Now don’t go getting me wrong, I don’t like Sadam Hussein, and I certainly don’t think that he was by any stretch of the imagination a nice man, but I can’t shake the feeling that he’s getting an unreasonably rough deal. First, he has his country trashed by what, if it was any country other than America doing the invading, would be acknowledged as an illegal war. Secondly he gets photos of him in his underwear published in major news papers, in flagrant disregard for his rights under the Geneva conventions. Then he is given a trial, but so far his defense team hasn’t been told the charges, hasn’t been given access to any of the millions pages of documents which may be going to be used in evidence against him, and can’t get assurances that the trial will actually be at all “fair” in any legal sense.
The only thing that justifies toppling regimens is if the invaders can show themselves to be better than those they are removing.
Before the American’s started meddling, Iraq had a health system, running water, rule of (admittedly totalitarian) law, and a productive economy. Now the country basically has none of the above, has dozens of people killed each week in unchecked random violence, and even the one thing that the invaders prize most dearly, their much vaunted “justice”, is being denied to those who they overthrew.
Personally I agree with an idea espoused recently by Saddam’s defence team: that Saddam should be tried (and if guilty jailed) in a neutral country such as Sweden, which has undertaken similar judicial roles in the past (The former Serbian president Biljana Plavsic is in jail there after he was convicted of war crimes). If we cannot afford him a free and fair trial then we are ultimately no better than he was.
And if the Americans want him to be executed (which they frankly seem pretty keen on) they should do it themselves and show their true spots (and wear the international condemnation that would follow like real men).