The only thing worse than a show trial would be a show trial that let Saddam Hussein off the hook. I’m glad that Saddam is going to get what he should have gotten the second he was pulled from his spidey hole. I don’t believe in injecting litigation into what was essentially a foreign policy/war matter, an innovation of the Nuremberg trials (which Winston Churchill, who, like me, belongs to the shoot ’em dead school of thought, initially opposed).


But the guys at The Corner don’t seem to share my non-legalistic Scotch-Irish/Roman Empire point of view on this matter:  


Unlike me, Victor Davis Hanson seems to approve of the trial: “Saddam’s trial, despite the criticisms, is very significant. When in the history of the Middle East has a democratically elected government held public trials, with an independent judiciary, to call to account a former head of state for crimes? Saddam was not tortured and did not mysteriously disappear; nor did he drop dead in mediis rebus like the Milosevic fiasco at the Hague. He and his cronies were rounded up – unlike the European failure even to find Gen. Mladic and Radovan Karadzic – tried and convicted. And where else would a shyster like Ramsey Clark be allowed in to pontificate and to cause petty distractions with impunity?”