Posted on 12/28/2006 4:27:28 AM PST by goldstategop
Let us now praise the Iraqi legal system. Scorned by international watchdog organizations and self-credentialed legal minds since its establishment in 2003 as a newly independent institution, it has now done something that the international communitys premier courts have consistently failed to do: punished, in a reasonable timeframe, a mass murderer and delivered justice to his victims.
Back in November, it may be recalled, Iraq's High Tribunal judged Saddam Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to hang for the 1982 massacre of 148 Shiites in the city of Dujail. Initial concerns about an interminable appeals process have proved groundless, as that verdict has now been upheld by Iraq's Court of Appeals. That means the deposed dictator must swing from the gallows by the close of a 30-day period. Mere days now separate his neck from the noose.
How Saddam must envy the late Slobodan Milosevic. Although the Serbian strongman faced a far more comprehensive indictment prosecutors charged him with 66 counts of genocide compared to the mere six charges against Saddam he succeeded in delaying justice for four agonizing years before denying it altogether after succumbing, last March, to a heart ailment. When it was subsequently revealed that Milosevic had longed to see the completion of his trial, it came as no surprise: the Butcher of the Balkans must have favored his chances against the feckless UN International Criminal Tribunal.
Saddam, to be sure, did everything in his power to reproduce Milosevics coup. In the defiant style of Milosevic before him, he harassed witnesses, interrupted trial proceedings, denounced Iraqi jurors as stooges of the occupation forces, insisted on acting in his own defense, and generally exerted himself to the twin tasks of assailing the courts legitimacy and stoking Sunni anger.
In these efforts he was enthusiastically abetted by the familiar forces on the transnational Left. Ramsey Clark, fresh from his role as co-chair of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, the coalition of anti-American radicals and Serb apparatchiks that hailed the peoples tyrant (as Serbian writer Vidosav Stevanovic aptly dubbed him) as a heroic socialist freedom fighter, joined Saddams defense team and even likened him to Milosevic high praise indeed. Both men, Clark explained, were courageous enough to fight more powerful countries.
Iraqi jurors, to their credit, proved far less tolerant of Clarks provocations than their Western counterparts. When Clark attempted to turn Saddams November sentencing into a crude referendum on the trial itself, Chief Judge Raouf Abdul Rahman promptly dismissed him as a mockery and evicted him from the courtroom. If there were any remaining doubts about the wisdom of the Iraqi court, this should have put them to rest.
Not that self-styled human rights groups were willing to give credit where it was due. Before the first gavel fell to open the trial, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had alleged that its proceedings were unfair and that its verdict would be irreparably flawed. But the widespread attention such charges attracted in the press was in inverse proportion to their merit. Consider that the most serious charge leveled against the trial that it failed to protect witnesses and defense lawyers hardly skewed the outcome in Saddams favor and was in any case a more convincing indictment of the security situation in the country than the procedural aspects of the trial.
But no amount of hand-wringing over the integrity of the trial could mask the real motivation of the critics. It was the fact that Iraqis refused to do adopt the enlightened view of the international community and do away with the death penalty. Thus Human Rights Watch lectured that the death penalty was an inherently cruel and inhumane punishment. As the conclusion of unfair trial, moreover, it was simply indefensible. That Saddam had filled mass graves with thousands of Iraqis; that he had terrorized the region; that he had sponsored Palestinian terror proxies and coordinated with al-Qaeda operatives these, presumably, were technicalities of no great consequence.
Amnesty International, not to be outdone, greeted news of Saddams sentence with an outraged press release: Amnesty International deplores death sentences in Saddam Hussein trial. Not only did the benighted Iraqis insist on imposing the death penalty, but they resisted all conformity with international standards. Of course, given the dubious legacy of such standards, one is tempted to count this as another point in the Iraqi courts favor.
In historical perspective, what the Iraqi tribunal accomplished is nothing short of extraordinary. In the span of a mere four years, a legal system that was once the preserve of Baathist ministers, operating as an official organ for the regimes oppression, has been transformed into a modern judicial branch that is arguably one of the most transparent and impartial in the entire Middle East. Equally impressive is that this transformation has taken place amid relentless sectarian violence and a steady drumbeat of criticism from the ranks of high-minded activists. Most significant from this angle is not that the trial had its flaws rare is the high-profile trial without its share of diversionary drama but that, in contrast to the much-lauded international courts, those flaws did not prove fatal to the cause of justice.
Indeed, it now seems certain that the only fatalities the trial is likely to produce will be those of the dictator and his henchmen. Its a safe bet that this wont please the usual suspects, but then it is not supposed to: the days when Iraqi courts slavishly served a political agenda have passed into history. Shortly it will be Saddam's turn.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Tick tick tick
BUMP! Outstanding.
Saddam is scum on the highest order, no question. Executing him, however, won't do a damn thing except give a lot of ragheads excuses to blow things up. That pic of him in his underwear was a death sentence for him on the international scene. Harmless? I wouldn't say that, but if we ever hope to have an Iraq at peace, someone has to stay their hand and stop the killing. Sparing Saddam and sentencing him to life in supermax security would have taken the wind out of these leftist punks and maybe given some Iraqis pause before picking up a weapon. Then again, there's no prison, Iraqi or otherwise, outside of the US that I would trust to hold him (the Euroweenies let terrorists go, remember?), and I'm certainly not footing the bill for this guy's Mach 3's.
"Amnesty International deplores death sentences in Saddam Hussein trial. "
I don't remember Amnesty International complaining when almost 3,000 people were murdered on 9/11/01, or when Saddam was murdering people in his own country....
Liberals tell us such things as a last resort"You'll just make him a martyr!"but it doesn't seem to pan out that way. A jailed gangster like Saddam can run his organization from jail, as John Gotti did. Meanwhile, dead is dead. Tyrants' influence seems to wane when they are in hell.
"Mumia" still excites the KGB nostalgists in this country, but al-Zarqawi has been curiously ineffective as an executive since his automobile collided with a missile some time ago.
naw..CNN can only show snipers hitting our GI's, don't forget they won't show people dying at the WTC, it's too soon
Is there any chance we can appoint this guy to our Supreme Court?
I think his demise began when the Reagan Administration distanced itself from him after he used poison gas against Iran, and later the Kurds who were revolting in the North. Policy papers on the Middle East at that time, and for most of the preceding 15 years show American foreign policy more preferred Saddam in power then the Islamic government that would naturally form in his absence due to the complex demographics of the region. The Bathist Party was secular...It was thought they could be dealt with.
The first Gulf War had nothing to do with terrorism...Saddam invaded Kuwait because he claimed Kuwait was slant drilling Iraqi oil and he intended to annex those oil fields. Islamic Kuwait had admitted to stealing Iraqi oil by such means but disputed the amount. Up to that point relations with the United States and Iraq were distanced, but not hostile. The process of his demonization to the American public began with the advent of the Presidency of oil man G.H. Bush...But he'd been a demon for two decades before then and we tolerated him as an alternative to what might have been...and what now may turn out to be. For better or worse this series of events have led us to this point in history. Why do I hesitate to celebrate?
I thank God it is not my fate to be the one to govern Iraq.
Let's transfer this thought over to Saddam's outlaw Baathist Party. Some of Saddam's top lieutenants still run the Party's murderous insurgencies in Iraq from another country.
When Saddam is at last pushing up figs and dates from 6-feet under the remnants of his poisonous party will convolute and wiggle for a short time and then will mostly wither away and die like a beheaded snake.
Leni
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