Krauthammer: The Iraqis just screw up everything!

Posted by Joshua Holland at 10:26 AM on January 5, 2007.

Apparently, Charles Krauthammer almost gets why Saddam Hussein's sham trial and botched execution -- actually "murder" is the correct word for killing someone without due process -- was so problematic …

If the death penalty was ever deserved, no one was more richly deserving than Saddam Hussein.

For the Iraqi government to have botched both his trial and execution, therefore, and turned monster into victim, is not just a tragedy but a crime -- against the new Iraq that Americans are dying for and against justice itself…

Instead of exposing, elucidating and irrefutably making the case for the crimes of the accused -- as was done at Nuremberg and the Eichmann trial -- the Iraqi government lost control and inadvertently turned it into a stage for Hussein.

After a brief review of Hussein's trial by kangaroo court -- he doesn't characterize it as such, but the implication is there -- he adds of the hanging itself:

Consider the timing. It was carried out on a religious holiday. We would not ordinarily care about this, except for the fact that it was in contravention of Iraqi law. It was done on the first day of Eid al-Adha as celebrated by Sunnis. The Shiite Eid began the next day, which tells you in whose name the execution was performed.

It was also carried out extra-constitutionally. The constitution requires a death sentence to have the signature of the president and two vice presidents, each representing one of the three major ethnic groups in the country (Sunni, Shiite and Kurd). That provision is meant to prevent sectarian killings. The president did not sign. Nouri al-Maliki contrived some work-around.

Even for The Hammer, blaming the Iraqi "government" and, by implication, absolving the American one, is stunningly disingenuous.

The trial was planned and its course was mapped out, after all, before there was an Iraqi government. It's been widely reported that the legal process was guided from beginning to end by American advisors working out of the embassy, and the AP reported that the execution date -- to which Krauthammer rightly objects -- was the subject of heated negotiations between Iraqi officials and American advisors.

Of course, portraying the Iraqi government as fully sovereign and blaming it for the mess that Iraq has become is the last refuge for the scoundrels who advocated the invasion in the first place. The wonder is that the mainstream media and even many of the war's opponents go along with the fiction.

Which is not to say that it's a puppet government -- that's too simplistic and the Iraqis have shown a willingness -- and ability -- to challenge their American benefactors on key issues (the scheduling of Saddam's hanging is a case-in-point: despite the negotiations that took place between American and Iraqi officials, the IHT reported that the date was ultimately set over the objections of American advisors). But it is a government with very little legitimacy, based entirely in the Green Zone and propped up by 140,000 U.S. troops. It wasn't elected in anything resembling a democratic process, but in what my occasional sparring partner David Lublin astutely described as an "ethnic census."

In other words, while it's not a puppet government, it's also ridiculous to confer on it the autonomy that would be necessary to screw things up as badly as has been done.

This is another one of those posts about something that seems too obvious to bear explicating, but I guess that's part of the unreality that's long marked this war as so utterly insane.

Tagged as: iraq, saddam hussein, krauthammer

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.