Saddam's Years of Playing Footsie with the United States

* Henley:

"And it’s also true that the US and its Iraqi allies chose to try Saddam on one of his relatively minor crimes because if they did so they could get him safely hung before they had to try him for the major ones, the gas attacks and massacres that happened during The Years of Playing Footsie with the United States. The Dujail reprisals were a war crime, no doubt about it, a bigger sham of justice than Saddam’s own trial, by two orders of magnitude. They were also the sort of war crime that people like Ralph Peters and a hundred other pundits and parapundits think the United States should be committing. Every time you read a complaint about “politically correct rules of engagement” you are reading someone who would applaud a Dujail-level slaughter if only we were to perpetrate it. Those are the people who are happiest of all about tonight’s execution. Smells like - victory! "

* also, FAIR, from 2004:

"How easy it is to praise your own country for the same actions you condemned when performed by its enemies."

* lgm:

"Excuses for war are like buses; there's always another one coming. The problem with war against Iran is that it's a terrible idea on its merits. It's a high risk, no payoff maneuver. Indeed, in spite of the mental gymnastics of such luminaries as Arthur Herman, there's almost no way to sketch out a scenario in which war gets us what we want from Iran without also incurring exorbitant costs. "

* chs has a lovely post about saddam, defendants, and the death penalty - she ends thusly:

"The search for justice comes in the little actions, the difficult choices, the close cases, the ones where you have a difficult defendant who has committed heinous atrocities, and you still have the character and the moral standing to treat that person with the same standing as anyone else would be given under the rule of law. Was that the case for Saddam Hussein? History will long-from-now look back on this and judge it, kindly or harshly, but in the meantime, the world looks on and we will know their judgment soon enough. But it is my own doubts about our role in this process that are causing me to ask questions — and I am not certain that the answers will bring me much, if any, comfort.

But, search we all must, because that is our duty as citizens of this nation. For it is in the accounting of this and every other case that the true search for justices lies. Especially where those answers seem as difficult as these may be."

* jonathon:

"I realize I shouldn't be shocked by anything anymore...but I am shocked and frightened by the way this has happened. I honestly never believed the Bush administration could get away with preventing Saddam from speaking about his longtime collaboration with the U.S., which started in the late fifties. (Of course, Saddam may have had his own reasons for not, uh, emphasizing this.) And I really didn't think they could off him with no trial for the large-scale crimes we assisted with. But apparently they can. It's just a few steps short of an intra-mob hit."

* here's a comment from gatewaypundit's site - just for fun:

"Liberalism is a mental disorder wherein any absurd and bigoted belief that supports its agenda must be tolerated, promoted by force and revered as doctrine by its fanatical partisans. Any and all means will be employed to achieve its despotic and tyrannical objectives, even the embracing of an enemy sworn to destroy its own existence and the sacrifice of its unborn infants."

* glenn:

"For the Bush apologists who require them, help yourselves to all the meaningless caveats you want. Saddam Hussein was far more brutal, more tyrannical, more liberty-abridging than George Bush. When it comes to internal repression, the two should not be compared.

Those who take comfort in comparisons like that, who think that these sorts of rationalizations constitute some kind of mitigating argument -- "hey, American behavioral standards still hover above those of Saddam's Baathist Iraq, so only deranged Bush-haters would object to America's treatment of its detainees!" -- are precisely the people who have no understanding of what kind of country America is supposed to be."