Justice deferred

What ever happened to Saddam? We dragged him out of that spider hole, and there was that little gaffe with Saddam in his undies. But since then, where has that genocidal maniac been? Well, in case you didn't know, he's currently on trial, in what can only be described as one of the weirdest courtroom proceedings ever.\nSo far, there have been two assassinated defense attorneys, an attempt to fire rockets at the courtroom and a period of extended oratory by Saddam's half-brother during which he screamed, "Down with the dictators! Long live democracy!" The defense's strategy involves ignoring Saddam's fairly transparent crimes, whereas the prosecution is only charging Saddam with an obscure 1982 act of tyranny against the Shiite town of Dujail.\nSaddam's half-brother slapping guards with a notebook? Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark lecturing the judge? A judge falling asleep during the trial? Saddam was a despicable dictator, and his people deserve swift justice. How has his trial devolved into an episode of the "People's Court?" If the whole reason to go to war against Iraq was to stop Saddam, what is he doing in this joke of a trial?\nFor one thing, the setup of the Iraqi Special Tribunal takes the format of past war crimes tribunals, and then fuses it with Iraqi civil law. The bizarre process uses a five-judge panel as primary investigators, and it doesn't follow many previous conventions for war criminals, most notably by trying him in Iraq under the interim government. \n No one takes this trial seriously. Many in Iraq assume that Saddam is as good as dead and that the international community has rigged the trial. The interim Iraqi government cannot lend any legitimacy or security to the trial by being barely able to keep its head above water. Judges can't keep order in the courtroom because their authority in Iraq exists because of America's presence. With America's military as the only thing holding Iraq's fragile civil society together, it's hard to see how this trial can be taken seriously.\nMany have cited the Saddam trial as a reproduction of the Nuremberg trials after World War II, but this comparison is flawed. Saddam's trial is not a failure because it's a tribunal instituted by an occupying force. Saddam's trial fails because of its inherent conceit: that Iraq has a functioning government fit to try its ex-leader on charges of mass genocide and crimes against humanity. While the United States might have symbolically handed Saddam over to the Iraqi government, they're still our soldiers who guard his cell.\nWe cannot afford to pass judgment poorly. The world and the people of Iraq, especially Witness C, deserve a trial, not a circus. Witness C, identity hidden for fear of retribution, testified that his whole family was taken prisoner by Saddam's security forces and imprisoned in Abu Ghraib, where his father died. Saddam angrily questioned the witness, without significant interruption from any judges, demanding to know how he remembered all this information.\n"This was a great sadness to me, and I cannot forget a great sadness," said Witness C.\nNeither should we.