June, 2005

So Saddam can't see his lawyers and we can't hear his evidence. And he won't, it seems, be brought to trial this year. I don't think he'll ever face charges in court; mostly because that court's address would then become known, and 'insurgents' would blow it up, or shoot its prosecutors on the way to work. Or else because his defence would then be heard. This would probably show that there were no rape rooms, no human shredders, no eye-gouging or WMDs, so the war that overthrew him was wrongly, illegally, fraudulently, criminally, cruelly and ill-advisedly launched, and the people -- Bush, Blair, Aznar, Howard -- that launched it killed twenty thousand children and many more adults than Saddam was ever plausibly said to have killed, in hundreds of war crimes for which they were, strangely, not being tried.

It would also show that his captors had denied him his civil rights -- to a lawyer, to contact with his wife, to an explanation why his sons and grandson were killed, and why their killers were not as yet awaiting trial. Why, indeed, his yacht had been burned to the waterline and what purpose this served. And when the arsonists, whose names were known, would be brought to trial.

His opponents would say that these were acts of war, and deaths and burnings in wartime were common, unremarkable things. And Saddam would say that the killings he was charged with happened in wartime too, in a civil war whose purpose was to overthrow and kill him, and he was acting, over-zealously perhaps, in self-defence when he gassed a village and killed five thousand people, if that's the number he killed. Shock and Awe killed far more people, he would say, and no-one has yet said why they were killed. They had WMDs? No. They were shooting at Americans? No. They were cowering in their unprotected homes. Why were these people, in their tens of thousands, killed? When would their killers be found, arrested and brought to trial? Would they, the killers, have a right to a lawyer? And contact with their wives? Of course not. There will be no such trials, and none for Saddam either.

So what will happen to him? My guess is he'll be killed 'while attempting to escape' since poisoning him could provoke a Red Cross autopsy that might inconveniently postulate what happened to him. Or the Americans will pull out of Iraq soon and a 'reconciliating' government will let him go, and live under supervision with his family in Egypt or Libya.

The one thing that won't occur is him being able to speak up, uncensored, undrugged, in a televised courtroom in his own defence. For this would rally four-fifths of the Arab world to his side. Not because he's a good speaker, which he is, or because he's a trained lawyer, which he is, but because his case is strong. Four-fifths of the Arab world is a lot to lose but the Americans, by their unfairness, cruelty, hubris, pathological falsehoods and many, many pointless killings in a country they had no business invading have already lost it. And they, and we, are the barbarians now.