So, the infamous Butcher of Baghdad is having his day in court. And with that, we hope and assume that Iraq will become the great “beacon of democracy” that Bush has envisioned.
But the words and opinions of the Iraqi citizens tell another story. Yes granted, those persecuted by Saddam have a score to settle, and with good reason. But they seem either unwilling or unable to at least try to entertain the notion of at least one basic democractic principle, due process:
“This is divine justice,” said Shakir Majeed, 38, an appliance repairman who was fiddling with an electric generator in his shop, so as to keep the television going. “The proper sentence for him is execution, but this method of trying him is not encouraging. His crimes are many and the court shouldn’t spend time hearing him out. The court should judge him at the first session without listening to his defense.”
[…]
“The judge dealt with Saddam as a regular man, not as a criminal,” said Akil Jawad, 20, a tailor in Sadr City trying to mend a shirt with a sewing machine while watching the trial.
All right, I’ll give these guys this much: it’s very, very hard to truly treat Saddam as “innocent until proven guilty.” I mean, we all know that he used chemical weapons and killed scores of Shiites and Kurds. We all know that he invaded Kuwait and plundered that country, his troops on orders to rape, pillage and kill. And we all know that Saddam was a ruthless, torturous monster of a dictator. Right?
But, why do we know these things? Because we’ve told that these things happened, by those who were ultimately victorious in bringing about Saddam’s defeat. Just like the victors of WWII told us that Axis powers slaughtered millions of people under the command of a similarly ruthless, insane maniac, and therefore we know that the Nazi regime was deserving of its ultimate defeat.
But even as we know these truths to be “self evident,” they aren’t so in everyone’s minds. There is still a revisionist movement out there bent on trying to convince the world that the Holocaust was all one big myth, a yarn spun by the victors to justify an allegedly-senseless attack of poor Germany.
How do we counter revisionist theory? Well, we can do so because of the abundant presence of evidence, such as that presented at the Nuremberg trials. The trails were done carefully and methodically to show the world that this wasn’t just “victor’s justice,” a kangaroo court that would take for granted that the defendents were bad people.
Likewise, the victors must do the same with Saddam. Not everyone “knows” what we know, and there are plenty in Iraq and in the neighboring region who will vigorously defend and justify his actions as not only legal and necessary, but the moral and upstanding thing to do. This is why a slow, fair and methodical trial is necessary, regardless of how obvious the crime may seem.
It would appear that many Iraqis have a lot to learn, including this very basic concept, before democracy will really work there.