COMMENTARY
We Got Him ... Now What? Robert Scheer
December 16, 2003
The capture of Saddam Hussein is being treated as a celebratory occasion, but it is one that the Bush administration might come to regret.
The onus is on the United States to accord this former ally and head of state all the rights due a high-level prisoner of war, as established at Nuremberg and The Hague. His testimony in open court could prove fascinating if he is allowed to detail his past relationships with top U.S. officials - including the president's father and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who worked out terms of cooperation with Hussein in 1983.
And now that the "fear factor" of Hussein's ghostly presence has been removed, there is no longer any valid explanation for why former members of Hussein's regime and key scientists cannot show us where all those infamous weapons of mass destruction went. After all, this invasion - based on a new doctrine of preemptive war that bypassed United Nations inspectors - was not pitched to the American people as a mercy mission.
We were told that Hussein posed an imminent threat to the world and was close to building nuclear weapons that he might give to Al Qaeda. Occupying Iraq, it was stated over and over again by the White House, was a legitimate response to the horror of Sept. 11 and a way to prevent, as Condoleezza Rice once put it, "a mushroom cloud" from appearing over an American city.
Of course, President Bush was finally forced to concede that there was no evidence that linked Hussein to 9/11. Yet, in his brief statement after the capture of Hussein, he again connected the secular dictator to the threat of fundamentalist terrorism. He did this while continuing silence on the Bush family's old business buddies in Saudi Arabia, backers of Al Qaeda and other religious fanatics, who numbered Hussein among their enemies.
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Quis custodiet istos custodes?
"Who will watch the watchers?" ~ "Who is to guard [us from] the guards themselves?"
-- Juvenal's Satires, VI. 347, circa 110 AD