Sunday, December 14th, 2003
SADDAM HUSSEIN CAPTURED BY U.S. TROOPS
Saddam Hussein, looking much like an Iraqi Karl Marx, was captured by American troops in a safe house in Tikrit. He was armed with a pistol and was travelling with $ 750,000 in U.S. currency.
Hussein is eligible for trial under the laws of war by Coalition forces under the precedent of Nuremburg; under the auspices of the Genocide Convention by an international tribunal; by a reconstituted sovereign Iraqi state and by the nations of Iran and Kuwait which have valid war crimes claims to press. The Bush administration will likely opt for the Nuremburg model with Iraqi and possibly Kuwaiti and even – this is unlikely but possible – Iranian participation. This would be after a lengthy intel debriefing process by the DIA, CIA and British intelligence.
Expect the international left, particularly transnationalist NGO’s and the EU bureaucracy, to mobilize to move Saddam to international UN custody where his trial would become, like that of Milosevic, an endless farce where justice would be denied and the death penalty an impossibility. Failing that, as the Bush administration is unlikely to agree, a political campaign by the Left to discredit any other possible trial of Saddam will begin, probably within the next few days if not within hours of this posting.
This is a great moment, not merely in terms of American policy or for the Iraqi people but in terms of putting tyrants everywhere on notice that their abhorrent crimes may one day result in a day of reckoning that they cannot escape.
ADDENDUM
The Leftist NGO campaign to thwart a consequential trial for Saddam has, as I predicted, already begun. Wow ! That didn’t take long now did it ? Tacitus has the link.
