Saddam captured

I was flying west with the night for the past 24 hours, arrived in Incheon Int’l airport, Seoul, S. Korea at 6 a.m. their time to discover that while we flew Saddam was captured.
There’s a fine piece on Juan Cole’s blog already that starts with a lengthy catalogue of Saddam’s acts of brutality and violence. (Sorry I can’t do the link since all the browser instructions on this computer here are in Korean.)
I would describe some of Saddam’s acts im even starker terms than Juan does: “fencing” with the Kurds in the 1970s doesn’t to my mind quite capture it. I would call draining the marshes that the Marsh Arabs lived in for untold generations a clear act of cultural genocide. I would list not only the assassinations but also the mutilations and, perhaps worst of all, the systematic attempt to destroy social trust in Iraqi society by urging children to inform on their parents, relatives on relatives, co-workers on co-workers, etc etc…
But still, Juan’s list was pretty good and extremely sobering. Since I can’t link to it, let me paste it in here:

I remembered the innocent Jews brutally hung in downtown Baghdad when the Baath came to power in 1968; the fencing with the Shah and the Kurds in the early 1970s; the vicious repression of the Shiites of East Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala in 1977-1980; the internal Baath putsch of 1979, when perhaps a third of the party’s high officials were taken out and shot, so that Saddam could become president; the bloody invasion of Iran in 1980 and the destruction of a whole generation of Iraqi and Iranian young men in the 1980s (at least 500,000 dead, perhaps even more); the Anfal poison gas campaign against the Kurds in 1987-88; Halabja, a city of 70,000 where 5,000 died where they stood, their blood boiling with toxic gases, little children lying in heaps in the street; the rape of Kuwait in 1990-91; the genocide against the Shiites that began in spring of 1991 and continued intermittently thereafter; the destruction of the Marsh Arabs; the assassinations, the black marias, the Fedayee Saddam. Yes, the United States was not innocent in some of this. Perhaps they cooperated in bringing the Baath to power in the first place, as an anti-Communist force. They certainly allied with Saddam against Iran in the 1980s, and authorized the purchase of chemical and biological precursors. But the Baath was an indigenous Iraqi phenomenon, and local forces kept Saddam in place, despite dozens of attempts to overthrow him…

He goes on to write:

A nightmare has ended. He will be tried, and two nations’ dirty laundry will be exposed, the only basis on which all can go forward towards a new Persian Gulf and a new relationship with the West.
What is the significance of the capture of Saddam for contemporary Iraqi politics? He was probably already irrelevant.

Well, it would be interesting if we were to see the “two” nations’ dirty laundry all exposed, but somehow I doubt it will happen…
Halabja? Undertaken in almost exactly the same period Bombs-Away Don was visiting Baghdad and giving Saddam a green light to do whatever it might take to contain the Iranians and their Iraqi-Kurdish friends… I’m not sure we’re about to see all that kind of dirty laundry being exposed in any court that is controlled by either the US’s CPA or its creature, the IGC…
You have to know that somewhere in a vault in a Swiss bank or someplace Saddam and his cronies have stored numerous enormous wads of documents that are the records of all their interactions over the years with Bombs-Away Don and others from the Reagan administration; with the Saudis; with the Brits as well as other European governments including of course the Russians and the French; with the Chinese–hey, just to get a “Royal Flush of the Permanent Five members of the Security Council…
And you have to believe that in the case of anything like a decent, recognizable trial process, the defense would have to have access to those records. (Slobo has been trying to do exactly this at the ICTY in The Hague. But he had far less of a record of world-power connivance in his misdeeds to build on than Saddam has.)
Actually, the issue of what to do with Saddam now that the US forces have him is quite a tricky one.

What if they’d actually captured Hitler alive at the end of WW2? (As it was, he was missing, presumed–rightly, as it turned out–to be dead. As was Goerring. But the Allies went ahead and tried Goerring anyway, “in absentia”. A strange episode…)
At the end of WW1, Kaiser Wilhelm, against whom there’d been much previous Allied agitation, was given the offer of a safe haven by the Dutch, as I recall (not personally, you understand…) But the Allied demands that the fragile Wemar Republic try the Kaiser and some of his associates were extremely destabilizing in post-war German-Allied relations, and along with the rest of the extremely punitive package of policies the Allies imposed on the whole German people helped to prepare the ground for the rise of Hitlerism just a few years later.
I don’t think that is what’s going to happen in this case. (At least, I’m assuming someone in the Bush administration is smart enough not to try to punish the whole Iraqi people for the misdeeds of the Baathist leadership. But maybe I should assume nothing about their intelligence?)
What I do take from my study of the history of post-war punishment efforts in Europe and elsewhere is that they are always intensely political, like it or not. And the claims by people in the international himan-rights movement that there actually is an international criminal-justice system that is (or perhaps, ever can be?) completely above politics is pure pie in the sky. No question: Saddam is a very hot potato, indeed.
Meanwhile, I concur in Juan’s judgment that his capture may well not make of a longer-term difference to the political balance within Iraq. (And I note with great interest the supposition Juan ascribes to his wife, that Saddam’s incapacitation may actually make the Shi-ites and many other Iraqis feel more free than hitherto to express their opposition to the US-UK occupation forces. That supposition has also been voiced by my spouse, too.)
The fact is, Saddam has been on the run now for eight months. He’s had some networks of supporters that he’s been in touch with. But the biggest direct opposition the US-UK forces have faced has come not from organized Baathist cells but from a more disparate conglomeration of Sunni forces, while lurking in the wings is the even bigger threat yet: the huge political challenge posed to the US-Uk’s plans by the increasingly organized Shi-ite forces inside the country.
So, my gut thoughts? It is great to see this terrible malefactor taken into custody. Truly great. But we, the longsuffering members of the US public, were never told that the reason for our national leaders to launch the “war of choice” against Iraq last March was to effect regime change there, or to capture Saddam and “bring him to justice”. We were told by the Bushies that the war was necessary to pre-empt an imminent military threat posed by the combination of Saddam’s actual possession of Weapons of Mass destruction and his (claimed) links with the OBL-type international terrorists.
So now, the US forces have captured Saddam. They have not, however, found any traces of the WMDs, or of the claimed links between Saddam and OBL.
Nor, in case anyone in the White House still cares about this, have they caught OBL himself.