Don't Look Too Hard at the Gander

I wasn't really focused on this issue because it seems obvious that, on the one hand, Saddam Hussein is a monster who the world will be well rid of and, on the other hand, that convicting and executing Saddam won't change anything that matters in Iraq or in the world. It is, however, actually worth noting a few things about this case. One, as Spencer notes in its zeal to avoid an international tribunal (Bush hates international law), we organized a total farce of a trial and wound up creating a kangaroo court to try a guilty man.

Second, Saddam was charged with the wrong crime. When you think "Saddam Hussein and crimes against humanity" your thoughts naturally turn to Halabja/Anfal. Prosecuting that case, however, raised awkward questions about Don Rumsfeld's meet-and-greet with Saddam Hussein:

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The purpose of said visit, as people might recall were the American press not to have its head in the sand, was largely to reassure Saddam that the Reagan administration's public condemnation of Iraqi chemical weapons use against the Iranian military and Kurdish insurgents was not something Baghdad should take especially seriously. The State Department would condemn, but special envoy Rumsfeld was around to cut deals.

At any rate, as a result of Saddam's pending execution, prosecutions for further crimes, including matters related to Anfal, are now deemed unnecessary, and Rumsfeld and the rest of the Reagan national security team can escape scrutiny.

This, in turn, raises questions about the legal precedent being set by the case. Saddam is being executed for the specific charge of killing 148 men and boys from the town of Dujail in retaliation for a July 8, 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam. Saddam's legal team argued that given the state of war existing at the time between Iraq and Iran this fell under the purview of sound counterinsurgency strategy and said argument was rejected.

Fair enough, but compare this to, say, Fallujah. Thirteen civilians were killed when American soldiers opened fire on protesters. This led, in turn, to the murder and mutilation of four contractors employed by the US military. This led to a retaliatory military strike on the town by US and Iraqi government forces that local doctors claimed killed over 600 people. The Iraqi health ministry disputes that, arguing that "only" 271 civilians died in the attack, during which "more than half" of the city's homes were destroyed.

The exact same as what happened at Dujail? No. A completely different sort of thing? Also no. But if Dujail is worth a death sentence, then what's Fallujah worth? Five years? Ten? I don't really know. How about the people tortured to death after the Bush administration's decision to ignore international and domestic law regarding detentions and interrogations?

Which is all just to say that the Bush administration has every reason to seek to undermine international human rights law and the concept of international tribunals.

Comments

Not sure why Sistani is on Spencer's list of the November criminals.

Posted by otto | November 5, 2006 9:20 PM

I suppose he is a blogger...

Posted by otto | November 5, 2006 9:22 PM

"...as people might recall were the American press not to have its head in the sand..."

I'm sure that many in the elite press are quite aware of what transpired between Iraq and the Reagan admnistration. But they place their heads in the sand because doing otherwise would severely derail their careers.

Which should serve as a warning to you: If this sort of thing seeps into your periodical writing, you can kiss your mainstream punditry career goodbye.

Posted by Mark | November 5, 2006 9:25 PM

Spencer's post is extremely hackish. But it really doesn't hold a candle to Matthew's hackishness in this post - the references to the Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam always struck me as the ultimate resort to hackdom - after all, if in discussing the Clinton-North Korea policy, I pointed at the famous picture of Madeline Albright clinking champagne glasses with Kim Jong Il, he would surely say I'm a hack.

And what's even more hackish is that Matthew is ALWAYS a proponent of negotiation! He wants negotiation with Iran now. He wants negotiation with North Korea now. But he criticizes Reagan's negotiation with Saddam then.

As I said, this post is hackish in the extreme.

Posted by Al | November 5, 2006 9:43 PM

The purpose of said visit, as people might recall were the American press not to have its head in the sand, was largely to reassure Saddam that the Reagan administration's public condemnation of Iraqi chemical weapons use against the Iranian military and Kurdish insurgents was not something Baghdad should take especially seriously.

Oh, and by the way, the link doesn't support this sentence in the least - which is natural since the sentence is not true at all.

Posted by Al | November 5, 2006 9:46 PM

He already has, Mark. Or at least, said lots of things that he knew would hurt his career. Two-three years ago, he was, I think, expected by lots of people to follow say Jon Chait's career track, and might still, especially considering that what opinions are most opportune will change with the times.

Comparing Matt's career trajectory with Jonah Goldberg's is quite instructive.

Posted by David Weman | November 5, 2006 9:49 PM

Fair enough, but compare this to, say, Fallujah.

Um, in the one case, civilians were deliberately targetted. In the other, they weren't.

Really, what is so hard to understand about this? It's been repeated ad nauseum, and yet the left never seems intelligent enough to comprehend.

Posted by Al | November 5, 2006 9:50 PM

Yeah, or something. I don't claim any expertise on DC media careers. Hope you're not too weirded out by the discussion, Matt.

Posted by David Weman | November 5, 2006 9:51 PM

Spell it out: In what way is a comparison of MY's career with Jonah Goldberg's instructive?

Posted by otto | November 5, 2006 9:51 PM

Al: Is there any part of you that thinks we really care if one group of not-us uses chem weapons on some other group of not-us? Why would we, if it advances our interests?

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | November 5, 2006 9:54 PM

Well, it doesn't relate directly to the rest of my comment. MY could be a Jon Chait, but not Goldberg. The rules are different for wingnuts.

It is instructive that Goldberg, egregiously hackish, and dumb as a post, who was kind of Matt's wingnut equivalent career wise a few years ago, is now on the op-ed page of the LA fucking Times.

Posted by David Weman | November 5, 2006 9:58 PM

I'm not sure I really understand your comment, SCMT. We have an interest in human rights, compliance with treaties against the use of chem weapons, etc. So it surely was in our interest that Saddam not use chem weapons. That was one of several interests involved when Rumsfeld went to Iraq.

Posted by Al | November 5, 2006 10:04 PM

Are you saying that Matt wont become a Washington Post op-ed writer soon after the release of his forthcoming book Guilty Men?

Posted by otto | November 5, 2006 10:20 PM

So it surely was in our interest that Saddam not use chem weapons. That was one of several interests involved when Rumsfeld went to Iraq.

What a crock of shit. We knew they were using chemical and nerve agents in the 80's, and we provided them with data on Iranian troop movements anyways. Under the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations we exported a metric shitload of "dual use" chemical and biological agents. And yet you compare this to Clinton's North Korea negotiations while calling Matt a hack.

Tool.

Posted by gswift | November 5, 2006 10:30 PM

Oh, gosh, Al. I don't understand you at all.

Of course, I might be reading into that the fact that I --- a rather liberal liberal --- believes at the end of the day that the U.S. has permanent interests, and backing Iraq over Iran in the middle of their war might have been one of them. And I certainly have no problem with the fact that once the situation changed, our interests changed, necessitating the need to go to war with Iraq in early 1991.

Matt is pointing out that (a) Fallujah was a Bad Thing, and (b) the court nailed Saddam on a charge that, had an international tribunal had handed it down, would have set a rather bad precedent for the United States. Now, I happen to disagree with Matt's implication --- and it's only an implication --- that an international tribunal would have handed down a decision on the same grounds that the Iraqi tribunal did. I rather doubt it, in fact, given all of the clear crimes committed by Saddam and his regime. But that doesn't seem to be where you take issue. Rather, you seem to take issue with the claim that Reagan-era policy towards Iraq involved a violation of the standards that the U.S. publicly claims to uphold. That meeting quite obviously told the Iraqis not to worry about our public statements --- such as they were --- about their use of ... ah ... unconventional counterinsurgency techniques or their chemical attacks on the Iranian army.

I'd understand an argument that claimed that such violations were the least-evil option available to the U.S. during the 1980s. Heck, I'd be sympathetic to it. But I can't understand at all burying your head in the sand and pretending that the U.S. didn't make a deal with the devil. Then again, I'm not a conservative and haven't been one for some time, so what do I know?

Posted by Noel Maurer | November 5, 2006 10:30 PM

This post is much better than Ackerman's. The latter spreads the blame around so much as to be meaningless.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | November 5, 2006 11:01 PM

Hey, Al. Suck it.

Posted by Mike | November 5, 2006 11:04 PM

Matt's increasing levels of sanity, clarity, and anger may spell trouble for his mainstream press career. On the other hand, he is a certifiably bright young thing from Harvard. And the political tides seem to be slowly turning. Perhaps in another couple of years editorial pages will be casting about for people like him. Let's all hope so.

Posted by MQ | November 5, 2006 11:13 PM

Republican fear of Yglesias, Drum, Aravosis, Marshall, et al, is growing. These voices are smart, honest and brave, and that's what right wing ideologues can't win against in America, in a fair fight that is.

Posted by ferd | November 6, 2006 12:21 AM

The people who, in the late '60s and early '70s, started talking about American war crimes were sidelined as "anti-American extremists" by the learly '80s. However, that had a lot to do with the direction of political momentum at the end of the Vietnam War, which was already swinging rightwards by the late '70s, coming off a period of left-liberal dominance (with Nixon as Clintonesque triangulator); and this had a great deal to do with the fact that Vietnam began as a Democratic war, and destroyed the intellectual coherence of liberalism. It was the radicals of the late '60s and early '70s who really made "liberal" a dirty word, not conservatives.

Today the situation is very different. (Neo-)conservatism is being ripped apart by Iraq in the same way liberalism was by Vietnam. This is a Republican war, and it's swinging the political pendulum towards the left. It's at least arguable that where the feel-good-again-America agenda of the late '70s and early '80s relegated those who wanted accountability for Vietnam war crimes to the fringe, the same might not happen today, because of the direction of political momentum.

So, in short -- go forth, Matthew, and speak of Rumsfeld, his war crimes and the Hague. Fear not the revanchism of brownshirted Reagan Youth. For verily I tell ye, thine is the House, and the Senate, and all the fruits of agenda-setting that go with it...

Posted by brooksfoe | November 6, 2006 1:05 AM

Al, for all his myriad faults, is not clinically retarded, so his inability to understand the congruity between Matt's description of the Rumsfeld/Saddam meeting and the description in the linked document must be deliberate.

National Security Archive: "Rumsfeld met with Saddam, and the two discussed regional issues of mutual interest, shared enmity toward Iran and Syria, and the U.S.'s efforts to find alternative routes to transport Iraq's oil; its facilities in the Persian Gulf had been shut down by Iran, and Iran's ally, Syria, had cut off a pipeline that transported Iraqi oil through its territory. Rumsfeld made no reference to chemical weapons, according to detailed notes on the meeting."

Matt: "The purpose of said visit...was largely to reassure Saddam that the Reagan administration's public condemnation of Iraqi chemical weapons use against the Iranian military and Kurdish insurgents was not something Baghdad should take especially seriously."

See, Al knows that when the President's buddy comes to visit and talks about how he can help you sell oil and studiously avoids discussing the international crisis provoked by your genocidal war crimes the clear take home message is "let's not let a little genocide get in the way of business, shall we".

Unlike Al, I am not a connaisseur of hackishness, so I'm not sure where on the hack spectrum deliberate obtuseness lies, but I'm pretty sure its in there somewhere.

Posted by DMonteith | November 6, 2006 2:56 AM

Al, for all his myriad faults, is not clinically retarded

No, he's not. That's why he's such a monster, morally speaking. There's literally no lie he won't tell on behalf of The Party. As I've said before, if you ever wondered what kind of people made up the higher echelons of the Nazi or Stalinist apparatus, just look at Al.

From a certain perspective it's sad we haven't descended into totalitarianism, because that means Al has never had his chance to really shine. All he can do is leave comments on blogs and work at his Republican Party job, rather than be Goebbel's deputy, run show trials, etc.

Posted by grh | November 6, 2006 5:16 AM

There's literally no lie he won't tell on behalf of The Party.

Because of that, I wish people who post anonymously would start to post under their own names. It's difficult to deal with the cowardice of lies when other people use anonymity for other reasons. Were everyone to post under their own names, the Als of the world wouldn't have any place to do their stuff.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 6, 2006 7:26 AM

Were everyone to post under their own names, the Als of the world wouldn't have any place to do their stuff.

and it would be that much easier for the true nutcases of the world to harass their political opponents in real life.

Posted by cleek | November 6, 2006 9:06 AM

cleek, recall, W.B. Yeats's poem where the 80 year old Lady Gregory told her threatener that she played cards under her window every evening with the blinds up. But even a middling amount of bravado is hardly necessary.

I've posted under my own name around Usenet and web sites since the late 80s and I've been harassed exactly once.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 6, 2006 9:17 AM

> Al, for all his myriad faults, is not clinically
> retarded, so his inability to understand the
> congruity between Matt's description of the
> Rumsfeld/Saddam meeting and the description
> in the linked document must be deliberate.

"Al" is a synthetic persona of the Radical Counter-Blogging project; he is not a real person. Even if there were a real person whose views just happened to coincide exactly with every single Radical attack meme, there is no way in this reality that a single person could blast those views onto a dozen liberal blogs within minutes (sometimes seconds) of posts going up **24 hours/day, 365 days/year**.

Admittedly, there are a lot of "parody Als" at work now, but you can usually pick out the "real Artifical Al" by the consistent phrasing and very clever use of pretzel logic.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | November 6, 2006 11:19 AM

Matt, anyone can be a craven pundit who says and does whatever he needs to to move up the pundit chain. Those types are a dime a dozen. This is a great post, and you are not good but courageous work. I've been reading you since you were on blogspot, and all I can say is, more like this.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." -Edmund Burke

"For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" -Matthew 16:26, King James version

Posted by Mitch Schindler | November 6, 2006 12:41 PM

"One, as Spencer notes in its zeal to avoid an international tribunal (Bush hates international law), we organized a total farce of a trial and wound up creating a kangaroo court to try a guilty man."

I gather that most reasonably developed countries without functioning sewer and power systems also don't have functioning judicial systems.

"When you think "Saddam Hussein and crimes against humanity" your thoughts naturally turn to Halabja/Anfal. Prosecuting that case, however, raised awkward questions about Don Rumsfeld's meet-and-greet with Saddam Hussein:"

Ha!

Posted by Linus | November 6, 2006 9:54 PM

Matt,

In the dreadful farce that was Saddam's hanging, the public reaction has been a mixure of ho-hum nonplussed momentary attention and outright disgust.

Now Bush has his pound of flesh. But, we see that the revolt against our occupation is not driven by Baathists and Saddam henchmen, it is driven by Islamists like the Salafi groups.

All we saw in Saddam's "Night Journey to the Gallows" was a man taunted by thugs whooping and hollering sectarian insults. We saw a monster elevated to martyr status in a travesty with American figerprints all over it.

This "Show Execution" stinks to high heaven!

Posted by boilerman10 | January 1, 2007 2:50 PM