Saddam's Trial in Context

Episode of the Victors' Injustice

By NICOLA NASSER
CounterPunch

"Saddam's trials were staged to buy the U.S. and British leaders as well as the rulers of their new Iraq some time for political survival, but the trials needed no time to prove they are counterproductive and will in no way make the conclusion of a farce trial a turning point, a "milestone" or an end of era as President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki prematurely stated.

Democrats' crushing victory in the U.S. mid-term election was the latest proof that his administration's gimmick of orchestrating trials of Saddam Hussein was a failure that clearly turned the pre-planned verdict against Saddam into a popular verdict against Bush himself, in a referendum on his performance in the war on Iraq that broke his grip on power in Washington by depriving him of ruling with his own Republican party in charge of both houses on Capitol Hill, as he has done for six years.

While the western public opinion has criticized the trial on the grounds of its legal flaws the official European, Australian and Russian reaction in particular was confined to criticizing the death penalty and to some warnings against the fallout of the verdict on the Iraqi internal situation. Without underestimating both accounts this reaction fell short of Iraqi as well as Arab expectations: A farce trial orchestrated by an occupying power with the aim of changing a regime by an outside invading force outside the framework of international law should have had the priority to condemn as a matter of principle.

Saddam Hussein's purged "party comrades" may have more convincing grievances against his rule and could have a more credible case against him in court, but unlike their sectarian and ethnic counterparts --would not call in a foreign invasion to empower them to settle their accounts and did not hesitate for a moment, together with other national, pan-Arab and Islamic opposition to Saddam, regardless of sect or ethnicity, to join forces against the occupation of their country.

The issue at stake here is the foreign occupation that destroyed the Iraqi state and not the dictatorship or the democratic structure of an Iraqi regime in an occupied stateless country; all, Saddam inclusive, will be judged by where they stand vis-à-vis the occupation."