Trying Saddam?

How many times have we heard announcements from “officials” in Iraq that Saddam Hussein is “about to be put on trial– any day now”?
The latest one came in this announcement today, made by Ibrahim Jaafari’s US-educated spokseman Laith Kuba.

Kuba told reporters that Saddam,

will go on trial within two months on charges of crimes against humanity, with prosecutors focusing on 12 “thoroughly documented” counts, including the gassing of thousands of Kurds in northern Iraq.

He also said that, though it would be possible to bring “500” cases against Saddam, the Iraqi government will only bring 12 of the better documented charges against him.
These would all, Kuba said, be charges of “crimes against humanity.”
That AP article linked to above quoted Kuba as saying that, the attack with chemical weapons on the Kurdish town of Halabja would be one of the charges brought, but he “did not elaborate on the other 11.”
If the charges are indeed all to be charges of crimes against humanity, then that would indicate that they would all be charges connected with actions Saddam took against people within Iraq’s own national borders— the classic definition of crimes against humanity.
If the charges were to include actions undertaken against either Kuwait or Iran, then those would more likely be designated as “war crimes” or possibly “crimes against the peace”.
This latter category of atrocity, which concerns, essentially, the launching of an unjustified war, has not been prosecuted since the post-WW2 trials. But if it was applicable to Hitler and his generals, and to the Japanese generals and militarists, then why not to Saddam Hussein?
Oops, it might involve having Iran take part there as one of the two aggressed-against victims. Some one million Iranians died as a result of Saddam’s 1980 aggression against their country. (That figure is far, far higher than the number of Kuwaitis who died as a result of his invasion of Kuwait nine years later.)
And oops, if launching an unjustified war that imposes terrible suffering on large numbers of people can be prosecuted these days, then how about the Bush administration??
So no. It seems that they’ve agreed for now to stick to the “safer” charges connected with the actions Saddam took against his own people.
Of course, the whole process looks irretrievably politicised at this point. Not just in the choice of “charges” brought.
But look who made this latest announcement??? Wouldn’t it really have been a lot better for the rule of law in Iraq if announcements like this had come from the Chief Prosecutor or someone in his office? Why on earth have them come from the Prime Minister’s spokesman?
Back in December 2003, shortly after Saddam’s capture by the US forces, I wrote here that,

No doubt about it: the trial of Saddam Hussein has many, many political aspects to it. It certainly won’t be the simple, gloating “victory lap for the Coalition” that many in the US media now think it may be.

And here we are, 18 months later, with that point now, I think, very well proven. (If you haven’t read that whole post there, you really ought to go back and do so.)
The whole process of “trying Saddam” is absolutely, inextricably political at this point. However, it is not the main priority for the Iraqi people. It’s a sideshow, grotesquely inflated for western audiences by an Iraqi administration seeking to curry western favors.
I think– and I’m relying on JWN’s Iraqi readers here to correct me if I’m wrong– that there are many, many tasks that are more important for Iraqis today than staging what will under even the very best of circumstances at this point be nothing better than a show trial.
Meanwhile, Saddam and his top henchfolk are being kept carefully in US custody, in a place where they can be prevented from releasing embarrassing details about things like the encouragement they received from the US, UK, and other western powers back in the 1980s as they upgraded their chemical weapons capabilities and launched a quite gratuitous war against Iran…
By the way, John Burns wrote in the NYT today that the total number of detainees being held as “suspected insurgents” in just the US-run detention facilities in Iraq has now rerached 14,000. That is a shockingly high number! Can you imagine the conditions in which most of those people are being held?
Burns also wrote that of those 14,000, only 370 were foreigners, “according to figures provided by the American command.”