I hope we all savoured yesterday’s sweet taste of success. Because as far as Saddam is concerned, it may be the only satisfaction we get.
Saddam quickly followed his craven capitulation with an unleashing of the barely lucid, self-aggrandising rhetoric we’ve come to expect of him and his ilk. Defiant words and cowardly acts – nothing new there. But Saddam being captured alive means that now that the party is over, the U.S. has to figure out what to do with him. Tricky.
It seems obvious that the next steps are to question Saddam for intelligence purposes and then submit him to a tribunal where he will be made accountable for his deeds. President Bush signalled as much when he said that Saddam would “face the justice he denied to millions.” But the conduct of the war on terror, which blends law enforcement and intelligence gathering in a way that undermines due process, will make forcing Saddam to take responsibility for his actions more difficult than one might expect.
First, let’s look at intelligence gathering. There is unanimous agreement that good intelligence gathering and analysis, focusing on human intelligence rather than signals intelligence, were primarily responsible for the capture of Saddam. Now that he is in custody, the U.S. will rightly want to squeeze Saddam dry of every last scrap of information. WMD information would be nice, but what’s really needed are the goods on the resistance movement. Cutting off the figurehead is a very good start, but the capture or defeat of the resistance leaders is an essential condition for the success of state-building in Iraq.
But intelligence is not just about what you know, but who knows it, and who you know knows it. (Or, as Rumsfeld might say, it’s about limiting the ‘unknown knowns’.) That’s why the internees at Guantanamo Bay are languishing without due process or even the hope of it (as I’ve blogged before). You can’t squeeze your subject dry of information and then let them go and tell others what they’ve told you. Or at least, you hang on to them for a very, very long time, until they can do you and your intelligence operatives and sources no harm. The last thing you want to do, while a military campaign is still going, is give your prime intelligence source a soap box to the world in the form of an international tribunal.
Now let’s look at what a tribunal might involve. It requires first and foremost the collection of evidence and reliable witnesses. Evidence is not the same as intelligence. Much damning intelligence may have to be concealed, because it would be too damaging or risky to reveal. Evidence also requires a pedigree or audit trail; it can’t be vouch-safed on a tip-off from Saddam’s third cousin once removed. What is good enough intelligence to find someone hiding down a spy hole, or order the policing of a no-fly zone, will not necessarily stand up as evidence to convict a genocidal maniac. (Which is not at all to say that it can’t be done – it’s just a lot trickier and more time-consuming than we might think.) Hopefully, Saddam’s capture will encourage many potential witnesses to come forward, but again, the sifting and weighing of their testimony will be difficult and will take time. Some may be better used as intelligence sources than trotted out in public to convict Saddam.
The needs of a successful intelligence-gathering operation and those of due process are contradictory. Justice is rules-governed – process and procedure are everything. Intelligence operations are purely outcome-oriented. Different people, different rules. I don’t at all envy the people who have to decide just how long to question Saddam for, and when and how to conduct a tribunal. How to satisfy the righteous anger of the Iraqi people with the administration’s imperatives in current and future operations?
Then there’s the shape of the tribunal itself. Iraq’s judicial institutions are clearly not yet up to the job, and its neighbours won’t be much help either. Sending Saddam to the Hague would be politically unpalatable in the U.S. and would deny the Iraqi people their chance to see justice be done. But a purely U.S.-led initiative would be a disaster in terms of credibility, and let rip a million conspiracy theories throughout the Arab world. Given the split in the UN Security Council, and the U.S.’s unwillingness to share the spoils of war with its un-supportive allies, it will find it hard to involve the UN. Yet somehow, under some institutional aegis, an international tribunal will be cobbled together.
What of the admissible subject matter for such a tribunal? The neo-cons would love to use the process to expose France and Russia’s commercial involvement with Saddam’s regime. But back when Saddam was gassing the Shi’ites and the Kurds, the country was full of Americans doing business, not all of it clean. Dig too deep in Iraq, and the resulting oil gush will smear everyone.
But let’s say that a tribunal of sorts is set up in Iraq, and the show goes on. What do we think we can really get from Saddam? Some humiliation? An apology? A death sentence maybe.
But the planet is crawling with unrepentant mass-murders. Just ask the Cambodians. (Or the Chileans, or the Burmese, or the Chechens, or the Kurds in just about every country they’ve ever lived in.) All we will get out of Saddam is the same, chilling madman’s logic that put him where he is today. Beneath the pan-Arab nationalism, the quasi-socialist rhetoric, and the Ba-athist ideology, there’s nothing more than a motiveless malignity.* There’s no satisfaction to be had, because there’s no ‘there’ there.
But yes, I do hope the U.S. garners intelligence from Saddam that helps to eliminate the resistance attacks. And I do hope the tribunal somehow manages to get it right, and that its conduct and outcome help the Iraqi people through the process of building a functioning, democratic state.
After the party comes the hangover. The world is arguably safer today than it was two days ago, but none too cheery for that.
* For more Shakespearian comparisons, read John Holbo.
{ 7 comments }
Barry 12.15.03 at 1:47 pm
A rather long post. Let’s see if we can condense it a bit:
1) When extracting intelligence from a prisoner, it’s good that his/her comrades don’t know what has been spilled. True. However, whenever a prisoner is presumably subject to torture, the *only* reasonable assumption is that the prisoner will quickly spill his/her guts.
2) Compromising intelligence sources used to capture Saddam, or used to document his crimes, would be bad. Agreed. However, the former could simply not be used in a trial, since it is not relevant. There’s probably enough evidence of enough crimes to convict Saddam of virtually anything at least 100 times over.
3) The information problem faced by the US administration is really how to keep Saddam from talking in public. He’s got to have lots of damaging information about higher-ups in the Bush administration – during the 1980’s, when ‘gassing his own people’ was merely a PR problem. And later, in the 1990’s when a wholly-owned French subsidiary of Halliburton (i.e., Cheney, Inc) was doing business with him.
freddie-poo 12.15.03 at 1:52 pm
I am surprised that the rleased version of how Saddam was caught is not questioned. After all, our troops managed to get tips and info from families close to Saddam? Do you really believe that story? Oh, yes. If you are looking for him he is in a hole about x miles from here. Any other questions? for a better pespective see my site: http://www.GoodShit.phlap.net, where I have posted a piece that is much more sensible.
Dan Hardie 12.15.03 at 3:30 pm
I know this sounds negative, but the idea that the US can extract useful intelligence from Saddam about the guerrillas rests on two assumptions: one, that he can be broken under interrogation; two, that he has a lot of useful intelligence to transmit. And I don’t buy either assumption. The first seems (I’m sorry) utterly ludicrous; the second, counterintuitive though this may seem, unlikely.
Re breaking Saddam under interrogation: what are they going to do to him if he doesn’t talk? Strip him of power, kill his sons, invade his country, publicly humiliate him? Oh, wait…And I don’t see too much chance of plea-bargaining, or a beautiful empathetic friendship springing up between Saddam and his interrogators.
Re his probable lack of useful intelligence: any successful guerrilla campaign- one that can generate a large number of attacks on the enemy and maintain a presence in the civilian population- has to be very decentralised. Otherwise it is just too vulnerable to decapitation: you strike the guerrillas’ commander, or cut or infiltrate their communications, without which command and control is impossible, and the guerrillas have lost. Lots of conceivable references on this one: try Mackenzie’s official history of SOE (the French Gaullists in particular were unwilling to accept a decentralised guerrilla structure, and set up a huge politico-military bureaucracy *in Occupied France* under Moulin and Delestraint, which was of course busted in its entirety by the Germans), or anything on the IRA shift to a cellular structure after the early ’70s. It’s not an exact fit, but the closest business comes to a successful guerrilla organisation is the franchise model: lots of eager little beavers handle the bombing and killing; head office diffuses best practice and market information (ie sends out a few instructors, although learning how to make bombs is not all that hard, and warns about potential traitors); and, perhaps, pushes seed money towards those franchisees who seem particularly enterprising. Saddam can’t have been exerting close, real-time command and control over the guerrillas: the landline and mobile phone networks have been largely down since the invasion, and would be insecure anyway; using a satphone would be suicidal; and passing messages by guys on foot or on bikes may be secure but takes time.
My guess is that his primary contribution to the guerrilla campaign was a) to motivate Ba’athist fighters who really did think the chief was going to make a comeback; and b) to intimidate the Sheikhs and other local leaders -who seem to be so important in Iraq- perhaps not to participate actively in attacks but to passively let guerrillas operate on tribal land without tipping off the Americans. Maybe Saddam did think he could say ‘Ali, tell the Tikrit resistance to kill the invaders on Tuesday’, but- like Hitler in the bunker- I doubt that these orders achieved any effect besides bolstering Saddam’s self-delusion.
The one exception to the above is that I would guess that Saddam knows where a lot of his missing dollars are being held, and was in touch with the man or men responsible for funnelling money down to guerrilla groups. People like that don’t trust others with their money. But, as previously stated, I doubt there’s a cat’s chance in hell that he’ll tell the US where to find the money. Maybe now some of the bagmen will make a break for Switzerland or the Bermudas.
As to this not having any effect on the guerrillas: depends which guerrillas. I would say Saddam’s capture is necessary to defeat the guerrillas, but hardly sufficient. The guerillas’ money may well start to dry up. Lots of Ba’athists will now give up the fight; Arab nationalists, blood-feuders looking to avenge relatives killed by US troops, and jihadis will keep going (although they may have been sustained by Ba’athist networks). Local leaders in particular will be less happy to turn a blind eye to the guerrillas; but that doesn’t rule out a possible clash between the coalition forces and Iraqi civilians on other grounds.
Keith M Ellis 12.15.03 at 6:32 pm
Nice analysis, Maria.
pchuck 12.15.03 at 9:39 pm
The Iraqis are going to try him and execute him, toot sweet.
Thorley Winston 12.15.03 at 10:09 pm
I agree with Dan Hardie that it is unlikely that Saddam Hussein will have much useful information with regards to the B’aathist network of terrorists but will still probably be useful in cutting off their funding and demoralizing them. However, in my layman’s opinion, it seems to me that Saddam Hussein’s primary cause and ideology has always been his own survival above all. It may not come to torture (although I would not rule it out, despite the SecDef’s assurance that we will be following the Geneva Convention’s standards on the treatment of POW’s) and faced with the choice between execution and life imprisonment, he might be willing to bargain for the latter. In which case he might be able to provide us some useful intelligence on WMD’s, the disappeared, where he stashed his loot, and maybe some of his cohorts.
I think that there are two additional benefits to putting him on trial.
First, it will provide a closure for a lot of Iraqis who lived under his regime to see him broken, defeated, tried, and punished and perhaps inspire new cooperation with Coalition forces. Maybe we could invite that kid who kicked the head of Saddam Hussein’s statute to play soccer with the real thing. ;)
Second, I think also the prospect of having Arab and Muslim witnesses testifying about the atrocities that were ordered by Saddam Hussein on Arab and Muslim citizens might be useful in countering much of the anti-US propaganda about the “occupation.†At the very least, it will undercut sympathy in the Arab/Muslim nations for the leader who “stood up to the United States†to hear from his victims.
Just a couple of thoughts.
Keith M Ellis 12.15.03 at 10:19 pm
I remain deeply skeptical that Hussein will be present at a full-blown trial. I know what Bush (and Blair, per the comment yesterday—but who says he actually has a vote in this matter?) are saying. But Bush is picking his words carefully. I think the reality of the “trial” will be quite a bit different than what people are expecting at this point.
I am still predicting something more like an Iraqi show trial with Hussein in absentia. As a matter of fact, such a trial with a death sentence, carried out by the Iraqis, would work well for the administration. The question is how soon they’d turn him over to them.
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