I woke up this morning to an American voice on the radio saying “We got him”, and apparently being quite happy about it. I naturally assumed they’d caught Bin Laden, but it turned out to be Paul Bremer saying they’d caught Saddam Hussein.
So well done, I suppose. But now that they’ve got him, what are they going to do with him? Apparently they don’t intend to assassinate him any more, or they would have done it straight away.
If they put him on trial, how exactly would it work? Anybody else would send him to the International Criminal Court, but the USA doesn’t recognise it. I sometimes wonder how you fail to recognise a court - do you walk past it and loudly say “That is a very nice Ice Cream Factory”? Presumably any relevant court in Iraq was removed when the USA dismantled the apparatus of the Iraqi state. And it’s hard to see how Saddam Hussein could be said to have done anything to be tried by a US court.
Which leads to the next question: what would they try him for? Having weapons of mass destruction which aren’t there? Waging a pathetic war in defense against an invading power? Buying weapons from Donald Rumsfeld? Gassing Kurds during the Iran-Iraq war? Invading Kuwait? I expect they could make a decent case against him concerning the purges of his political enemies, but it’s going to be a tough job. And if the recent debacle with the Guantanamo prisoners is anything to go by, it doesn’t seem like the USA is particularly interested in trials any more.
So… what? They put him in a cage and try to forget they have him?