Part 1 Two Sundays ago the news broke that Saddam Hussein had finally been captured. He emerged from his hole in the ground, to be revealed to the world – a man brought down from the place of power from which he had tormented his people, no more now than a dazed and grubby-looking fugitive. When Paul Bremer uttered those six words to the assembled press conference – ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!’ – there was prolonged and jubilant applause, though mainly, it seems, from the Iraqis present. Their joy was widely shared around the world.
But there were some for whom, if they felt any joy at all, this wasn’t what was uppermost in their minds; or it wasn’t what was uppermost in their public reaction. A cartoon by Martin Rowson in the Guardian the following morning had Saddam in his lair in the role of the baby Jesus, with Tony Blair and George Bush on their knees before him, their thought bubble reading ‘Our saviour’. The caption was ‘Christmas comes early’. The morning after that, in a cartoon by Steve Bell in the same place, it was Bush rather than Saddam undergoing a medical examination, his mouth wide open to the doctor’s torch, with a small noose dangling within. Such was what these two cartoonists chose to highlight at the moment when one of the cruelest of modern dictators met his nemesis.
Some of the usual suspects chipped in to similar effect. George Galloway was reported as saying that the arrest would not stop the Iraqi ‘resistance’ and might even encourage it. Tony Benn was reported as thinking, for his part, that Saddam was unlikely to get a fair trial as this might embarrass the United States. In the first edition of the Socialist Worker (online) following Saddam’s arrest, there was nothing at all that I could find marking his political end as something to welcome or be relieved about. In a post of couple days ago, I quoted Stephen Sackur on the disgusted – and disgusting – reaction of an acquaintance of his to the Iraqi jubilation. Anecdotal and more direct evidence from the blogosphere and from letters to the press chime in with these responses. It is clear that one thing on many people’s minds was a worry that the arrest of Saddam might help to secure George Bush’s re-election, a worry mattering more to them than did the cause of Iraqi rejoicing.
How to explain it? If one could amass in a single place all the suffering, the sheer volume of human pain and loss and grief which this odious tyrant and his regime have been responsible for, a mountain chain would not encompass it. Yet in the days following his final demise, there was this cramped reaction from a lot of people who you would expect to have been prompted by their own fundamental values towards some feeling of elation, some spirit of solidarity with the joy that those Iraqis gave forth at the Bremer press conference. I have argued (see, in particular, The War in Iraq, July 29) that the opposition to the Iraq war represented a great moral failure on the part of so much left-liberal opinion across the world. This type of reaction was a late echo of that failure.
It is not logically impossible, of course, to oppose a policy and then, if it comes to be implemented despite your opposition, to welcome features of it which you judge to be good and worthwhile. And this indeed is what many opponents of the war went on to do, for all their misgivings: they welcomed the defeat of the Baathist regime back in April; and they took pleasure two weeks ago over the arrest of the man whose creature that regime largely was. But, logically possible as the response may be, it has proved a difficult one psychologically for some to make. The war’s critics were not, mostly, people with any real feeling of warmth for Saddam Hussein. However, many of them have invested so much emotion in opposing the war, and so much contempt and derision for its chief figure, George W. Bush, together with a matching, if somewhat milder, disdain for Tony Blair – a freight of emotion that has often appeared to exceed anything negative they felt (in their guts) towards the former ruler of Iraq – that for some of them, at least, the consequence was that at that crucial symbolic moment when a filthy and murderous dictator’s arrest sealed the end of his regime, the cheer, assuming there was one there to begin with, froze in their throats.
Part 2 I was surprised by the vehemence with which some began to insist, after Saddam’s arrest, that the death penalty must on no account be an option in the judicial process to follow. This view was expressed in a Guardian leader, and then by Max Hastings, in the week that followed. It is also the position of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. I am, myself, an opponent of the death penalty under any system of municipal law and for what one might call ordinary crimes. Moreover, I respect the view of those who are opposed to the death penalty without exception. Yet it seems to me at the very least arguable that, for crimes against humanity on the monstrous scale before us in the present case, there are considerations which apply to the ordinary run of crimes but which fall away here. Two such considerations are these. First, the danger of miscarriages of justice, in which those innocent of any crime are done to death, I would have thought to be almost non-existent in the case of major criminals against humanity. Second, trials like any that is projected for Saddam Hussein or his principal co-perpetrators do not require the institutionalization of an entire system for the regular killing of human beings, such as might be thought to degrade the society which tolerates it.
In current discussion, the anti-death penalty argument often avails itself of George Bush’s record as Governor of Texas, as a way of making some extra rhetorical mileage. But there are other possible references. Primo Levi, for example, whose claims to judiciousness and humanity would withstand most comparisons, wrote in The Drowned and the Saved of ‘the just hangings’ that followed upon Nuremberg and of the deaths that the worst Nazi criminals ‘deserved’. The bare name of Primo Levi is not a sufficient argument for anything, of course; but nor is the bare name of George Bush an argument against it.
What is most crucial to the judicial process now being anticipated and argued about, surely, is that the trial should be fair and seen to be so, and that so far as it is within the power of any group of people to deliver this, justice should be secured for Saddam Hussein’s thousands upon thousands of victims. Securing it seems to me to be compatible both with a process that might issue in the death penalty and with one that could not. The words of Ian Kershaw seem apt here. He wrote that, should Saddam be condemned to death, he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it: ‘I’m against the death penalty, but if ever there was a candidate for it…’