No one should be surprised that Saddam Hussein would be convicted of a war crime, but the particular crime for which he was to be executed was an odd choice, to say the least. The torture and killing of over 100 people in the village of Dujail in reprisal for a presidential assassination attempt by Iranian sympathizers early in the Iran-Iraq war was certainly cruel and unjust, but hardly atypical of war. Collective punishment of towns considered treasonous has been a staple of warfare, and over the last few decades it has been practically a standard counter-terrorist policy of the Israeli state. The U.S., for its part, willingly tolerates the “collateral” loss of thousands of innocent lives in the pursuit of a supposed greater good, such as its own security, so it is hard to see why one would begrudge Saddam a mere hundred reprisal killings.
It is true that this case had the advantage of a clearer trail of direct presidential culpability, but there were far better cases from which to choose in this regard, without the clouding circumstances of war with Iran and an attack on a head of state. For example, during a televised purge of the Baath party, Saddam read names of those who had fallen out of favor, and they were led out to be executed. The footage of this purge exists, and provides unambiguous evidence of purely political executions. Unfortunately, the victims are Sunni and Baath, and the war crimes tribunals were concerned only with crimes against the Kurds and Shiites now in power, the same groups who supported Iran during the Iran-Iraq war.
The Dujail massacre has another advantage, in that it occurred before the U.S. lent its overt support to Saddam’s regime. Through most of the Iran-Iraq war, the United States had removed Iraq from its list of terrorist states and allowed American companies to sell the materials needed for chemical weapons. The U.S. provided aerial intelligence to help Saddam select Iranian targets, several of which were struck with chemical weapons. The American press showed little sympathy for the gassing of Iranians, but there was outrage toward the 1988 gassing of Kurds, which the Reagan administration met with only a terse statement of disapproval, but no sanctions.
It was during this period that Saddam committed his greatest crimes and earned his reputation for monstrous cruelty. This would have been the more obvious period to find a case that typified his crimes, but this would have been a disaster for the U.S. Saddam’s Western lawyers could no doubt have called upon Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others who aided and abetted Saddam’s genocidal war against the Iranians and their allies in Iraq. The same people who claim that Saddam killed hundreds of thousands neglect to mention that the only way to arrive at such a large figure is to include the Iranian casualties in a war where the U.S. overtly supported Iraq. Naturally, Saddam’s American co-conspirators would have declined to testify, but the public relations damage to this increasingly discredited administration could have been disastrous.
Not that this administration necessarily responds to public opinion. Saddam’s execution has no doubt inspired some more fist-pumping at the White House, and rehabilitated the delusion that success in Iraq can be achieved by an escalation of force deployment. Although President Bush claims the goal is to democratize Iraq, this was an after-the-fact improvisation made necessary by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. The goal in Iraq since the Clinton administration, long before 9/11, has been regime change. If the goal had been security, there would have been no reason for de-Baathification and the wholesale disbanding of the Iraqi army. Those ill-conceived policies (belatedly and partially reversed under Bremer) are the principal reason for the security failure and economic disaster in Iraq, and have made success in those areas practically impossible, as it requires the construction of a modern government from scratch. The failure of Iraq is a legacy of the policy of regime change and the ends-justify-the-means mentality that has prevailed at the policy-making level at the Pentagon and in the White House.
With the death of Saddam Hussein, regime change is complete; that is the only “mission” the U.S. intended to “accomplish” anyway. The socialist structure of Iraq has been dismantled, and restrictions on foreign ownership have been eased, to allow lucrative reconstruction contracts. Careful students of modern history know that the Cold War was about defending capitalism rather than democracy, as the West supported business-friendly dictators and opposed socialism even when it was the product of free elections. The idea that “the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power” seems unassailable in principle, but the reality in Iraq makes that proposition more doubtful by the day. At any rate, that oft-repeated Bush/Blair mantra simply reiterates the morally bankrupt ends-justify-the-means mentality that destroyed a nation in order to “save” it.