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Saddam's Capture: Roundup of Articles

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From the Iraqi Perspective, Paul Bremer's Press Conference on the Capture of Saddam Was a Downer (posted 12-16-03)

Tom Engelhardt, writing in tomdispatch.com (Dec. 15, 2003):

Let me return for a moment to the Sunday news conference in Baghdad where Saddam's capture was announced. Thanks to a piece by Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times yesterday ( A Careful U.S. Plan to Dispel All Doubt on Hussein's Fate ), we know that this event had been carefully scripted months ago -- two scripts actually to correspond to either half of"dead or alive" -- in Washington and Baghdad's Green Zone, and approved by the President himself. This public relations"playbook" had its own code name, HVT (for High Value Target) No. 1, and was in part created so that the administration wouldn't be caught off-guard and make mistakes, as they felt they had when Saddam's sons were gunned down.

Despite the scripting, there was still something spontaneous about the actual press conference (other than the cheering Iraqi journalists) -- and that was the visible euphoria of the Americans. As Iraqi exile Sami Ramadani wrote in the British Guardian , of watching the news as he remembered friends who had disappeared or died at Saddam's hands (in a piece included below):"But here it was, at last: Saddam's surrender in ignominy. However, this delightful moment -- enjoyed by all the Iraqis I spoke to as the news of his capture was breaking -- was soured by the fact that it was Iraq's newly appointed tyrant, Paul Bremer, doing the boasting: 'Ladies and gentlemen... we got him!'"

Honestly, even after months of planning, the Bush administration has no clue how we look through other eyes. But their planning does give us a glimpse into the deeper nature of the President and his advisors, especially since -- as news story after news story reported -- they were desperate to put an"Iraqi stamp" or an"Iraqi face" on events. (That, of course, is a strange image in itself, implying as it does the degree to which we imagine the turning over of power in Iraq to be a matter of image."Face" in this context becomes the equivalent of"mask." But in addition, think about putting an Iraqi face on a show focused on the only Iraqi face most Americans know, Saddam's.) Ruttenberg, for instance, writes:

"A decision was made early on that the capture of Mr. Hussein would need an Iraqi face, said [Gary Thatcher, an author of the media strategy and the director of strategic communications for the Coalition Provisional Authority], a stipulation that Mr. Bush felt strongly about, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said Sunday at a briefing.

"'Iraqis were going to be making the announcement no matter what,' Mr. Thatcher said. 'This was overall an Iraqi victory. It was obviously going to mean a great deal to the Iraqis.'"

These are men who know that first impressions matter and initial moments can be crucial, and this was their best shot. So let's look at the production they actually put together because what they can't see about themselves or really do anything about -- those tiger's stripes that they will never change -- tell us much about the longer term reality that lies just behind the euphoria of the moment and will actually determine our future in Iraq.

Here was the striking thing -- for me -- about the"got him!" news conference : It started with L. Paul Bremer, CPA head, striding through a portal, up to the podium, and leading off with that exuberant, quite euphoric exclamation about Saddam. After offering a few details on the capture, he added:

"Before Dr. Pachachi, who is the acting president of the Governing Council, and Lieutenant General Sanchez speak, I want to say a few words to the people of Iraq. This is a great day in Iraq's history… Now is the time for all Iraqis, Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis, Shiaa, Christian and Turkaman, to build a prosperous, democratic Iraq at peace with itself and with its neighbors."

The sort of words it might have been more appropriate for an Iraqi to speak. Only then did he turn to the aging exile Adnan Pachachi."Dr. Pachachi?"

Pachachi offered a bare paragraph of comment. ("I am pleased to announce to you on behalf of the Governing Council that we are moving on the way with our efforts to achieve sovereignty and authority in the proper allotted time…") and then Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, allied military commander, took over the podium and gave a long statement punctuated by those dramatic film clips of Saddam. Questions followed with all three answering, but with General Sanchez controlling the process, and the event ended with the general pronouncing the last words,"And God bless America."

Pachachi in other words was sandwiched between the two exuberant Americans, between, that is,"Got him!" and"God bless America." An exceedingly thin slice of meat between meaty hunks of bread. And that pretty much reveals the face behind the mask (both of which turn out to be ours). Imagine if they had really wanted to put an"Iraqi face" on the event. Dr. Pachachi could, of course, have strode through that same portal, stepped to the same podium, and announced the capture of Saddam, showed the videos, called on the Americans for details and clarifications, and then taken the questions and doled them out. He could, in short, have run the news conference. But it would have cost in impact in the United States and in any case it was, I have no doubt, beyond what Gary Thatcher, L. Paul Bremer or the President could imagine. It's just not in their mental repertoire.

Keep that in mind over the coming days and weeks. When they wake up from this end-game of inside-the-Beltway-and-Green-Zone dreaming, that will be the bedrock reality of our Iraqi occupation, one likely to present endless problems for them. They simply have no idea how to put an"Iraqi face" on anything but a deck of cards. This is not an approach likely to have much appeal when set against Iraqi nationalism which is still largely"faceless." It's not just a matter of the insurgency. Think of the Shiites in the south or the trade unionists now being arrested in Baghdad.

The essential nature of this administration is set. They can't kick it. And that's why they're going to be left with the Iraq of their dreams. It just so happens that those dreams are nightmares. They always were. This is a passing moment. When the dust clears we'll still be an unpopular occupying power with 110,000 embattled troops in a country with over 60% unemployment, a significant insurgency, and few reassuring Iraqi faces.

The only face that might successfully take Saddam's place down the line would be Osama bin Laden's. In the meantime, Americans, I suspect, have largely accepted the deeper promise of Saddam's capture. And that is: Mission accomplished. The words don't have to be said. This is what his fall and capture have always meant: the goal is reached; the worst is over; the troops will soon enough be on their way home; Iraq will be quiet if not happy.

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Put Saddam on Trial (posted 12-15-03)

Eliot A. Cohen, professor of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University , writing in the Wall Street Journal (Dec. 15, 2003):

The trial of Saddam must take place in an Iraqi courtroom; it must be fair, although it is hard to imagine any outcome other than a richly deserved execution; above all it must be thorough and public. There are cogent arguments against trying dictators -- this is why, after all, Winston Churchill simply wanted the Allies to shoot top Nazis rather than create tribunals whose outcome was foreordained. He disliked the smell of victors' justice, worried about the precedents set for political prosecution, and loathed the thought of American and British judges serving side by side with Stalin's henchmen at the trial bench.

All fair enough, but for once the great man was wrong. The Nuremberg trials were important not because they did justice -- for crimes such as those committed by the Nazis or by Saddam there can be only a faint simulacrum of real justice -- but because they told a story, left a legacy, and provided a warning.

Scholars still turn to the massive documentation produced at Nuremberg for insight into the workings of Hitler's government; no less important was the impression upon the public mind of the detailed description of one of the great evils of human history. Now too it is essential that the full tale of Saddam's cruelties, from the gassing of the Kurds to the massacres of the Shiites, from the diabolical tortures he ordered to the beating deaths he administered with his own hands, be laid before the world. Those who favored the war and those who opposed it, and above all the residents of Iraq itself and of the Arab world, deserve and need to have that record laid before them completely, in Arabic as well as in English, and it should spare nothing. Let there be no doubt about what the war terminated, and perhaps a glimmering of what it may have prevented.

The legacy of the World War II tribunals was the promise that those who commit truly monstrous crimes will be found out and pay for them. As flawed as they were, they demonstrated some effort to reclaim humanity's moral sense in the face of human beings' capacity for brutality of the most horrific type. Who knows how dictators may be deterred? For the true monsters of human history the normal calculations of consequences may not work; their tolerance for risk, their beliefs about their role in history may preclude the contemplation of such consequences.

But even if the prospect of standing in the dock does not prevent such crimes, a trial testifies to the quest for justice which is common to all civilized societies at all times.

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Saddam Was Not a Creature of the United States (posted 12-17-03)

Martin Kramer, writing on his blog (Dec. 17, 2003):

With Saddam in U.S. hands, thoughts turn to his future trial. Various pundits have claimed that it won't be enough to examine Saddam's crimes. It will also be necessary to probe U.S. and Western support for his regime, during the decade of the Iran-Iraq war and the lead-up to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The late Elie Kedourie, historian and political theorist at the London School of Economics, put the issue in just the right perspective, in an interview granted in June 1992. (This was less than three weeks before his untimely passing.) Kedourie, it will be recalled, was a native of Baghdad, and an acute observer of Iraq's troubled history. The interviewer told him that a Paris-based scholar had declared Saddam to be a "creature of the West." Kedourie's reply:

I do not understand what he means by that. If he means that it was Western governments that put him in power, then that is not true. If he means that from 1980 to 1990 the American and French governments and German firms did their best to help him, this is perfectly true. But you have to look at what their intentions were....The Americans believed, mistakenly I think, that if they did not do something in order to stop Khomeini, he would sweep over the whole of the Middle East. I think there was little prospect of that, but that is what they believed and therefore they chose to support Saddam. Again, within its own terms it was a rational if mistaken calculation. It was a terrible mistake, which lay at the back of the invasion of Kuwait and the war that followed, which I consider an unnecessary war. It was the result of policies that the Americans had followed vis-à-vis Saddam for ten years and that made him think that he could invade Kuwait with impunity.

A calculation went wrong. But I do not think that there was anything else there. Saddam is not a creature of the West. He is not a creature of anybody.
There are two crucial points here. First, Kedourie knew far too much about Iraq to regard Saddam as the West's creation. He understood precisely which tectonic forces, by their immense internal pressures, had combined to produce him.

Second, Kedourie did not rail against the United States for its best-guess policies of the 1980s. He regarded the U.S. decision to back Saddam against Iran as a mistake and a miscalculation. But as a thinking historian, who never stopped reading in diplomatic archives, Kedourie thought it perfectly legitimate for states to calculate and act on self-interest. (This was always preferable to action the name of ideology. Ideological states, Kedourie believed, were intrinsically dangerous to their peoples and their neighbors.) Kedourie also knew and expected that states, working in a fog of partial knowledge, were bound to make mistakes in pursuing their interests. He never set himself up in Olympian judgment of policymakers for these sorts of errors.

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History Shows the Punishment of Tyrants Can Backfire (posted 12-19-03)

James Sterngold, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle (Dec. 16, 2003):

Every Aug. 15, the anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II, the fate of Hideki Tojo comes to life in Japan. The United States declared Tojo, briefly a prime minister, a war criminal and he was hanged after a two-year trial, along with a half dozen other leaders. But the executions hardly settled their legacy as the U.S. had intended.

Each anniversary, the Japanese media is filled with debate and sound trucks blare angry protests through the humid streets of Tokyo on whether Tojo ought to be remembered as a patriot or a murderer. And nearly every year, the prime ministers of Japan render the ultimate judgment: they make the pilgrimage to the Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of the executed leaders are symbolically enshrined, and bow deeply in respect.

Will Dec. 13, when Saddam Hussein was captured, become such a day in Iraq ?

History provides few precedents. Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker as the Russian Red Army advanced into Berlin . Benito Mussolini was strung up by partisans and publicly hanged alongside his mistress in a public square in Rome . Other modern tyrants, like Idi Amin and Baby Doc Duvalier, slipped into comfortable exile, largely irrelevant, often ridiculous.

But the United States is apparently eager to do with Hussein something similar to what it did in Japan and Germany after World War II, to use the capture and trial of the leaders of a conquered country as a tool not only to establish guilt but to erase the physical and psychological legacies of a totalitarian regime and plant the seeds of a U.S.-friendly democracy.

A number of experts on America's experience in World War II say the task may well backfire if not handled with great delicacy. They point to Japan as an example of how difficult it is make people accept the verdict of the victor as the verdict of history.

"The risk you face, which you had in Japan, is that the trial must be perceived as fair, and to do that you have to let the accused put up a proper defense," said John Dower, a historian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the pre-eminent authority on postwar Japan. "But that could be very embarrassing to the U.S. It could be hard to accuse him of crimes when at one time he was our man. He can bring all that out if this is a real trial."

He added that, in Tokyo, some of the international judges who rendered the verdicts on Tojo and the others criticized the trials harshly, adding to the sense of many Japanese that America was being hypocritical, paradoxically helping maintain the respect in which at least some Japanese hold those leaders.

"I think this is going to be a hot potato for the U.S. ," said Chalmers Johnson, an expert on Japan and China and the author of two recent books critical of America 's international policies. "It might have been better if Hussein had just been shot when he was captured. In Japan , the war trials backfired badly and tarnished America 's reputation. That could well happen here."

No matter where he is tried, Hussein may exploit the opportunity to win hearts, not unlike former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic who is currently being tried at an international tribunal at The Hague .

Laurence Rothenberg, an international law expert and fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington , said it is likely to take at least a year to prepare a court case and that many able defense lawyers will probably be eager to represent him at the high-profile trial, even if many believe the outcome is preordained.

"The rules of evidence and so forth will be written in such a way the United States will be able to say that he got a fair trial, and then they will execute him," said Rothenberg. ...

The trials after World War II did not entirely demythologize the leaders of the defeated nations as the United States had hoped, even though Japan and Germany subsequently built strong democracies.

Germany made a greater attempt to wipe the slate clean because of the Holocaust, historians say. Japanese leaders, however, were not tried for genocide or murder after the war, but essentially for aggression.

"What everyone learned from Japan is that aggression is what the losers do," said Johnson, a professor emeritus at University of California at San Diego . "That's the reality, and it's not much of a way to win hearts and minds."

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The Necessity of Putting Saddam on Trial (posted 12-19-03)

Anthony D'Amato, Leighton Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and lead counsel for Milan Kovacevic, the first person charged with the crime of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague; writing in Jurist(Dec. 15, 2003):

Just five days after the establishment of the Iraqi Special Tribunal for Crimes Against Humanity, Saddam Hussein was captured hiding in a hole in the ground. He will now have the starring role of defendant at the new tribunal.[1] If this were a Hollywood movie, critics would complain that it was not true to life.

The case against Saddam could be open-and-shut. He ordered the murder of Kurds and many of his political opponents during his wars against Iran and Kuwait. Murder in these circumstances is a violation of international humanitarian law.

But murder will only be one of many counts against Saddam. A multi-count indictment might appear to be redundant from a legal point of view, but a trial is as much about educational psychology as it is about law. For one thing, as Professor Lon Fuller used to say, the trial brings home to the defendant the extent of his antisocial behavior better than any punishment. The defendant throughout the trial is paying close attention to the testimony, hoping to contradict it, and increasingly becoming convinced that the facts are going to convict him. The more the trial goes on, the less he can successfully resort to psychological denial. Something like this process seems to be going on in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic at the Hague Tribunal; now in its second year. The physical and psychological toll on the defendant is written plainly on his face and in his recurrent illnesses in the detention center. These illnesses are not fake; the Dutch doctors servicing the detention center (as I know from my own experience as a defense counsel there) are skeptical and meticulous.

A second reason for having a thorough trial even in an open-and-shut case is the educational effect upon public psychology. The important target audience is those Iraqi citizens who benefited from Saddam’s regime. Although Saddam built lavish palaces for himself, the people who built them were paid good wages. The merchants who displayed Saddam’s picture in their shops, and who had nothing but praise for his regime, did very well for themselves economically. The soldiers in his army and elite corps did quite well. All the relatives and close friends of leaders in Saddam’s government were enriched in various ways. Teachers, doctors, scientists, and other professionals were pretty much left alone so long as they never criticized the regime. These are the social leaders who will be watching the trial on public television and who will be listening to the evidence.

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After Saddam's Capture: Now What Will Germany and France Do? (posted 12-18-03)

Arnold Beichman, writing in the Washington Times (Dec. 15, 2003):

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has sent his congratulations to President Bush and French President Jacques Chirac sent his felicitations when he finally figured out what he could say without too much embarrassment. And what an ordeal for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as he tries to speak warm words after discouraging doing anything about Saddam Husseins violations of UN resolutions except lets pass more resolutions.

So you wonder: what is the West European hate-America crowd going to say now? What will the British Guardian and the French Le Monde and, above all, the hate-America British Broadcasting System say now, they who mocked President Bush and his campaign to bring some kind of democracy to the long-suffering Iraqi people? What are the Tony Blair haters in the British House of Commons and in the British media going to say now when the full story about Saddam's reign of terror is heard? And here at home what are"hate Bush" Hollwood liberals going to say? Barbra Streisand, where are yoo-oo-oo-oo?

      A tyrant will now be tried for his crimes; his atrocities will now be documented and disseminated at a war crimes trial but how about a trial also for those who mocked this crusade against dictatorship and said it was illegal? How about a trial for those who if they had had the power to do so would have sabotaged the war against tyranny, a war which took the lives of hundreds of Americans fighting men and their coalition allies from Britain, Spain and Italy? 

All over Western Europe there is now great disappointment among the literati, the intellectual classes, because the capture of Saddam Hussein will vindicate the American crusade for freedom in the Middle East. And, oh yes, we mustn't overlook an unhappy Middle East billionaire, Yasir Arafat, the money-grubbing, embezzling dictator over the Palestinian people. The capture of Saddam Hussein is a warning not only to Arafat but also to Syrias Bashar al-Assad and to the Saudi monarchy of what could be in store for them. And in his cave Osama bin Laden must be shaving his beard, digging a man-sized hole and trying lipo-suction to save himself from inevitable capture.

And so what are the Democratic presidential candidates going to say now? Like General Clark, like Howard Dean, like John Kerry and the whole lot? Will there be a word of apology or a statement of congratulations to President Bush and the American servicemen and women who helped effect the capture of this homicidal Iraqi dictator? To the special operations forces of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division for a job well done?

For months these candidates, with the exception of Joe Lieberman, have mocked President Bush for seeking to defend the lives of the American people against terrorism. Where are the Weapons of Mass Destruction, they declaimed? Well, the American Army has found and captured the only Weapon of Mass Destruction that mattered.

These must have been trying days for President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and their staffs as they were nickled and dimed by a hostile media corps, embedded or distant, and with a few exceptions the television news anchors, all seeking to turn the moral dimension of the war against Saddam Hussein into a failed and meaningless war with supposedly wasted lives and treasure.

But they can be secure in the knowledge that the surviving families of the 3000 dead in the World Trade Center will feel that with Saddams capture a measure of justice has been done.

And there is more yet to follow.

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Saddam's Long Ties with the United States (posted 12-18-03)

From the newsletter of the National Security Archive (Dec. 18, 2003):

Newly declassified documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive show the British Embassy in Baghdad recommending Saddam Hussein to London in 1969 as a "presentable young man" with an "engaging smile," "with whom, if only one could see more of him, it would be possible to do business."

U.S. documents published in today’s Saddam Hussein Sourcebook quote Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1975 telling the Iraqi foreign minister "we do not think there is a basic clash of national interests between Iraq and the United States" (the Iraqi disagreed), and that Israeli influence on U.S. policy would diminish given "our new electoral law" which means "the influence of some who financed the elections before isn’t so great."

The newly declassified briefing notes for special envoy Donald Rumsfeld’s second trip to meet Saddam Hussein in March 1984 reveal Rumsfeld’s instructions to reinforce the message of U.S. interest in improved relations "at a pace of Iraq’s own choosing," and to emphasize that U.S. criticism of Saddam’s chemical weapons use versus Iran was not meant as a pro-Iranian or anti-Iraq gesture. Saturday, December 20, marks the 20th anniversary of Rumsfeld's famous handshake meeting with Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.

When the U.S. Senate passed economic sanctions on Iraq in 1988 for using poison gas against the Kurds, U.S. ambassador April Glaspie reported that the U.S. construction company Bechtel planned to employ "non-U.S. suppliers of technology and continue to do business in Iraq," according to a CONFIDENTIAL State Department cable. In October 2003, Bechtel landed the largest U.S.
Agency for International Development contract to date for infrastructure repair work in Iraq, with an initial payment of $34.6 million and long-term value of up to $680 million.

The "Saddam Hussein Sourcebook" posted today also brings together five briefing books previously published by the National Security Archive into one searchable file of primary sources. These include "Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction," "Overhead Imagery of Iraq," "Alleged Iraqi War Criminals in 1992," "Operation Desert Storm," and "Shaking Hands with Saddam: U.S. Policy before the Gulf War."

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Saddam's Capture Shatters Arab Illusions (posted 12-18-03)

Fouad Ajami, writing in the Wall Street Journal (Dec. 18, 2003):

We owe to Hannah Arendt one of the central insights of our time: the banality of evil. Arendt returned with that verdict after covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. There were the monstrous deeds of Eichmann and the Nazi regime whose work he had done. But there was also the man in the glass booth whom Arendt saw and described: "Medium-sized, slender, middle-aged, with receding hair, ill-fitting teeth, and nearsighted eyes, who throughout the trial keeps craning his scraggy neck toward the bench... ." There is a swindle, a disappointment to great evil. It never quite lives up to expectations. The image of Saddam Hussein in captivity was but the latest variation on Arendt's theme. The dazed and scruffy man in the "spider hole" was the very same tyrant who had inflicted unspeakable sorrow on his people, and on the peoples of two neighboring lands.

It adds nothing to say that the insurgency in that Sunni triangle of rage will go on with or without Saddam. Nor is it particularly insightful to assert that the jihadists who made their way to Iraq -- across the Saudi or Jordanian or Syrian borders -- are of a religious bent and had no use for the secular despot. In a highly personalistic culture susceptible to myth, the former dictator on the run had become a rebuke to American power, proof of our inability to penetrate an alien, seemingly inaccessible place. We had awed the region with our high-tech wizardry; so our enemies fell back on the consolation that we were strangers destined to lose our way in their cities and towns. Save for a minority of Arabs who cast their fate with us (I think of Kuwait and Qatar) we were in truth alone in an Arab world that wished us ill in this campaign. We had gotten our comeuppance, our enemies and false friends alike were happy to proclaim. The insurgents had bought time, and additional yarn, for Arab delusions; and the disappearance of the dictator fed the idea that we'd blundered into a place destined to thwart our power.

November had been the cruelest of months: our Chinooks and Black Hawks were being shot out of the skies over Tikrit and Fallujah and Mosul. There were rumors that we had begun to scramble for a way out. The capture of the dictator came in the nick of time. Our troubles are not over, not by a long shot. But the message has been received in Araby. The man who'd strutted around the region, who for all practical purposes dominated inter-Arab politics for nearly a generation, was found at the bottom of an eight-foot hole. Legends die hard. The crowd is, of course, what it is, and its capacity for self-delusion is bottomless. In the hours that followed the dictator's capture, and in the shadow of that image of him meekly undergoing a medical examination, the legend spread, in Ramallah and Cairo, and as far away as the Muslim suburbs of France, that it was all a trick, that the man had been drugged, that it had all been an American hoax.

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Will Saddam Whine Like Eichmann? (posted 12-15-03)

Martin Sieff, writing for UPI (Dec. 15, 2003):

What will Saddam Hussein's defense strategy be when he comes up before an Iraqi-led tribunal to account for 30 years and more merciless oppression of his own people?

The record of war crimes tribunals over the past 60 years suggests he will have at least three options. He can make a Milosevic, emulate Eichmann or go for Goering.

Former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic is now on trial for war crimes at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Milosevic tried as long as he could to fall back on his alleged sickness and infirmity. This could be a possible strategy for Saddam....

But Saddam may instead choose to emulate Adolf Eichmann, the middle-level Nazi bureaucrat who was the administrative driving force in implementing the genocide of the Jews of Europe during World War II. After Eichmann was captured by Israeli agents in Buenos Aries and flown to the Jewish state where he was put on trial for his crimes, he tried at first to cooperate with his captors and ingratiate himself with them. Some of the initial reports on Saddam's capture suggest that this was his first reaction, too, after being captured by the U.S. military....

If Saddam recovers his spirits and morale in captivity, he may be more likely to"go for Goering." The former Nazi Reichsfuhrer had become a figure of contempt -- a self-indulgent, obscenely overweight drug addict -- during the last, grim years of the Third Reich. But under Allied -- predominantly U.S. supervision at Nuremburg -- Hermann Goering regained much of his health and his old spirits and defended himself with unrepentant energy and vigor before the International Tribunal....

Indeed, for all his ruthlessness and obsession with power over the decades, Saddam in the dock may well prove to be an Eichmann rather than a Goering. Goering, for all his crimes and excesses, had been a genuinely heroic combat pilot and air ace during World War I. Eichmann was a physical coward who crumbled as soon as he fell into Israeli hands. All the Israeli agents, military figures and prosecutors who dealt with him in captivity recalled him with unanimous contempt.

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What Saddm's Capture Means for the War on Terrorism (posted 12-15-03)

Gerald Posner, writing in the NY Daily News (Dec. 12, 2003):

While most U.S. government officials enjoyed a day savoring Saddam Hussein's capture, CIA analysts began feverishly working to determine what it means to the overall war on terrorism.

They are likely to conclude that his arrest is a body blow to international terrorists and their supporters. Not because he was financing their murderous efforts - the money pipeline closed with the American seizure of Baghdad - and not even because he was involved in the insurgency against U.S. forces in Iraq. Instead, how he was captured is significant. Who expected Saddam, the last great tyrant who bragged he was a modern-day Saladin, the great Muslim warrior, would so meekly be taken by"infidel" soldiers?

The dictator who threatened the"mother of all battles" and a"river of blood" for American troops was instead run to ground, cowering in a hole, looking more the bewildered country farmer than the iron-ruler of Iraq....

Yesterday, in Yemen, a hotbed of anti-American activity, a journalist asked passersby what they thought of the news. A dejected 50-year-old merchant, Mohammed Abdel Qader Mohammadi, said what was on many minds."I expected him to resist or commit suicide before falling into American hands," he said."He's disappointed a lot of us. He's a coward."

That judgment unsettles many potential recruits to terror groups. If Saddam will not die for the cause of expelling Americans, then should they?

Saddam's capture also means there is now less inspiration for those fighting U.S. troops in Iraq. Will they fight as hard and still risk their lives? The attacks will not stop overnight, but as they slowly subside, it will free the U.S. military to once again take a more aggressive role in Afghanistan. The Taliban and Al Qaeda cells that have had an opportunity to regroup there because of our intense focus on Iraq will soon be under renewed pressure.

And, finally, there is one person who understands better than most the effect of Saddam's capture on the war on terror. That is Osama Bin Laden, still clinging to freedom somewhere in the frontier region separating Afghanistan and Pakistan. This arrest is a vivid reminder that his own days of freedom cannot run forever.

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What Should Be Done with Fallen Dictators? posted 12-17-03)

John Keegan, writing in the Melbourne Age (Dec. 15, 2003):

How to dispose of a fallen dictator is a problem of immense complexity for victor states.

Sovereign states shrink from disposing peremptorily of sovereign rulers, as Saddam was. The process, whichever is chosen, always threatens to set inconvenient precedents.

Since 1648, when the Treaty of Westphalia created the principle that sovereign states, and therefore their sovereign heads, are legally and morally absolute, there has been no legal basis for proceeding against such a person, however heinous the crimes he may have committed.

A fallen ruler is therefore an acute legal embarrassment, as first became apparent with the flight of Napoleon from France in 1815. Napoleon took refuge aboard a British warship and then sought to throw himself on the mercy of the Prince Regent. The British government, horrified at the prospect of his having recourse to British law, refused to allow him to land and deported him to the distant island colony of St Helena, the contemporary equivalent of Guantanamo Bay. The legality of his exile was never tested in law, since his own country, France, refused to protect him, holding him to be a usurper, and the British were determined not to allow him to proceed in British courts. His hope of finding sanctuary in the US was physically prevented.

A similar situation arose in acute form towards the end of the Second World War.

The crimes of Hitler and his minions were of a character that cried out to heaven for justice. At a lower level of iniquity, his allies Mussolini and the Emperor Hirohito also demanded legal punishment. The victor states, as the war drew to its close, realised they did not have an open-and-shut case. For one thing, Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito were all sovereign rulers. For another, there was no body of law under which they could be arraigned.

It was therefore a considerable relief when the Italian partisans solved the Mussolini problem by murdering him and Hitler solved, or at least simplified, the Nazi problem by committing suicide. His death in the bunker, however, still left the problem of what to do with his associates. The victorious Allies, determined to bring the Nazi crew to justice, had therefore to create from scratch a court and a body of law that would allow due process.

The outcome was the International Military Tribunal, convened at Nuremberg, and a new set of laws, founded on the idea of universal natural justice, under which they might be found guilty. So, eventually, most of them were, the worst criminals being condemned to death and executed.

The difficult issue of the culpability of Admiral Doenitz, who, as Hitler's successor, might have claimed sovereign immunity, was evaded by trying him for his criminal conduct as a military commander before he succeeded Hilter.

That still left Hirohito, whose complicity in the crimes of the Japanese generals could probably have been proved. Historical evidence brands him a guilty man. The US, the occupying power, decided, however, that its desire to remake Japan as a democratic state would be greatly facilitated if the imperial system was left in place. For reasons of political expediency, therefore, Hirohito was spared prosecution and allowed to regain his respectability as a constitutional monarch, something he certainly was not during his years as a war leader.

None of these precedents seems likely to spare Saddam. He may, de facto, have been head of state but, by fleeing his capital and office at the outset of the second Gulf War, he effectively abandoned whatever constitutional status he enjoyed.