07.07.2004
Show (trial) time?
Mike Macnair looks at the highly hypocritical trial of Saddam Hussein
On July 1 Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, president and tyrant of Iraq before the US invasion, appeared in a ‘special court’ to be formally charged with a mixture of war crimes, crimes against humanity and simple political murders.
Numerous reports in the western media have shown that many Iraqis would be happy to see Saddam tried for his crimes, but are hostile to the present process. Their gut reaction to this intended show trial is the right reaction.
‘Like a puppet-master’
Saddam is notionally in the custody of the ‘interim government’ (IG). In fact, he is in US custody. The US armed forces tried to control what was published of the appearance. They claimed that the judge had prohibited recording and transmission of sound from the courtroom, which was in fact untrue, and confiscated tapes and censored them. Their technical skill did not extend to an effective prevention of sound recording. They, or the judge, prohibited publication of the legal arguments put up by Saddam’s co-defendants - the various senior ministers of the former government the US has also put on trial.
The ‘special court’ is governed not by any variant of Iraqi or international law, but by a ‘statute’ setting it up, drafted by US government lawyers. As Anthony Scrivener QC pointed out in the June 4 Independent on Sunday, this “bears an uncanny resemblance” to the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague - which the US administration has vigorously opposed. Scrivener’s question: if the US wants to proceed against Saddam under something resembling international law, why don’t they hand Saddam over to the ICC? Another Scrivener quote: professor Michael Scharf, US director of the war crimes regional office, has said that “The United States will be involved in the trial but from behind the scenes, more like a puppet-master”.
Which crimes?
The charges are distinctly ‘select’. The common murder charges concern the killings of:
(1) political party leaders, since Saddam’s seizure of power; and
(2) religious leaders, over the same period.
The war crimes/crimes against humanity charges concern:
(1) The chemical weapons attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988;
(2) The 1983 ‘collective responsibility’ killing of the relatives, and destruction of the home village, of Kurdish Democratic Party leader Massoud Barzani;
(3) Large-scale massacres of Kurds in the late 1980s, and of shias and Kurds in the aftermath of 1991; and
(4) The 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
As George Galloway correctly pointed out in The Guardian (July 1), one key war crime was missing: any mention of the Ba’athist regime’s unprovoked invasion of Iran in September 1980, or the use of chemical weapons in the eight-year war following that invasion. This silence, as Galloway explains, reflects the fact that the Iraqi invasion of Iran was supported by the US and Britain, a support which extended to selling the regime a variety of military material, including the technology of chemical weapons and nerve gas. Any mention of the Iran-Iraq war threatens to expose the real role of the occupiers in supporting the Ba’athist regime for their own ends. It also threatens to embroil some people who are now ‘good’ ex-Ba’athists - supporters of or participants in the puppet regime under the IG.
The Iranian government has also noticed the gap: on July 4 it announced that it would be laying its own charges on the basis of the Ba’athist regime’s conduct in the Iran-Iraq war. This will face the US with the choice between suppressing the charges (and making the show-trial character of the proceedings even more obvious); or letting them in (and exposing even more than now US-British complicity in the crimes of the Ba’athist regime).
It can be added that the US state department in summer of 1990 indicated to the Ba’athist regime that the US would not regard an invasion of Kuwait as threatening to US interests: for example, “We do not have any defence treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defence or security commitments to Kuwait,” said state department spokeswoman Margaret Tutweiller; or, in the words of US ambassador April Glaspie, “We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts.” A trial before the ICC, or any court independent of the US - even one limited to the present charges - would open up the question of what the US was up to when it indicated to Iraq that it would not respond to an invasion of Kuwait.
This is the answer to Scrivener’s question: why not hand him over to the ICC? The mafia dons (the US administration) want to run a show trial of their hit-men (Saddam and his henchmen) themselves. That way they can minimise any exposure of their own responsibility for their hit-men’s crimes.
Why now?
Bringing Saddam and his associates to the ‘special court’ to be charged at this time is clearly part of the same political operation as the ‘transfer of sovereignty’ to the IG.
From the standpoint of the former Ba’athist elements in the IG, getting rid of Saddam and co plays the same role that the imprisonment (and fortunate death) of Judge Jeffreys did for the British Tories in 1688-89. Saddam and his colleagues are to be the scapegoats. By dumping all the blame on a few criminals at the top, space is made for other Ba’athists to take their distance from their own criminal responsibility.
The occupiers, as I argued in last week’s Weekly Worker, must be hoping that some re-Ba'athification will provide at least a sufficient temporary improvement in stability, behind which they can draw back their forces. In this context they share goals with the IG’s ex-Ba’athists. But putting Saddam on trial is also independently and fundamentally important in relation to an exit strategy for Bush-Blair.
In the US the invasion was sold primarily as part of the ‘war on terror’. It is now blindingly obvious that the invasion of Iraq has increased the political authority and mobilising capacity of al-Qa’eda and Wahhabi islamist jihadi politics in general, and provided a new focus for jihadi mobilisation after Afghanistan, and an enormous and diffuse US military target in Iraq. It has also provided the basis for more open jihadi action against foreigners in Saudi Arabia. In other words, it has worsened the military-political position of the US in relation to the people who launched the 9/11 attacks, etc.
In Britain the war was sold primarily on the grounds of the Ba’athists’ (or ‘Saddam’s’) alleged ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and aggressive plans. No WMDs have been found, and the alleged grounds for the claim that there were any after the mid-1990s have steadily unravelled. The obviously lawless aggression of the US-led coalition against Iraq has increased the efforts of other members of the ‘axis of evil’ (Iran, Korea) to acquire nuclear weapons, and its diplomatic and military consequences have weakened the position of US and British imperialism in responding to these developments.
What is left for the pro-war side to justify its war? The answer is the one single thing which was the core of the arguments of the ‘pro-war left’. Saddam Hussein was a tyrant and a criminal. Never mind that he was a tyrant and a criminal who for many years had been given political and military support by the US and Britain. Nonetheless it was - David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchins and all the rest claim - justifiable to invade to free the Iraqis from this tyranny - to get rid of Saddam.
In this the left apologists for the war had surprising common ground with George W Bush. Bush had been arguing since before he was elected for ‘dealing with’ Saddam. It was his father’s ‘unfinished business’ from 1991. The neo-conservatives in his administration had other reasons for wanting to invade and make over some Middle Eastern state.
The state of the US capitalist economy needed the US to invade somewhere. But there is no strong reason to suppose that Bush’s personal motivations for choosing this target went beyond the desire to overthrow Saddam and finish his father’s unfinished business.
Setting up a ‘new Iraqi government’ which ‘puts Saddam on trial’ thus puts Bush-Blair on the road to an exit strategy. We went to war to get rid of Saddam, they will say, and we got rid of him. Now we can pull out.
If the new regime turns out to be as tyrannical as the old, or Iraq descends into warlordism - not our problem. The world will be invited to forget, please, the massive destruction imposed on Iraq by our open war in 1991, our undeclared war of blockade and air raids (‘sanctions’) between 1991 and 2003, our 2003 invasion, the chaos of our non-compliance with the international law duties of occupiers (we didn’t want to put that many troops into Iraq) and our corrupt and kleptocratic occupation administration.
Responding
Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti and his associates are criminals and it is right that they should be put on trial. The US’s puppet show, however, cannot without scare-quotes be called a trial.
The Iranian regime, reactionary as this regime is, is right to lay charges before the court on the Iran-Iraq war. Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s representative in Karbala, Abdul Mahdi al-Karbala'i, is right to demand that the trial “be used to discover all the crimes of Saddam, especially those still hidden from the people” (http://www.juancole.com/). But these are no more than “exposure demands”: there is no likelihood that this US-controlled ‘special court’ will allow a real and open trial of the Ba’athist leaders for their crimes.
The right response to this ‘trial’ from the British workers’ and anti-war movement is to fight for British troops to get out of Iraq. Get out now, totally, and without preconditions. Leave the Ba’athist leaders to be dealt with by the Iraqi people.
At the same time, the shift into exit strategy and end-game marked by the ‘transfer of sovereignty’ and the beginning of the ‘trial’ means that the anti-war movement will increasingly be faced, not with the imperialist occupiers trying to hold on in Iraq, but with them trying to create some sort of new puppet regime onto whom they can shuffle off responsibility. This makes all the more urgent the struggle for solidarity with the Iraqi workers’ movement.