TRIAL OF SADDAM HUSSEIN

Dr. Abdul-Haq al-Ani was approached by Saddam Hussein's daughter Raghad about defending her father once it became clear that he would be put on trial by the Iraqi High Tribunal. Since this was a political trial, he advised that it be met with a political counterstroke -- a boycott. His decision would seem to have been a wise one. Had he gone to Iraq to actually advocate for Hussein before the tribunal, there is every likelihood he would have been killed during the trial along with three of Saddam's Iraqi lawyers by friends, relatives, or a militia claiming to represent the victims of the first Dujail trial in 1982.Historians of the twentieth century love international tribunals because among their other functions, they collect and preserve the historical record. The Iraqi High Tribunal failed in this as in so many other respects. It collected data about only one incident of Saddam Hussein's regime (albeit an awful one) and decided that he and three of seven co-defendants merited death for this alone. He was executed a little more than a month after the sentence was handed down. Said data was released to defense counsel in a bastardized form and no transcript of the proceedings was kept. Like most of the decisions made by the IHT, this was the result of a decision by the US Department of Justice's Regime Crimes Liaison Office, which was totally in charge of every aspect of the trial, including determining which of the defendants' lawyers would be allowed into the courtroom.I added this book to my Wish List at about the same time I added the Documents Pertaining to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. That book included the statute, indictment and judgments of the court. It was interesting because there were concurring and dissenting opinions. All five of the judges at the Iraqi High Tribunal seem to have agreed on all the facts and the law; there is only the Judgment which al-Ani thankfully does not reproduce in whole, but quotes from and comments on. We will never know if there was any dissent (not that it is likely there was) because only the name of the chief judge, Ra'ouf Abdul-Rahman, is known. The other four judges were (figuratively) masked and (completely)anonymous. Defense counsel objected to this and their own vulnerability on at least one occasion by literally wearing masks inside the courtroom.The best parts of "The Trial of Saddam Hussein" are not about the trial at all, but about the slow death of Iraq starting in 1990 with the sanctions, which Saddam Hussein was unable to prevent. I will reproduce the two best paragraphs here in full. Here is the first one:Many people with good intentions talk about the need to put an end to wars and destruction. But few address the capacity for double-think of the culture. It is my view that unless this Eurocentrism changes, there will be no change in its propensity to wage war and wreak havoc and destruction. Unless people come to accept that an offense is the same whether committed nationally or internationally, there will be no end to war. It is only when ordinary people come to believe that the killing of children through blockades and/or maiming through cluster bombs and burning young children by phosphorous bombs in Fallujah and Lebanon is just as murderous as killing children in a park in London that we will have some hope of forcing an end to wars. This is the campaign that needs to be launched by the peace movement -- a campaign of educating the public to appreciate this reality of the equality of life irrespective of whether it is inside their country or outside it, especially so today when globalization drives the world to interact as if it were a big village.Sounds pretty unobjectionable. The next one is more controversial:There is no objective definition of what is a "civilized nation." When the Europeans invaded the four continents, they argued that they had a mission to civilize the barbarians of these continents. But did their own behavior of aggressive wars of conquest, the expropriation of land, and the slaughter of the original inhabitants, exemplify civilized practice The question that was never asked by Europeans was whether or not those so-called barbarians believed themselves to be -- and were, in fact -- civilized, although they were never well armed. When Baghdad was destroyed by the army of illiterate moguls in 1258, it was basking in its cultural glory. Very little has changed during the last three centuries regarding the dealings of Europe with the rest of the world. The invasions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were little different from the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The problem that faces a student of international law is whether or not these European practices carried out by European nations over the last two centuries form a cogent source and civilized basis for the development of a truly universal international law.If you agree with these two paragraphs you will probably agree with most of what is in the book. I do not agree with everything -- the emerging split in values and practice between the United States and "Old Europe" is a more significant story than al-Ani takes into account. But this book functions not only as a comprehensive takedown of Saddam's trial, but as a powerful broadside against Western influence in the Middle East from the Crusades on. I give it four stars.