December 29, 2003 by lonbud

Watch What You Wish For

George W. Bush is going to wish he never heard of a spider hole.

Once the initial huah over Saddam Hussein’s capture began to recede under continuing reverberations from suicide bombings, coordinated insurgencies, and the steadily climbing death toll of American service personnel in Iraq, it became clear that one more thing the U.S. Administration didn’t have a plan for was finding its Bogeyman alive.

During the long months on the lam Hussein spent growing that natty beard, Bush and his henchmen took pains to distance themselves from the idea that it made any difference whether Hussein was dead or alive. What mattered was the sparkly new freedom of the Iraqi people and the democratic light they would bring to the rest of the Arab world.

What mattered was raising funds and personnel from “coalition” countries to help with reconstruction.

What mattered was showing the world that U.S. hegemony is good medicine.

And then, there he was, looking for all the world just like any number of the raggedy souls I see every day in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, or by the entrance to Golden Gate Park on Stanyan Street, or all up and down Haight Street and Market Street –hell, if Saddam had somehow managed to get here, they might never have found him.

But I digress. Find him they did, and bully for the forces of Good, as I said in a previous installment of this series. But now that he’s been had, the question remains: what to do with the old dirty bastard?

He’s been tried and convicted many times over in the courts of non-Arab world opinion. Heinous, despicable, inhuman, monstrous, unconscionable –those are some of the more genteel epithets with which he’s been saddled over the years. Certainly many, many people in this world would think it quite all right if he were turned over to the Iraqi Kurds, say, to be summarily disemboweled and fed to dogs on international TV. However, as long as Rupert Murdoch has no say in the matter, that is not the likely scenario.

The Bush administration has been pointedly circumspect in offering scenarios of its own regarding any effort to bring the former dictator of Iraq to justice. In fact, after the initial blush of euphoria at his capture, after the fun with his medical and dental exams, his shave and his haircut, Saddam Hussein and his fate have been oddly out of the news. And if they can help it at all, that’s just the way Bush and his crew will want to keep it.

The Hague, a dreary city in northern Europe, is home to The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991 (ICTY). The star defendant currently in the dock before the ICTY is Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslavia’s former leader, who has been called to account for some of the many horrific atrocities visited upon predominately Muslim citizens of Bosnia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia during the decade of the 1990s.

The ICTY is heir to the community of nations’ best intentions to create lawful forums for the fair adjudication of War Crimes and violations of International Humanitarian Law, which began with Allied oversight of the Nazi War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg in 1945, and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which tried twenty-eight high-ranking Japanese defendants in Tokyo from April 1946 to November 1948.

Since the founding of the ICTY, similar tribunals have been established to investigate and prosecute crimes and atrocities for Rwanda, East Timor, and Sierra Leone. There is a fascinating article detailing all of this and much more in the January 2004 issue of Harper’s Magazine, “War Crime and Punishment,” by Guy Lesser.

What struck me in reading the article, and what has no doubt occurred to the brains of the Bush operation, is that, when Saddam Hussein is tried for his crimes, a few very prickly decisions must be made, in addition to the obvious ones about where and how to try him. As Lesser says in a footnote,

The several years of both direct and indirect preparation involved in, for example, marshaling adequate admissible evidence and finding witnesses is but one issue. Others include whose notion of a “fair” trial will prevail, and whether the trial is to deal with almost twenty-five years of International Humanitarian Law and human-rights abuses or ought to be a brief proceeding limited in its scope. If the latter, victims’ families are certain to raise passionate objections. A trial of broad scope, on the other hand, would drag on for several years. And it is easy to imagine that much would be made of active U.S. support of Hussein’s regime during his country’s conflict with Iran, that the “legality” of the U.S. invasion would be vigorously contested by the defendant(s), and that every effort possible would be made to play to the region’s anti-American audience, portraying Hussein as both a martyr, struggling to defend Islam from the West, and something of a pawn, turned upon and betrayed by his former ally, the United States. Doubtless, too, some attempt would be made not only to portray the current Bush agenda for the Middle East in a sinister light but also to implicate the United States during the period prior to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, perhaps even in the role of an accomplice that supplied and trained Hussein’s armed forces while turning a blind eye to IHL crimes they were fully aware of and might have done something to prevent.

The great Hollywood director John Ford once said, “When it’s a choice between writing the story and writing the myth, write the myth.” In the present case, George Bush, if he even bothers to wrap his mind around the situation at all, must wish either that Saddam Hussein had been a more fanatical believer in Islam and the promise of Heaven made to its martyrs, or that those American bombs had been smarter.

Then, he could have ridden the myth of Saddam Hussein as evil incarnate into the sunset of history. Now, unfortunately, he’ll have to watch and listen, along with the rest of us, to how the story isn’t quite that simple and to how the United States of America has plenty of blood on its hands to go along with the lust for oil in its heart.