It is always a joy to see vicious criminals brought to justice (assuming the trial is genuine), but ultimately it means nothing. History is not made by one person, and to claim that putting Saddam on trial is somehow an important victory shows how little we've learned.
Saddam isn't the first dictator to come to a bad end; it wasn't a lesson to him and it won't be a lesson to any would-be tyrants in the future. That's the thing about madmen: they're mad, and don't learn from the past. Even Saddam might've gotten away with it if Bush I hadn't given him permisison to invade Kuwait.
The victims of the Saddam regime know he couldn't have devastated the country alone; the hundreds of thousand of people who worked ceaselessly to enhance Saddam's power are mostly still at large, and many of them are either in the employ of the United States or running the US government.
Besides, what are the chances it'll be a real trial? Saddam knows too much about the workings of American foreign policy for him to be simply put in prison - who knows what his memoirs might reveal? My money is on either acquittal or that he'll be found strangled in his cell the day before the verdict is announced.
After WWII, the Nazi war criminals ought to have been tried for their crimes, and they were. But no one would say that is was anything more than the smallest fraction of the work that needed to be done.
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As my history prof says, never underestimate the power of personalities in history. Sure, many folks were involved in Saddam's atrocities; I'm sure he wasn't personally responsible for all the rapes, or for turning on the human shredder every time. But that doesn't change the fact that Hussein's influence was the dominant force behind those evils.
Are you saying that a "real trial" would likely result in imprisonment, and not death? Why would the U.S. (or anyone else) bother to strangle Saddam when it's practically guuaranteed that he'll fry? (or is it?)
Loyal,
I think that Seth is certainly right to say “never underestimate the power of personalities in history;” however, that is all about which he is right. Seth seems to be operating within the confines of a western bourgeois individualist ideology, and so he forgets that the “personality” of Saddam as a world historical figure is not the same as Saddam the individual person. In fact, the historical “personality” of Saddam is a myth created by thousands of people working together—sometimes systematically, sometimes haphazardly—just as crimes attributed to Saddam and his co-defendants are the work not of individuals but of classes, ethnicities, nations, societies, bureaucracies, etc. In fact, we must conclude that this myth of Saddam was an essential part of legitimizing the genocidal crimes of his regime to the Iraqi people. Without that mixture of fear and awe and national pride which this personality was able to inspire within any particular Iraqi or group of Iraqis during his reign, it would have been impossible for “him” to maintain “his” power. However, you seem to hint that the solution to this problem is that we root out everyone in any way involved with these crimes and put each of them on trial. Perhaps instead we need to realize that the very idea of “a trial” is itself flawed since it carries with it a deeply embedded fallacy of western individualism. What we really need is a new form of justice which takes into account the collective nature of crime. You certainly know more about this kind of thing than I do, so I ask you Loyal: any suggestions?
Fraternally,
Jon
I wonder if your conflating tyrants and madmen doesnt confuse the analysis. Issues of rationality and sanity may be unhelpful diversions from the discussion of structures of power and systemic causes such as those suggested by Seth. I thought the punishment for the crimes he is on trial for is public hanging, that should be quite a spectacle.
Perhaps there are more, uh, nuanced (ha) social and cultural aspects to Saddam's crimes, but that doesn't negate the fact that Saddam is personally responsible for the evils that he committed. He should be judged by them.
As the recent death of Rosa Parks reminds us, history is not made by a few powerful individuals but by the thousands and millions who put change into practice.
True, but an importand distinction must be made:
In a dictatorship, one man has all the power, and thus can affect radical change rapidly. In a democratic system, the power is spread among all the people, making change slower and less radical.
Its convenient to believe that Hitler alone was responsible for Nazism, Mussollini for Fascism, Stalin for Soviet totalitarianism etc but if the current events in Iraq tell us anything it is that a tyrants power is underlayed by a movement of sympathetic and equally fanatical supporters.In a theoretical democracy power is spread equally but in the real world such a condition has never existed.
I don't deny the importance of a "movement of sympathetic and equally fanatical supporters" to a fascist regime. But do you really think Nazism would have risen to power without Hiter, or the Stalinist state to come into being without Stalin?
I do not believe that is the point, Seth. What Troutsky and others are saying, if I have it correct, is that without the people of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, Hitler and Stalin would not have been such reckless forces in history. It is an interesting point, but a very hard one to argue. For we never hear of the dictators who were never allowed to dictate at all.
But yes, the people of these regimes were at least partially repsonsible for the actions of their not so benevolent leaders. Iraq is but what example.
Discussing counterfactuals, the what-ifs of history are less productive than looking at the actual forces at work, economic, cultural etc.
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