Nov. 7, 2006
 
EDITORIAL: Guilty of This and Much Else Besides
 
By Dale McFeatters
Scripps Howard News Service
 
"Long live the Arabs! Long live the Kurds!" shouted Saddam Hussein, who was responsible for killing so many of both, as he was led from the Baghdad courtroom where he had been sentenced to death for crimes against humanity. In fact, it was one of his smaller crimes for which he is to be hanged, the systematic execution of 148 Shiite men and boys in 1982 whose crime was to live in a village not far from where the Iraqi leader's motorcade was fired upon.
 
The question of his guilt was foregone. His brutal bureaucracy left a voluminous paper trail and there was no lack of eyewitnesses. The prosecution's problem was not how to prove his crimes but deciding where to start. They decided to start small and work up. Assuming Saddam isn't executed first, his next trial is for the gassing, bombing and shooting of 180,000 Kurds, a number more commensurate to the scale on which Saddam preferred to operate.
 
Still, the proceedings were only a model of jurisprudence in comparison with the courts under the 24 years of Saddam's rule. The Iraqi government kept demanding a quick guilty verdict and so harassed the first judge that he resigned. The defense was hampered in its access to documents and witnesses and three of its numbers were assassinated. And the defendants -- two others received death sentences -- constantly disrupted the proceedings.
 
The American presence was restrained, even though the United States paid for the proceedings and they were conducted in the heavily fortified U.S. Green Zone. But it was better to have the Iraqis do this themselves rather than turn Saddam over to an international tribunal where the 69-year-old deposed dictator likely would have died of old age before a verdict was reached or, far, far worse, bringing him to the United States.
 
The Saddam verdict is subject to automatic appeal but the government is pressing for the sentence to be carried out within months, by next spring at the latest.
 
The reaction in Iraq precisely mirrored the nation's deepening ethnic divisions. The Kurds and the Shiites, who were the principal victims of Saddam's murderous rule, took to the streets in celebration. The Sunnis, dispossessed of their preeminent position under Saddam, vowed revenge.
 
The Sunnis resurrected an old chant of loyalty: "Our blood and our souls we sacrifice for you, Saddam." One hopes that the Iraqis will reflect that far too much blood has been sacrificed in Saddam's name already.
 
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.net