About Saddam

Someone who has, in spite of his humble origins, cut such a gigantic figure across the world stage over the past few decades naturally provides a grotesquely monumental contrast to President Bush, who in spite of his privileged birth, has shown none of the noblesse oblige or even evidence of the strenuous and expensive, and ultimately fruitless, efforts to educate him expended over the whole course of his life. Such a someone, paradoxically enough, Saddam Hussein turned out to be in the few years since, having mistaken the scurrilous face of American imperialism for development assistance since his party was installed by the U.S. so many years ago, he fatally presumed that the U.S. would see his adoption of our approach to foreign policy (since launching a war of conquest against Mexico) -- military invasion and occupation -- as an acceptable way to revise the borders drawn in his part of the world by our British cousins in the years after the first World War.

He was mistaken about that, of course. Among other things, he believed the American propaganda about liberating the world from terror and tyranny instead of the fact that Americans instead have relied on terror and military aggression to perpetuate tyranny in their own narrow self-interest at least since Mexico 1848 through Hawaii in 1893, Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, and Puerto Rico, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Palestine, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Afghanistan, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, among those interventions to which it has admitted, over the course of the next century or so.

It was instructive to see how calm and dignified he was during the last moments of his life, as what appeared to be street thugs no doubt ultimately answerable to George W. Bush at some faraway hiding place abused him and thereby made their own contribution to the destruction of any sense of legitimacy or justice other than the kind proclaimed by leaders who send young people to fight their fights while they cower behind their parents' lawyers' manipulation of the courts and the judges indebted to them for their own places at the table.

Saddam himself cannot be excused from his own violations of international law and the norms of civilized nations, as they say. But quite apart from the barbarity and arrogance that inform the taking of any life, it can at least be said that he was responsible for far less death and destruction than the drug and alcohol abusing C-student outlaw in the White House, whose only hope remains that Americans, like anybody else, don't learn to care what sort of injuries must be done to life and liberty elsewhere in order for Americans to have the appearance of an abundance of it here.

Hussein deserved what happened to him at the end of his life no more than President Bush deserved it long ago, which is to say not at all. What would have been far more constructive for the uplifting of humanity from the evolutionary struggle out of which it sprang is a fair trial for Hussein -- or, Jesus Christ, at least one that looks a little bit fairer than the one we have seen -- before an international tribunal that applies the norms common to the people of the world, instead of the ones dictated to it by the U.S.A. for its own selfish purposes. An appropriate punishment could then be found, if in fact a conviction could be supported by genuine evidence. Needless to say, there is nothing that would lift American out of the swamp of venality in which it seems so hopelessly stuck as a similar trial for the high command of this fiasco in Iraq -- Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney and their military puppets -- with a like result. We are hearing that the Americans are growing more tolerant of the exercise of justice under the rule of law by the International Criminal Court and other such institutions in the Hague, Geneva and Vienna; if we cannot try our own war criminals as we are entitled to do under the Rome Statute of the ICC, perhaps we are ready at least to comply with the statute's requirement that we surrender them to the Court for trial in the Hague. It is our best hope, however forlorn it may be.