The treatment he deserves: this prisoner should not be left to Jacques, Kofi, et al.

NEVER have so many congratulations been offered through such painfully gritted teeth. European leaders, Democratic politicians, and media Big Feet all felt compelled to celebrate the capture of Saddam Hussein. After all, as the guardians of the moral conscience of mankind they are supposed to disapprove of dictatorship, torture, and mass murder even more than most people. But welcoming the downfall of Saddam also meant giving aid and comfort to President Bush; that took all the fun out of it.

Listening to European politicians as they followed up their praise for the skill and bravery of the U.S. soldiers who nabbed Saddam with stern demands for the U.S. to share authority in Iraq with the international community or to hand over Saddam to be tried at The Hague, one was reminded of Muslim clerics condemning September 11. Yes, it was shocking and tragic, of course, but so were racist slurs on American Muslims, and "secret evidence" in terrorism trials, and visa rules that discriminated against Middle Eastern countries, and Western colonialism, and the medieval crusades, and the Spanish Reconquista, and ... In both sets of instances, the qualifications sounded more important and certainly more heartfelt than the condemnations or congratulations they were qualifying.

Tentative, sad, or angry reactions from Arabs to Saddam's capture were generally ascribed in the media to feelings of humiliation. For the umpteenth time a mighty Arab warrior had been defeated and captured by the "arrogant" Americans. Worse, the "new Saladin" had behaved in a shamefully craven way and, rather than dying with a gun in his hand, had submitted weakly to a medical examination and a shave. One sympathizes, naturally. But is there not something wrong or inconsistent about a culture that idolizes an Arab power-holder almost because of his ruthless brutality and then complains when a greater (if less brutal) power defeats and humiliates him?

If Arabs and Muslims are to break out of the vicious circle of humiliation-aggression-defeat-humiliation, then they have to settle for modest improvements in their everyday lives rather than seeking historic victories over imagined enemies by proxy. Their present policy of wagging their collective face in an enemy's fist is paying declining dividends in both Iraq and the Palestinian Authority. If humiliation is to be a useful diagnosis of their problems rather than just another excuse, they should be reforming their culture and political traditions to make them more cooperative, liberal, and practical and less clannish, oppressive, and dreamy.

Arabs and Muslims, however, are not the only peoples suffering from a psychological flaw that manifested itself in their response to Saddam's capture. Both "Europe" (a.k.a. France, Germany, the EU, and Russia) and the "international community" (a.k.a. France, Germany, the EU, Russia, and Kofi Annan) responded with stratagems designed to turn this U.S. gain to America's disadvantage. In ascending order of importance these were: 1) that Saddam should not be subject to the death penalty; 2) that Saddam should be tried not by the U.S. or in Iraq but by an international court, preferably at The Hague; and 3) that the U.S. should take the opportunity of Saddam's capture to broaden and "internationalize" the government of Iraq.

There are very few merits attaching to these proposals. Consider the first: that Saddam be spared any possibility of execution. In the first place, this proposal is morally compromised because its exponents include representatives of at least one country, France, that was an ally of Saddam right up to the invasion of Iraq. It is therefore interceding not for justice but for a client. Even if that were not so, it would still be objectionable because its main political purpose is neither to express compassion for Saddam nor to mount a principled argument against capital punishment but to embarrass the United States. It is a staple of anti-American polemics in Europe that American (and especially Texan) employment of the death penalty is barbaric and stands in shameful contrast to the rejection of capital punishment that is at the heart of civilized "European values." Intervening on Saddam's behalf is intended to remind everyone of this supposed contrast. In fact, large majorities of European voters support capital punishment in virtually every European country. What ensures that the death penalty is "outlawed" is not common values but elite contempt for the democratic rights of European peoples--a contempt that is displayed not only on capital punishment but also on currency reform, European integration, and much else.

The elites themselves are opposed to the death penalty because, among other reasons, they have largely forgotten what political evil is like. Or, to be more precise, they have blinded themselves to the reality of political evil, especially that on the left or "progressive" side of politics, because they did not wish to acknowledge crimes that they would then need to protest and punish. Their recent forefathers were more honest. At the end of the Second World War some countries restored the death penalty that they had abolished back in the late 1800s. They felt they needed such a condign punishment to mark their abhorrence of the crimes committed by Nazis and their collaborators. Saddam's crimes surely fall into the same category of horror requiring the same level of punishment and rejection. If that simple, unsophisticated truth is not obvious to the Quai d'Orsay, it surely is to the people of Iraq.

For exactly that reason (and others) Saddam should be tried by Iraqis in Iraq. They are in a better position to evaluate both his crimes and the punishment he deserves. Again, the demand by the "international community" that he be sent to The Hague or some other world tribunal is open to several serious objections. It is, of course, not proposed in order to ensure that Saddam Hussein gets the best and most disinterested justice. Some of the judges on such a court would almost certainly be seconded from countries that were his allies and arms suppliers to the bitter end. (Contrary to what many "activists" seem to believe, Saddam's main arms suppliers were Russia and France, not the U.S. and Britain--both of whom provided not only very modest supplies but also less and less as time went on and Saddam's true character revealed itself.) Iraqi judges and prosecutors would have the strongest incentive to discover the truth about who helped Saddam. Nor does the "Nuremberg precedent" support an international tribunal. Again contrary to what is generally believed, Nuremberg was conducted by the legitimate German government of the day--namely the Four Victorious Powers--and later trials were conducted by the new federal German government. Precedent would therefore suggest that the Coalition should prosecute Saddam if the trial were held today but hand over that task to the new Iraqi government if one is in office by next July.

Of course, the proposal for an international trial is intended not to obtain justice for Saddam but to remind people that the U.S. still opposes the proposed International Criminal Court--and to hint that, whatever Saddam's crimes may deserve, the U.S. is not the best guardian of human rights in this or any other case. Those making the proposal merely reveal their bad faith, however, since the rules of the ICC (to whose authority and example they appeal) actually allow war criminals to be prosecuted in national courts unless there is good reason to suspect that such trials will be fraudulent. How anyone can suspect an Iraqi government that does not yet exist of fraud (or any other crime) is a mystery.

The third proposal makes explicit what is merely implicit in the first two proposals: U.S. authority and power should be reduced in Iraq. It should be replaced to some extent by grants of power to Iraqi national bodies. But if these seem likely to reflect excessively American interests and priorities--as previous Iraqi and Gulf regimes took orders from British imperial "residents"--then the international community should replace the U.S. as the supervising imperial power.

It should be obvious that there is very little prospect of these three aims' being realized. Iraqis will ensure that even if the U.S. were to weaken--in the interest of appeasing France, Russia, the U.N., Kofi Annan, etc.--no Iraqi politician or clerical leader with any ambition will agree to let Saddam be sent off to The Hague facing the prospect of a comfortable apartment in some Belgian or Swedish prison with conjugal visits and free weekend passes. The international agencies themselves, having departed Iraq after the first wave of guerrilla attacks, are unlikely to return until the U.S. Army has restored order. And since maintaining order will continue to depend on the U.S. presence, real influence will rest on the most senior American official in Baghdad, and not on Kofi Annan's representative, for the indefinite future.

Being neither unworldly nor naive, European diplomats and U.N. international lawyers know this very well. It is a measure of their passions and resentments (their humiliation, one might also say) that they cannot hold off from making demands they know to be unachievable on several levels. What they resent, of course, is that such independent power should be exercised by a nation-state rather than being subject to the rules and procedures of international institutions and multilateral cooperation (administered, it is hardly necessary to add, by themselves). That the U.S. is the nation-state in question only makes matters worse since the U.S. is the leading representative of that "Anglo-Saxon" liberalism that has been the bane of continental orders rooted in centralized authority since the modern age began. And they therefore seek to constrain and limit the U.S. and its allies in the name of a future world order built in their image.

It is a consolation that in the U.S. itself the Democrats, the media, the cultural authorities, and the Left largely agree with them. In the light of the likely electoral consequences of Saddam's capture, however, that looks like very cold comfort indeed.