Justice For Saddam

The BBC has an article about the discovery of another mass grave in Iraq. This one is more heart-breaking than most:

US-led investigators have located nine trenches in Hatra containing hundreds of bodies believed to be Kurds killed during the repression of the 1980s. The skeletons of unborn babies and toddlers clutching toys are being unearthed, the investigators said.

One trench contains only women and children while another contains only men.

The body of one woman was found still clutching a baby. The infant had been shot in the back of the head and the woman in the face.

"The youngest foetus we have was 18 to 20 foetal weeks," said US investigating anthropologist P Willey.

"Tiny bones, femurs - thighbones the size of a matchstick."

Mr Kehoe investigated mass graves in the Balkans for five years but those burials mainly involved men of fighting age and the Iraqi finds were quite different, he said.

Iraq's human rights ministry has reportedly identified 40 possible mass graves across the country.

Mr Kehoe said that work to uncover graves around Iraq, where about 300,000 people are thought to have been killed during Saddam Hussein's regime, was slow as experienced European investigators were not taking part.

The Europeans, he said, were staying away as the evidence might be used eventually to put Saddam Hussein to death.

Forty mass graves! And still the squeamish Europeans don't want to get involved. Yes. By all means, the Europeans should not help to accumulate the evidence of Saddam's crimes because, why, then they'd be helping to show that he actually deserved to die and what kind of gratitude would that express to the man who filled the purses of so many of their countrymen with cash in order to keep them quiet about his crimes. The Europeans are nothing if not loyal to an ally, at least whichever ally offers them the most lucrative bribes.

Perhaps this is all one might expect from the people whose culture produced Hitler and Stalin. The Europeans have a soft spot in their hearts for murderous savages like Saddam, they tend to regard them as existential heroes, and we should be understanding of their desire not to see a Nietzschean Ubermann get what he meted out to so many others.

As for those who have not yet descended to European levels of effete decadence there still exists the concept of Justice. Saddam deserves worse than death, of course, but that should be left to God. Our only obligation, as General Norman Schwartzkopff once said, is to arrange the meeting.