All eyes today were on a courtroom in Baghdad where behind a barrier of white metal bars sat Saddam Hussein, in what he called “his best clothes,” his hair as jet black as always (are they still letting him dye it?). Despite the dramatic setting, nothing really happened aside from the former Iraqi dictator’s plea of “not guilty” and a brief scuffle with his guards. But this bit of non-news — after all, as expected, the trial for his crimes against the village of Dujail was postponed — was immediately seized upon by the blogosphere nevertheless.
Somewhat predictably, some left-leaning bloggers saw an unfair show trial in the works. Blog Tomaat gives his reasons for thinking the proceedings a farce: “American have appointed all the judges,” and besides, the 20-minute delay of the live broadcast must be “to prevent it that Saddam could say things that may not be so good for the Americans, such as the fact that they actively supported Saddam’s regime for years.”
Along these lines, Pradeep at Time and Tide wonders whether Iraq is politically stable enough to try its former leader. “Saddam must be tried by a sovereign Iraq, an Iraq that has evolved democratically to have an independent judiciary,” he writes. “But when will that happen? Will the U.S. be patient for that? It will be sad if Saddam is summarily tried and executed in no time. No one will gain anything out of it, except perhaps Bush’s ego getting a boost.”
On the more sardonic range of the register, Now That’s Progress writes that he “couldn’t care less about Saddam Hussein’s trial.” He thinks that “making Saddam front page news is a way of legitimizing the administration’s ever-shifting rationale for going into Iraq, as if the whole point was to save the Iraqi people from a ruthless dictator, and that the culmination of this effort is the trial of Saddam Hussein.” Hyping the importance of the trial, he writes, “makes it appear that we should care about this far more than is logical — we were not threatened by Saddam, he did not gas our people, Uday and Husay or whatever his name was did not put you and me into an iron maiden for performing poorly on the soccer field.”
On the other hand, he writes, “When George W. Bush is on trial, or even that Rove fella, give me a call.” Lest you think that only the left is capable of sinking to such depths of cynicism, over at Blogs for Bush, they are speculating that “Saddam Hussein is going to be the next Mumia for the radical left. Think about it, there are liberals in this country who believe that Saddam Hussein was a legitimately elected dictator of Iraq, but don’t believe George W. Bush is the legitimately elected President of the United States.” Matt Lauzier, grasping for straws, sees hope: “Saddam did something from a legal standpoint which has not been mentioned in any of the news reports coming from the courtroom in Baghdad. He entered a plea. Yes, that was in the news but it was his acknowledgement of the court’s jurisdiction. By entering a plea he accepted the legitimacy of the court.” He then excitedly wonders, “If Saddam is condemned to a firing squad, how many volunteers would there be among the 25 million Iraqis?”
But the last word has to go to The Daily Heretic. True to his blogname, he’s fairly certain this isn’t the real Saddam were looking at, but just one of his many doubles. “I am disappointed,” he writes. “We could use some amusement now, and the prospect of an impersonator being put on trial (imagine Will Ferrell being put on trial for George Bush’s crimes) is so rich in post-modern irony that CNN would have to hire Jean Baudrillard as their legal analyst to do it justice.
“You didn’t think that guy is really Saddam, do you? He had dozens of doubles when he was governing to protect him from assassination. The teeth on this guy they have in custody are all wrong and the eyes are different distances apart. His own wife says it’s not him.”
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.