Uday and Qusay, R.I.P. (Rot In Perdition)

Two heads of three-headed Iraqi Hydra have been chopped off. While I oppose capital punishment with all of my corpuscles, what happened to these two monsters wasn't an execution. When ordered by U.S. troops over a loudspeaker to surrender, the Brothers Grim answered with gunfire and wounded four of our finest. We fired back, and, as the saying goes, it looks like Uday and Qusay won't be coming down for breakfast tomorrow.

Together, they combined all the qualities possessed by an entire dock of hanged Nazis tried at Nuremberg. But, unlike the Nazis, whose mass murders were conducted by signing a piece of paper or transmitting an order through faceless subordinates, these guys actually killed with their bare hands.

Still, it would have been better to take them alive. For one thing, in an Arab world suspicious of everything America does, it would have been easier to prove their identities. But more importantly, they could have been tried before an Iraqi or an international tribunal. This is important, because so much of the denial – rife throughout the Arab world – about the true nature of Saddam Hussein will only be laid to rest with a Nuremberg-type proceeding.

Many conservatives have complained that "the media" have not given enough prominence to mass graves, torture cells and eyewitness accounts of rape, pillage and other brutalities of the regime. The truth is the media will report once it's been presented in a reportable format. And as worldwide aficionados of the O.J. Simpson episode (and a thousand like it) will testify, nothing is more reportable than a good old-fashioned trial.

The proceedings might be televised, broadcast on cable, with voice-over translations in a dozen languages, just like United Nations' speeches are today. The prosecution could present video evidence of the mass graves, the countless bags of bones being pulled out of the ground, as well as live testimony from witnesses describing the unspeakable horrors of the regime. Likewise, mind-numbing statistical evidence of the crimes could be presented – the numbers murdered, raped, tortured, imprisoned or gassed.

Perhaps most importantly, such a trial would place those elements of the Arab world who have an interest in denying Hussein's crimes – such as Osama bin Laden – permanently on the defensive. After an exhaustive trial, the burden would be on them to prove that Saddam and his regime didn't commit these atrocities.

That was, after all, the real gift of the Nuremberg Trials of World War II. From the moment that trial was over, the burden shifted forever to the shoulders of neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to prove that what Hitler did, he didn't really do, or didn't mean to do, or it was all some big mistake, or was Zionist propaganda. And the truth is Nazi types have never really recovered from the Nuremberg findings. A trial of Saddam's henchmen (and hopefully, Saddam himself) would put the Saddam-was-evil denier types in the same bag with the neo-Nazis. Fit company, no?

As a political matter, I would also caution some of my fellow Democrats to mute their complaints about Uday's and Qusay's all-too-timely departures. Rep. Charley Rangel and others have been whining that somehow the deaths of these two violated international law or our own necessary prohibition against presidential-ordered assassination. Nonsense. What happened in Mosul was no more than a good old-fashioned shoot out, in which a handful of armed and dangerous criminals decided to go out in a blaze of gory glory rather than obey a demand for surrender. If you've seen enough Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson movies, you know exactly what happened. The only difference is that the "coppers" never had TOW missiles and .50 caliber machine guns.

What the Democrats need to focus on now – for the good of the country and the world – is extracting a pledge from President Bush for war-crime trials in Iraq. No military tribunals, but a real trial – open to the world in front of an Iraqi jury – with Iraqi judges. For some types of disease, the glare of television lights is as powerful a disinfectant as sunlight.

She easily excuses the issue of media bias in reporting the Saddam era carnage in Iraq, surprise surprise. But "Nuremberg" type trials for the biggies actually don't sound like a half bad idea in principle. In practice the security issues would be another story. A wink from Saddam on camera might be the signal to al-Qaeda agents still at large in the West to launch yet another dastardly attack.

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