What
A Fair Trial For Saddam
Would Entail
By Noam Chomsky
The Toronto Star
27 January , 2004
The long, tortuous
association between Saddam Hussein and the West raises questions about
what issues and embarrassments may surface at a tribunal.
In a (virtually
unimaginable) fair trial for Saddam, a defense attorney could quite
rightly call to the stand Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
George Bush I and other high officials who provided significant support
for the dictator, even through his worst atrocities.
A fair trial would
at least accept the elementary moral principle of universality: The
accusers and the accused must be subject to the same standards.
For a truly fair
trial, it's surely relevant, as an abundance of congressional and other
records show, that Washington made an unholy accommodation with Saddam
during the 1980s.
The initial pretext
was that Iraq staved off Iran which it attacked with U.S. backing
but the same support continued well after the war was over.
Now, those responsible
for the policies of accommodation are bringing Saddam to the bar of
justice.
Rumsfeld, as Ronald
Reagan's special envoy to the Middle East, visited Iraq in 1983 and
1984 to establish firmer relations with Saddam (at the same time the
administration was criticizing Iraq for using chemical weapons).
Powell was Bush
I's national security adviser from December, 1987, to January, 1989,
and a few months later became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Cheney was Bush
I's defense secretary.
Thus, Powell and
Cheney were in top decision-making positions for the period of Saddam's
worst atrocities, the massacre and gassing of the Kurds in 1988 and
the crushing of the Shiite rebellion in 1991 that might have overthrown
him.
Today, under Bush
II, Powell, Cheney and others constantly bring up those atrocities to
justify beating the devil rightly, though the crucial element
of U.S. support of Saddam during this period is missing.
In October, 1989,
Bush I issued a national security directive, declaring that "normal
relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our longer-term
interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East."
The United States
offered subsidized food supplies that Saddam's regime badly needed,
along with advanced technology and biological agents adaptable to weapons
of mass destruction.
After Saddam stepped
out of line and invaded Kuwait in 1990, politics and pretexts varied,
but one element remained constant: The people of Iraq must not control
their country.
In 1990, the United
Nations imposed economic sanctions on Iraq, administered mainly by the
United States and Britain. These sanctions, which continued through
president Clinton and into Bush II, are perhaps the sorriest legacy
of U.S. policy toward Iraq.
No Westerners know
Iraq better than Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, who served successively
as U.N. humanitarian co-ordinators there from 1997 to 2000. Both resigned
in protest of the sanctions, which Halliday has characterized as "genocidal."
As they and others
pointed out for years, the sanctions devastated the Iraqi population
while strengthening Saddam and his clique, increasing the people's dependency
on the tyrant for their survival.
Whether or not this
history is permitted to come out in a tribunal, the issue of who will
be in charge in Iraq in the future still remains crucial and is highly
contested right at this moment.
Apart from that
issue, those who have been concerned with the tragedy of Iraq had three
basic goals: (1) overthrowing the tyranny, (2) ending the sanctions
that were targeting the people, not the rulers, and (3) preserving some
semblance of world order.
There can be no
disagreement among decent people on the first two goals: Achieving them
is an occasion for rejoicing, particularly for those who protested U.S.
support for Saddam and later opposed the murderous sanctions regime;
they can therefore applaud without hypocrisy.
The second goal
could surely have been achieved, and possibly the first as well, without
undermining the third.
The Bush administration
has openly declared its intention to dismantle what remained of the
system of world order and to rule the world by force, with Iraq as a
demonstration project.
That intention has
elicited fear and often hatred throughout the world, and despair among
those who are concerned about the likely consequences of choosing to
remain complicit with the current policies of U.S. aggression at will.
That is, of course, a choice very largely in the hands of the American
people.
Political activist
and author Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
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