OK. This post from Bill­mon is pretty damn funny. And it nails the absur­dity of the whole situation.

Bagh­dad, Nov. 5 (Whiskey Bar News Ser­vice) Legal experts expressed shock and sur­prise this morn­ing as an Iraqi court dom­i­nated by the country’s newly empow­ered Shi’a major­ity con­demned for­mer pres­i­dent Sad­dam Hus­sein to death for crimes against humanity.

“This has to be one of the most unex­pected ver­dicts to come down the pike since the O.J. trial,” said one anony­mous legal expert, who asked that his name not be used because he wished to remain anony­mous. “I thought after Saddam’s third attor­ney was mur­dered by the Shi’a death squads that the for­mer dic­ta­tor might be in some trou­ble, but I never expected a con­vic­tion on all counts. I mean, they didn’t even check to see if the glove actu­ally fit!”

It’s funny ’cause it’s true.

Reader Elyn F wasn’t able to post this to the com­ments, but I thought it an inter­est­ing enough response to yesterday’s The World on Trial that I offered to post it for her in the hopes of gen­er­at­ing discussion.

Dear Chris,
I’ve been a fan of your writ­ing & blog for a over a year now & gen­er­ally agree with your assess­ments of the sit­u­a­tions, but I have to dis­agree with the con­cept of an “Inter­na­tional Tri­bunal” for Sad­dam.
The cre­ation of an inter­na­tional trial (before that I believe the stand­ing pol­icy was ‘to the vic­tor went the spoils … & the head of his enemy if the con­querer so chose’), came about at Nurem­berg, with the trial of lead­ing Nazis. This was a fair & just deci­sion (though they did leave the Ital­ian lead­er­ship out of it, which was slightly odd), as the Nazi’s waged war, invaded, tor­tured & killed on a multi-national scale &, there­fore, had to answer to an inter­na­tional com­mu­nity.
In cur­rent times the use of the Inter­na­tional Court at the Hague hasn’t proven itself reli­able, timely, or effec­tive. Just look at the details of the fiasco known as the (ongo­ing) trial of Slobadan Miloso­vitch & his cohorts (that they’ve found).
But, even if the IC or any other type of Inter­na­tional Tri­bune could be stood up & prove itself func­tional, I still think that this is the wrong approach, for the sim­ple rea­son that this is an Iraqi dic­ta­tor, who stole from, ter­ror­ized, tor­tured & mas­sa­cred Iraqi’s, and must answer to … the Iraqi peo­ple.
As the Iraqi’s strug­gle to come together, how­ever ten­u­ously, as a nation rather then a col­lec­tion of tribes & reli­gious sects; attempt to nav­i­gate their new-found free­doms to vote, write con­sti­tu­tions, stand up an army, come together to make deci­sions (whether we in the US like these deci­sions or not); &, most impres­sively, begin to detain & evict the the for­eign Jihadi’s in their midst (& from what I’ve read, they may have rounded up more actual for­eign Jihadi’s in 1 day out in the Sunni tribal area then we grabbed in 3+ years), so that they the Iraqi peo­ple can guide their coun­try in a direc­tion that they, them­selves want (again whether we in the US like it or not); tak­ing away their right to judge a per­son who did the coun­try & the peo­ple so much (almost unimag­in­able) pain & dam­age would take them back psy­cho­log­i­cally 3+ years to the peo­ple swarm­ing around the Green Zone look­ing for hand­outs from Bremer’s brigades of nation-builders, rather then giv­ing them what any peo­ple deserve — respect in their abil­i­ties &, there­fore, respon­si­bil­ity to take care of them­selves.
I truly believe in the ‘you broke it, you fix it’ con­cept, & we cer­tainly ‘broke it’ in terms of Iraq. So if we want to with­draw our troops & what­ever of a coalition-we-have-left’s troops, we can only do so after we’ve given the Iraqi peo­ple, not just a func­tional army, police force, & get their ser­vices up & run­ning again but, per­haps more impor­tantly, help them find a back­bone (that had been beaten away for decades under Saddam’s dic­ta­tor­ship) & a psy­cho­log­i­cal belief that they, the Iraqi peo­ple, CAN & WILL be able to come together & make this new Saddam-free Iraq work. By plac­ing them, yet again, in the role of sub­servience by claim­ing only “we” (the west) can judge a man who did so much wrong to them, sim­ply turns them back to spine­less sub­jects & all we’ve done is sub­sti­tuted the Inter­na­tional (&, lets admit it, every­one say­ing that means US & Western/Central Europe) com­mu­nity for Sad­dam, to make deci­sions, help them out & send them rules, regs & con­trol. On the other hand, allow­ing the Iraqi peo­ple to take the respon­si­bil­ity to hold these tri­als them­selves — no mat­ter how many flubs, mix-ups & inci­dents (that would cause a mis­trial in the US) occur in court — is to set them on the psy­cho­log­i­cal road to self-determination & a new sense of empow­er­ment &, hope­fully, national & per­sonal dignity.

So there you go. Discuss.

BAGHDAD — Sorry for the delay in the fil­ing yes­ter­day. After we went into the press gallery for the trial, I was kind of cut off from the com­puter except for the pool reports which had to take prece­dence. And then, return­ing from the cour­t­house to the Bagh­dad Con­ven­tion Cen­ter was an ordeal … not to men­tion the night­time dash through the city traf­fic. Any­way, by the time I got back home, I was neck deep in new files, and I had to put the blog on hold. *Sigh* Serv­ing mul­ti­ple mas­ters is dif­fi­cult.
Any­way, by now, the accounts of the the last two days are “on the wires.”:http://news.google.com/news?q=Saddam+Hussein+trial&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&tab=nn&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d The trial is descend­ing into dark com­edy. While yes­ter­day we had three of the defen­dants — Ali Dayih Ali, Moham­mad Azzawi Ali and Abdul­lah al-Roweed, all local Ba’ath offi­cials from Dujayl — in the dock, today there were _no_ defen­dants present. Sad­dam, Barzan al-Tikriti (for­mer head of the _mukhabarat_) and Taha al-Ramadan (for­mer Iraqi vice pres­i­dent) refused to attend and the oth­ers were pre­vented from attend­ing ““Because they caused chaos and noise out­side the court­room, the court has decided to keep them away,” chief judge Raouf Abdel Rah­man said.
What does _that_ mean? So far, there’s been expla­na­tion. The trial has been recessed until Feb. 13, how­ever. Which is just as well. No war crimes trial can have even the patina of legit­i­macy if essen­tially it’s _in absentia._ Iron­i­cally, that’s one of the com­plaints the defense has against Judge Rah­man: He was twice tried _in absentia_ by Saddam’s regime for anti-government actions over the 1988 mas­sacre in Hal­abja and he might have biases against the lead defen­dant! Only in Iraq can such naked irony be com­pletely ignored with a straight face.
In pub­lic, and even in pri­vate, U.S. offi­cials express no con­cern over the direc­tion the trial is tak­ing or its increas­ing per­ceived lack of legit­i­macy. With many Iraqis — includ­ing some in the lame-duck gov­ern­ment of Ibrahim al-Jaafari — openly say­ing just hang the bas­tard already and inter­na­tional observers call­ing into ques­tion the fair­ness of the pro­ced­ings, the U.S. is look­ing increas­ingly alone as it con­tin­ues to insist on the need and fair­ness for the trial. But for once in Iraq, the U.S. is right.
Allow me to explain: It’s not right to say the trial is fair; it’s not trans­par­ent and the tribunal’s legal­ity is murky, con­sid­er­ing the ille­gal ori­gins of the war that brought the cur­rent gov­ern­ment to power. On the one hand, Iraq is a fix­ture of U.S. pol­icy. Because of the breath­tak­ing incom­pe­tence of the post-war plan­ning, the U.S. — and the world — will be sad­dled with the issue of Iraq for a long time to come. Because of this very big immov­able and unchange­able fact, the debate over whether the war is legal _in the con­text of propos­ing and car­ry­ing out U.S. for­eign policy_ is moot: the world is stuck with “the Iraq prob­lem.“
But in terms of set­ting up a tri­bunal and estab­lish­ing a legal prece­dent for try­ing heads of state for alleged war crimes, the legal­ity of the war is very much an issue. Prece­dent mat­ters in the realm of law, and the insti­tu­tional struc­tures built by an occu­pa­tion and its prog­eny had bet­ter be well-constructed indeed.
How­ever, and this is a big “how­ever,”: Sad­dam absolutely must be tried. He must be tried, judged and sen­tenced. He was — and likely still is — a hor­ri­ble man, respon­si­ble for the deaths of thou­sands. If he com­mit­ted the acts he’s accused of, he deserves the pun­ish­ment meted out, and whether he was America’s bestest buddy in the region dur­ing the 1980s is beside the point. (Remem­ber, he also bought a lot of weapons from the Sovi­ets, sold oil to the Chi­nese and had the full sup­port of Euro­pean gov­ern­ments as a bul­wark against Iran­ian expan­sion­ism at the same time.)
Which is why he must be tried in an inter­na­tional tri­bunal. There are two rea­sons for this, one of them prac­ti­cal. The prac­ti­cal one first: The Iraqis are not really in a posi­tion to pro­vide a fair trial. The secu­rity sit­u­a­tion has led to mul­ti­ple deaths among the defense team and Saddam’s crimes are too wide­spread not to affect almost every­one in the coun­try, espe­cially one with such strong tribal ties. A wrong done to a man here is a wrong done to his entire fam­ily and com­mu­nity. Because of this, the trial should be moved out­side the coun­try and handed over to an inter­na­tional tri­bunal.
Sec­ond, it is pre­cisely that he was sup­ported — or at least not roundly con­demned — by so many in the West and around the world that an inter­na­tional tri­bunal is nec­es­sary. Sad­dam must pay for his crimes, yes, but the gov­ern­ments who sup­ported him in his ter­ror should know that they’re on trial, too. An inter­na­tional tri­bunal will do that, at least sym­bol­i­cally. And while they won’t suf­fer the same penalty as Sad­dam — you can’t hang entire gov­ern­ments very eas­ily — their cit­i­zens have a right to know what their gov­ern­ments at least tac­itly endorsed in the name of “national inter­est.” And the vast major­ity of the peo­ple liv­ing in democ­ra­cies must own up to the fact that they didn’t care enough to find out what their gov­ern­ments were up to regard­ing Sad­dam.
In an ideal world, gov­ern­ments are those of laws, not of men. In the real world, how­ever, gov­ern­ments are staffed by men (and women) who saw Sad­dam as less evil than the Aya­tol­lah Khome­ini. They exchanged the ideals of free­dom and respect for human rights for cheap oil. They sold out the Iraqi peo­ple who paid the price.
Big deal? Wel­come to realpoli­tik? Yeah, I know. But if we’re ever to avoid more Iraqs, we have to begin to real­ize that sup­port for evil in the name of national inter­est often gets us into wars 20 years down the road. It also gets a lot of peo­ple killed. And frankly, why are Iraqi lives worth less than Amer­i­can lives? Why should Iraqis have to suf­fer under Sad­dam or endure watch­ing their friends shred­ded by car bomb blast so that Amer­i­cans can feel safe from Khome­ini or from ter­ror­ists? Why should Saudi Ara­bi­ans suf­fer a cor­rupt monar­chy so we can enjoy SUVs, for that mat­ter?
Sad­dam deserves to hang for his crimes, but as cit­i­zens of democ­ra­cies, we are cul­pa­ble, in part, for what our gov­ern­ments did to help him com­mit them. And an inter­na­tional trial out­side Iraq would be a step in forc­ing us to facce up to our own trans­gres­sions against the ideals enshrined in the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, the U.N. Char­ter and the Inter­na­tional Dec­la­ra­tion of Human Rights. It might also be a step toward own­ing up to our col­lec­tive tres­passes against the Iraqi peo­ple. We owe it to them… and to ourselves.