The moral sickness of the West
I am deliberately using a Melanie Phillips title because it is worth showing that the company morally stunted dwarves that she counts herself among - the National Review crowd and the "New Europeans", to use Rumsfeld's phrase, are capable of great callousness, thuggery, hypocrisy and lip service to human rights and international law.
Blair yesterday went some way to reversing Beckett's unprincipled claim that Saddam should be hung, by stating that he didn't support the death penalty. Unfortunately reporters couldn't pin him down on the issue of whether or not that principle should be exteneded to Saddam. By being ambiguous, at least nobody can accuse him of being a liar.
Others are prepared to just come out and say it. Spain's ex President
Aznar today claimed that Saddam had "suuficient guilt to pay in this manner". He muddied the waters a little, by also claiming that he was not a supporter of the death penalty. Damn right - under him Spain had to adhere to the European Convention of Human Rights, which explicitly rules out the use of the death penalty in all cases. Is he saying that what is not just in Europe is just in a recovering third world country? Does he want his fantasies of a lynching projected onto some failed state where there will be less of a fuss?
On
National Review the neo conservative and far right fanatics that share Phillip's vitriolic ideology had a get together to discuss the sentence. Peter Brookes from the Heritage Foundation wrote:
"While Saddam Hussein’s trial is a clear victory for the Iraqi people, its implications will reverberate far beyond Iraq. You can’t help but think about how the likes of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, Iran’s senior clerics, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Belarus’ Alexandr Lukashenka, Cuba’s Castro brothers, the Burmese junta, and other repressive leaders and regimes must be feeling today, watching one of their kindred spirits get the death sentence in Iraq — with the full realization that someday they may share his fate in the courtroom and the gallows."
I dealt with this ridiculous logic yesterday. The only implication that the reader can draw directly from Saddam's experience is that these foul men could be unseated in a military attack by the US or one of the heavyweight non super powers, subjected to an unfair trial -
when a fair one under international standards would have done the job just as well, and then lynched. With this in mind, Brookes' list of dictators has the look of a to-do list about it. The only lesson that these "kindred spirits" of Saddam would have learned is that to prop their regimes up from the threat of external attack they should arm themselves to the teeth. Those already armed - the governments of China and Russia, for example, or those on America's good side - the governments of Colombia, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, will not have lost
any sleep over Saddam's fate. In fact, you have to ask Brookes, what exactly changed with this verdict? Did the people of North Korea learn that Kim Jong il would
not live forever if suspended form the ground by a piece of rope? This is truly a half-arsed promotion of freedom and democracy. Newt Gingrich shares Brookes' conclusion,
"When you kill, torture, and destroy your own people, don’t be surprised that when given the chance, your people in turn destroy you."
To which Ahmadinejad [more importantly, the men who really pull the strings in Iran, Khameini and his posse] would no doubt reply: "OK, so I wont give them the chance."
But the good thing about Newt is that you always get the added bonus of him taking every oppurtunity to bash the UN with typical Republican frenzy:
"[
Saddam's death sentence] should teach us all one more lesson about the current destructive nature of the United Nations that having failed to protect the Iraqi people from Saddam, they immediately had their high commissioner talk about saving Saddam from the penalty chosen for him by an Iraqi court — death."
That's right, by trying to avert the destroying of a [lets by adults and remember] human life, it is the UN that is being destructive. I don't have a copy of the particular dictionary that Gingrich uses to hand, but I would love to see the definition of destructive. Does it cover houses being flattened and lives being ended by bombs?
For men like this, prison is not enough for a murderous tyrant, we have to "destroy" them in a paroxysm of vengeance. With coalition and UN assistance Saddam could have been dealt with in a truly just, lawful and humane way that would have set an example by the Iraqis that had him at their mercy. It would have signalled a desire to end the violence [dare I say "closure"?] But if one thing has always been clear, it is that this war was never really about the Iraqis.
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