Toronto Star Tears georgie A New One

Saddam Trial Won't Hide

Bush's Historic Mistakes

Propaganda seeping from whole exercise undermine its validity

by Haroon Siddiqui
Toronto Star

Iraqis have a new constitution. But they don't have drinking water or electricity. They have rights they never had before. But their women, once the freest in the Arab Middle East, are being pushed into purdah.

Saddam Hussein is on trial for his gulag in which 300,000 died. But between 25,000 and 100,000 Iraqis have been killed under the American occupation, another 500,000 having perished earlier under the U.S.-led economic sanctions.

Saddam's trial is meant to bring "closure" to his tyranny. Who or what will bring the curtain down on the current Iraqi nightmare? And how and when?

His trial is said to mark a new era of law and order. But Iraqis cannot venture out of their homes for fear of being blown up or shot dead. For that same reason, senior Iraqi judges are sitting out the trial, leaving it to juniors, four of whom did not show up on Day 1 for fear of being outed by the TV coverage.

Saddam is not being tried by an international court of law because the Americans said he is best judged by his own people. But the court trying him is controlled and directed by the U.S.-run Regime Crimes Liaison Office in Baghdad, which has spent $138 million U.S. — so far.

This is an American show trial, through and through.

There was the white-railing TV set that served as the docket for Saddam and the seven other accused, all arranged just so, for the cameras. We might as well have been watching a court episode taped in Burbank.

There was the photo op of hundreds of flag-draped coffins lined up with cinematic symmetry, the remains of Kurds gassed by Saddam and dug up by the Americans, in time for his trial.

There was the telltale American overkill on security. New York Times reporter John Burns recorded the details:

"The courthouse was secured with double barriers of concrete blast walls, rolls of razor wire, sniffer dogs and high-tech, 360-degree body-scanning machines, as well as an American Abrams tank at the courthouse gate. American attack helicopters and fighter-jets maintained vigil above ... Iraqi officials and reporters were shielded from the courtroom by windows of bulletproof glass."

All this inside the fortified Green Zone of Baghdad!

The problem with all this is not that Saddam may not get a fair trial, as the bleeding hearts fear. Or that the nincompoops running it will let him steal the show from the prosecutors.

The real danger is that the propagandist phoniness seeping out of this exercise will undermine its validity.

As a human rights activist told The Star's Middle East correspondent Mitch Potter: "The majority of Arabs will see this as nothing but a charade."

The trial and the new constitution, important historic initiatives, evince more interest from us than the Iraqis, who have more pressing needs of life and death.

For them, there was Saddam and now there is America. The latter is trying the former.

The blame for this moral equivalency does not rest with the Iraqis.

To them, and many others in the world not sucked in by the Washington spin, Saddam in the dock and the constitution on a referendum ballot are not milestones on the road to nirvana but the latest reminders of the gap between reality and the delusions, or the outright lies, of George W. Bush.

As Iraq becomes Vietnam, he blames the seemingly unstoppable insurgency on Al Qaeda and other Islamic militants, whom he has just compared to Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot. But his own analysts peg their number at only a few hundred out of an estimated 10,000 insurgents.

He blames Iran and Syria and won't rule out waging war on either or both. Yet suspected foreign militants caught in Iraq since April add up to a grand total of 312. Of them, the highest number, 78, hail from Egypt, about which he remains silent, as also about the other American ally, Saudi Arabia, whose apprehended citizens outnumber Iran's, 32 to 13.

He crows about bringing democracy to Iraq but plans to veto a U.S. Senate vote ordering him to bring Guantanamo Bay and similar other holding pens under the rule of law.

We are witnessing historic mistakes that cannot be masked even by master propagandists.

Haroon Siddiqui is the The Star's editorial page editor emeritus.