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It's not clear what kind of show trial the United States and its hand-picked Iraqi government will agree on. But you can bet that intense discussions are under way in an effort to figure out how to orchestrate the appearance of justice without causing acute embarrassment to the wrong people.
For the first decade of Mr. Hussein's 23 years in power, he was regarded NOT as a despicable tyrant but as an eccentric nuisance. He was considered fairly predictable and a reliable business partner, and he posed no threat to anyone outside his own region. Self-interest and self-enrichment led legions of political and business leaders in the United Staes,the West, and the Arab world to cozy up to him. Testimony from Mr. Hussein in an open courtroom could leave an indelible stain on all their records.
The list might include Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who shook hands with the Iraqi dictator in 1983 when the United States supported Iraq against Iran. On the other side of the ledger, it might include Dick Cheney's Halliburton or the French corporations who profited mightily from Iraqi contracts. And what about former Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov, who traveled to Iraq in February as the U.S.-led invasion loomed? What did he and Mr. Hussein talk about, besides the possibility of exile for the Iraqi leader? Oil? Nuclear weapons? The custody of key intelligence records relating to Iraq and the Soviet Union?
Perhaps Mr. Hussein will finally tell us something worth knowing about Iraqi links to al-Qaeda, or about weapons of mass destruction. The truth is that Iraq hasn't had deployable chemical, biological or nuclear weapons for at least a decade. That would be some comfort to the United Nations teams who spent years under pressure to achieve the logical impossibility of proving a negative. It would be no comfort at all to Mr. Bush or Mr. Blair, who justified participating in the invasion on the grounds that Iraq's armed forces were 45 minutes away from launching a long-range WMD attack.
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