in partnership with the Russians. Hitler's suicide came as a relief.
| We managed all the other Nazis without much problem at the Nuremberg trials. Hitler would have been a much bigger trial but there's no question the four-country tribunals would have tried and hanged him. |
Almost everyone involved in the Nuremberg trials of his subordinates felt uncomfortably conscious that they were administering victors' justice. The proceedings proved valuable, however, in placing on record for all time some of the monstrous crimes of the Nazis.
| Which Max would deny to the Iraqi people. It's useful to put Saddam's crimes into the public record, particularly at a time when useless idiots (e.g., Hans Blix) think that Iraq was 'better off' under Saddam. |
Also, in 1946 the Nuremberg judges possessed a critical advantage. Even if the wartime allies did not represent absolute good - how could any such partnership that included the Soviets? - few people doubted their overwhelming moral superiority over the Nazis.
By contrast, the moral authority of the Iraq coalition led by the US has been blown to rags since 2003. President Bush's achievement has been to convert an almost impregnable American position in the world after 9/11 into a grievously damaged one today.
| This is idiocy. Our 'almost impregnable position' on 9/12 was almost immediately denigrated by LeMonde. It was spat on by progressives around the world within weeks and months when we decided to fight back instead of questioning why they hated us. The left/progressive world wanted us to remain on our backs, and the very act of fighting back caused us to 'forfeit' our moral superiority. |
It is believed by a few delusional people at the Lancet that more Iraqis have died since the US invasion than were killed by Saddam Hussein.
| Max has drunk the Kool-Aid. |
Most have fallen victim to fellow countrymen rather than to American fire. Yet this seems irrelevant, since Washington chose to assume responsibility for the country. The dead have perished on Bush's watch.
| Max thus forgives the jihadis, the Ba'athists and the Sadrist thugs. They aren't responsible for the all the IEDs they planted, the ambushes, the sniper attacks, the murder of Iraqi police standing in line, the bombing of schools and the murder of children. It's Bush's fault, couldn't be anyone else of course. This is a despicable line of reasoning. |
Yet we should at least consider the pragmatic argument for executing Saddam. Alive, he remains a focus for the Ba'athist fanatics who spearhead the Sunni insurgency. They cling to a fantasy that one day their old leader will regain power and restore Sunni primacy.
| Max considers it to dismiss it ... |
However angry many of us are with George Bush and Tony Blair, we must never succumb to an unworthy desire to see coalition policy fail merely because this would humiliate the US president and British prime minister.
| Tell that to your fellow travellers Max. Think the MoveOn people are with you on that? Think Old Labour buys into that? |
Only one question should matter now: what is the best course, not for our consciences or political satisfaction but for the Iraqi people?
| Isn't that their decision? One country. Three countries. A tribal country. That's on them. We might fail to rescue them completely and lead them to a modest, semi-20th Century society. It's their decision, not ours. |
Western actions have precipitated the descent of their country into chaos.
| No -- Saddam did that. Look at Iraq in that thirty years and you'll see chaos, the controlled chaos that totalitarian rule brings. Nothing works. No one talks. Everyone is afraid. That's chaos and it's evil. |
Whatever we do henceforward must be designed to promote the restoration of order, however remote such an outcome may seem.
Many Kurds and Shias want Saddam to die. This is not only because they seek vengeance for decades of atrocities, but also because they think his removal will improve their future prospects. If Iraqis held a national referendum on Saddam's fate, most would unhesitatingly commit him to the gallows.
| Max will tell you shortly why that sensible thought is wrong, of course. |
Bush's people in Washington say: "Our policy is to empower the Iraqi people to determine their own future. Allowing an Iraqi court to condemn Saddam, Iraqi executioners to kill him, is a significant step towards that objective."
Yet to many of us it is not that simple.
| The 'us' in this are the Euros, and specifically the proper-thinking, progressive, quasi-socialist Euros, for whom nothing is simple except their own self-loathing. |
Real power in Iraq today rests in the hands of the Americans or those of local factions on the ground. The so-called national government and its institutions are almost impotent, because they face such physical and political difficulties in exercising their functions.
| It's a work in progress. Nothing gets built quickly. |
The verdict on Saddam is just.
| Nice of you to admit that. |
Yet everything stinks about the process by which it has been reached. Sentence on the condemned tyrant will probably be carried out before the trial of his cousin Ali Hassan al-Majeed, known as Chemical Ali. It is widely expected that the execution will be rushed so that Saddam cannot give evidence at Majeed's trial about collusion between Washington and the former tyranny, which could grievously embarrass the US.
| Would anyone believe whatever Saddam 'testified' to? C'mon Max, you can't be that stoopid. Saddam, Ali, the whole rotten gang will lie and deny to the end of their days. |
Once again it matters less whether this is true than that so many people around the world believe it to be so. It is dismaying to be obliged to acknowledge that Americans, British, Ba'athists, militiamen, national government representatives and insurgent suicide bombers in Iraq are all today perceived as coexisting on the same moral plane.
| It's dismaying to you because you're the one who believes it to be so. We simple folk at Rantburg believe that the Americans and Brits are indeed on a different, far higher moral plane. We didn't go into Iraq for oil or profit, we went there to remove a threat and an evil. We stayed when it would have been easier -- far easier -- to pull out in those first few months after toppling Saddam because we believed we had a moral responsiblity to help re-build the country. That's our moral plane. What's yours? |
Rationally, we know that Bush and Blair want virtuous things for the country: democracy and personal freedom. Yet so incompetent has been the fulfilment of their policies on the ground that the leaders of Britain and the US now possess no more credible mandate than that of Iraq's local mass murderers.
| Again, who's making that judgment -- you? Perhaps if you and your fellow travellers quit blabbering and started helping with the heavy lifting you'd help with the mandate. |
To justify hanging Saddam, Bush and Blair needed moral ascendancy, which they have forfeited.
| He keeps saying this hoping that repetition will make it come true. |
His execution will appear to be merely another dirty deed in the endless succession that have taken place in Iraq since 2003, backed by our bayonets.
Now the president will preside over a hanging that will be as much his handiwork as if he pulled the lever, with Blair performing the usual associated functions - attaching the hood, tightening the knot and otherwise making himself useful. In Texas this sort of thing is no big deal. But in Britain we have got out of the habit. Blair may need coaching.
| And then he can teach the rest of you. |
It seems remarkable that yesterday the two major political parties of a country that abolished capital punishment 40 years ago expressed satisfaction at the prospect of a hanging up the road, conducted by surrogates. How can Britain as a nation refuse to hang its own murderers, while being so eager to support the hanging of other people's?
| And here we cut to the real heart of the matter for Max: squeamishness. He's convinced of his own moral superiority because he and his country have abolished the death penalty, and the very act of hanging Saddam causes him to imagine blood on his hands. It took a thousand words and an adult life filled with delusion to get here. Max is unhappy because the real world has forced itself into his comfortable life. Far better to think great thoughts and imagine the fight to be over a better NHS, over global warming, than to be confronted with having to respond to evil. Hanging Saddam forces Max to focus on that which he does not wish to see. |
Only some Iraqi Sunnis will mourn Saddam, a monster of the 20th century as deserving of death as were the Nazis hanged at Nuremberg. But his execution will be widely perceived as devoid of legitimacy. British influence will as usual be negligible, yet we shall share responsibility.
This seems yet another ugly land-mark in an ugly saga in which Blair has made us all complicit. Here is another triumph for the man whom the Labour party conference last month cheered to the rafters.
| Max Hastings is a fool, a deluded fool who doesn't deserve the freedom and comforts his society, and his ancestors, have given him. |
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