Saddam trial

I wonder if the difference (between the pre-1991 crimes and those thereafter) is their “publicness”. The suppression of the Shiite revolt, the Anfal massacre, the invasion of Kuwait–all of them were televised, and large-scale and long-duration enough that the orders MUST have come from the top. The crimes in the 1990’s were mostly “normal dictatorship brutality”–done in the prison system; it is much harder to prove that the orders in any specific case came from Saddam, and the evidence would be only the few who were there–prisoner and jailers–rather than world-wide television coverage.

I wonder if a trial which did cover all of Saddam’s crimes would reveal much about his embarrassing connections to the US. I don’t see that the prosecutors (who would probably be pressured or even coached by the US) would want to bring out that information. As for Saddam, it wouldn’t be much of a defense to say “Yeah, I killed massive numbers of people, but the US backed me all the way until that little misunderstanding over Kuwait, so what’s the problem?”

I suspect lefties who want a trial that will bring out all the facts regarding Saddam’s crimes are expecting much more than you could ever hope to achieve with war crimes trials in the real world.
These things are morality plays with the correct villains pre-determined and there’s going to be tight control over what facts are brought out in the open and neither side will probably have any incentive to want this to happen.

Donald Johnson has half a point – what would indeed come out regarding US complicity, passive or otherwise, with Saddam? I for one would like to see what ever this turns out to be have a large spotlight put on it for all the world to see.

But he has only half a point and that is very telling. Why the exclusive emphasis on the US? What about France – who sold Saddam a nuclear reactor? What about all those other European countries who sold Saddam ingredients for chemical and biological weapons? What about Russian miltary support? If the US was guilty but ended Saddam’s rule, how does one judge those countries who are more guilty of supporitng Saddam and also opposed his overthrow? More severly is my answer.

Just from an optics point of view, don’t you think this is going to play badly. We went to war twice and destroyed a country at a cost of $300 billion to address a purge that occurred in 1982.

The average guy in the street is going to smell the stink of this. It reeks of expediency and cover-up.

Not to mention embarrasing

It’s more than just weapons. In 1988 the Reagan administration gave Saddam $500,000,000 in credits through the Commodity Credit Corporation at a time when Saddam could not easily obtain credit.

In 1989, after Halabja the Bush I adminstration doubled the amount to $1,000,000,000.

My source: Samantha Power’s A Problem From Hell.

So what exactly are the war crimes/crimes against humanity in this case? He put down a civil insurrection using bloody tactics, but it doesn’t seem outside world norms. Stomping on people after an insurrection/coup attempt is the norm, not the exception. That’s how it was always handled in the US (18th to mid 19th century). If he executed people after a trial, well, they got a trial. How do you differentiate that from situations elsewhere?

Anthony posts a most impressive list of weapons sales to Iraq, which sadly does not point out what it measures. Is that the percentage of weight? Quantity? Cost? We don’t know, so it’s completely meaningless.

It also fails to distinguish which of those sales comprised WMD.

Fortunately we can check Senator Riegle’s report, where we find the U.S. response to Halabja was to continue to approve transfer of a host of toxic nasties – anthrax, botulinum, West Nile fever etc.

That’s an embarassment that will stay off Saddam’s rap sheet.

Hey Nonnie Mouse,

can’t you follow a link?

”
France is the country who gave nuclear technology to Israel. Israel had claimed it was only for civilian uses, and lied.
”

Oh really? There’s plenty of guilt to go around.
(This is a more general example of the idiotic presumption pervading our lives that complicated things have a single cause eg that there’s a single inventor of TV, the internet, computers.)

How the UK gave Israel the bomb

Documents reveal that Britain supplied heavy water without safeguards against military use, enabling the production of nuclear weapons

David Leigh
Thursday August 4, 2005
The Guardian

Britain secretly supplied the 20 tons of heavy water to Israel nearly half a century ago which enabled it to make nuclear weapons, according to Whitehall documents which have been discovered at the Public Records Office.
Officials in the Macmillan government deliberately concealed the deal from the US, according to the files, which were discovered by BBC Newsnight and broadcast last night.

Historians and politicians have been startled by the discovery, which sheds new light on the process by which Israel was able to circumvent attempts to restrict membership of the “nuclear club” to the great powers.

Most of those involved are now dead, but Lord (Ian) Gilmour, who was active in Conservative politics during that era, said last night: “I would have been astonished and found it absolutely unbelievable.” He said he did not believe Harold Macmillan or his ministers knew anything about the sale, which Britain permitted without demanding safeguards against military use.

“They’ve gone out of their way to do it without safeguards,” he said. “One would have thought that any reasonably educated civil servant wouldn’t have dreamed of doing anything like this without consulting a minister but as far as I can see they didn’t.”

A nuclear specialist, Frank Barnaby, said: “I had no idea at all the British were involved.”

The sale, in two successive 10-ton shipments to Israel from a British port, went to Israel’s secret underground reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert.

Dr Barnaby said the deal appeared “rather foolhardy” and added: “I would have thought a cautious government would have in no way been seen to be doing anything to help the Israeli nuclear programme.”

The primary motive for the sale, according to the documents, appeared to be commercial. The British atomic energy authority was able to get rid of a consignment of heavy water worth £1.5m, or £20m in today’s prices, which it had bought from Norway but no longer had a use for.

The deal was structured as a resale to Norway, which then traded the consignment on to Israel. This enabled British officials to say they had no responsibility themselves for imposing safeguards.

But, according to the documents, the deal was concealed from the US, which was hostile to proliferation, because the Eisenhower administration might have insisted on unacceptable conditions which would have scuppered the sale.

When Robert McNamara became the US defence secretary in 1961, he and President Kennedy strived to stop Israel from going on to build nuclear weapons. He told Newsnight last night that he had never known of Britain’s behaviour at the time.

“The fact Israel was trying to develop a nuclear bomb should not have come as a surprise but that Britain should have supplied it with heavy water was indeed a surprise to me,” he said.

“It’s very surprising to me that we weren’t told because we shared information about the nuclear bomb very closely with the British.”

The origins of the heavy water used in the Dimona reactor remained almost entirely unknown until the revelations of Mordechai Vanunu, a disaffected Dimona technician, in the 1980s.

It was disclosed then that the 20 tons originated from Norway. But Norway itself continued to remain silent about the true nature of the deal.

Heavy water, made by a laborious electrolysis process, is so called because it contains extra neutrons. It was a crucial element of the kind of basic nuclear reactor then being built by Israel with French help, which used natural uranium rather than the more advanced technology involving enriched uranium fuel.

A lot of the posts hit the nail on the head.
Pre-1991 chrages would indict a lot of Hussein’s former supporters. That would include the list of nations Anthony featured above.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/index.htm
-thats a good site featuring a long paper trail of U.S./Iraq diplomacy prior to the first Gulf War.

Dan,

Re-arrange the following words: “head wall knocking your against”.

“Of course, I understand that America’s real sin is, well, being America.”

_Your_ America, anyway.

As I recall, male inhabitants of fighting age before the second assault on Fallujah were prevented from leaving, on the grounds that they might be insurgents. That’s a war crime—I don’t know how it compares to Dujail.

It doesn’t have to “compare” – that Jeff Dahmer is tried for murder doesn’t prevent someone who “only” murdered their spouse in a crime of passion also being charged. If the US committed war crimes, the claim “Saddam was worse” isn’t a defense.

Al Capone was eventually busted for tax evasion, which I suppose is a precedent. I am mildy impressed, though, that Saddam’s major contribution to the underworld doesn’t seem to get a gurnsey. The invasion of Kuwait is, after all, as nothing on the scale of the Valkyries compared to the attack on Iran. Millions, as opped to hundreds of thousands, on both sides died because Saddam wanted the credit for engrossing some few acres of Gulf. Objectively, that’s the biggest impact he’s ever had; at Nuremberg they covered in some detail the crime of waging offensive war; why not here and now?
And while I wouldn’t mourn his death, I’m against his killing, on the grounds that nobody who isn’t an American even has to think about the issue any more: you don’t fucking kill people if it can be avoided.

Chris, the problem with the Iran-Iraq war is that those countries had been in conflict about the border before and trying to determine who was most at fault is very tricky. It’s not as if Saddam intended the war to drag on and cause all those millions of casualties. Then it is politically inconvenient to bring up that war and make Iran the innocent victim. They are supposed to be an evil rogues state after all. Even worse, if you make the war against Iran a crime then what about all the countries that supported Iraq?

For the same reason Halabja is inconvenient to prosecute. It was part of the Iran war, both sides used gas, and Saddam’s lawyer is bound to bring up the old CIA reports that blamed the attack on Iran.

thomas,

The specific issue of the border dispute was the Shatt al Arab waterway. The Algiers accord of 1975 (signed by VP Saddam Hussein) resolved that issue in Iran’s favour while a later treaty (Frontier and northerly Relations, 1975) settled other border disputes in Iraq’s favour.

The Algiers Accord was something of a humiliation for a lot of Iraqi’s. The impetus for signing it came from the Baathist’s inability to deal with Kurdish seperatism which was being sponsored by Iran. That support was withdrawn and the Baathists were able to turn their attention to creating their version of the perfect Arab state.

By January 1979 the Shah was gone. The Iranian revolution caused waves of discontent amongst the repressed Shia populations of Iraq and the othe Arab gulf states. Iran’s encouragement of Shia discontent was a violation of the 1975 Frontiers treaty. This was the pretext for Saddam’s invasion of Sept 1980. However by aiming as far as the cities of Dezful and Ahvazhe he went far beyond simply seizing the border area. His war was a war of aggression for the purpose of enlarging Iraq’s borders far beyond the traditional, albiet disputed international border.

I guess because they could prosecute Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/etc. for the exact same crime, which might make things a little awkward. I don’t think we’ll be hearing much about “launching an unprovoked war of aggression” when Saddam’s crimes are catalogued.

Isn’t there a difference between a war to annex the territory of another nation and a war to overthrow a regime which has forfieted it’s claim to sovereignty?

No, I certainly don’t believe that killing ‘your own’ people is any different than killing any other people.