For the Byron Echo, May, 2005

Saddam Hussein can't watch television, read newspapers, telephone his wife or consult his lawyers. He can read novels, though, write poetry, tend a small rock garden. No television interviewer can go near him, no friendly or hostile biographer, no prosecutor from the ICC. Unlike everyone in the democracies, he cannot ask for bail, or asylum, or (something John Paul might have given him) sanctuary in the Vatican.

The reasons aren't too hard to guess. Under international law Saddam is still President of Iraq, the war that overthrew him having been illegal, unsurrendered and unconcluded, and he, a lawyer, knows this. He might say so to an interviewer and might moreover mildly ask why Americans bombed and burnt his property and murdered his sons and fourteen-year-old grandson. Why, in particular, they burned his yacht. What good did that do? Are the Americans crazy?

America's actions in Iraq, the killing of twenty thousand children, thirty or sixty thousand women and old men, twenty or fifty thousand teenage conscript soldiers (like Saddam's words, the figures have been suppressed), the torture of Abu Ghraib, the shooting up of the wedding, the shooting of an Italian negotiator, the bombing of dams, water-purifying works, holy shrines and cemeteries, seem worse in some ways than Saddam's. The number of Iraqis he killed, mainly Kurds in a civil war, number forty or sixty thousand. The number of Iraqis killed by Americans and their coalition 'partners', in two wars and a decade of sanctions, is over a million. Saddam, a lawyer, might ask that the two Bushes, heads of state like himself, be tried for this. No wonder he is not let speak.

His enforced silence, though, shows that nothing resembling 'freedom' prevails in Iraq, even after 'free' elections. All of us are born free, George Orwell might have put it, but some are more free than others. Saddam is no more free than Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Discuss. American soldiers are pretty free, though. They can kill anyone they like. Discuss.