I don't agree with everything in this piece but Richard Cohen is right about a few things: A trial that was supposed to "highlight the many crimes of Saddam Hussein" has instead obscured them and those anti-Iraq War folks calling for action in Darfur face a moral contradiction of their own.
On most days, [the trial] has been a sputtering charade, which somehow has managed not to highlight the many crimes of Saddam Hussein but to obscure them. This is an important point, for behind the stated reason for the war itself -- ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction -- was the repellent nature of Hussein's regime. It was no mere run-of-the-mill Middle Eastern dictatorship, like that of next-door Syria or, in its own way, Iran, but a place where the state could murder casually and with impunity -- and often did. It was a place of torture. It was a place of massacre. It was a place of unspeakable terror. It was a place where children were killed. It was a place where women were raped. It was a place -- just to cite what happened to the Fayli Kurds, a small ethnic group from near the Iran border -- where families were rousted from their homes, the men separated from the women (and never seen again), the women raped and abused and sometimes forced at gunpoint across the frontier into Iran. Some died of exposure in the mountains and some died of fatigue and some were killed in the crossfire of Iraqi and Iranian troops then fighting their war in the 1980s. So far, none of this has been mentioned at the trial. For many who supported going to war in Iraq, the nature of the regime was important, even paramount. It is disappointing that this no longer gets mentioned. I suppose the handwriting was on the wall when Michael Moore failed to mention Hussein's crimes at all in his movie "Fahrenheit 9/11." Years from now, someone coming across the film could conclude that the United States picked on the Middle Eastern version of Switzerland. Now, all the weight is on one side of the moral scale. But what would have happened if the war had actually ended back when George Bush stood under that "Mission Accomplished" banner? The U.S. combat death toll then was 139. (It's now approaching 2,500.) Would it have been worth 139 American lives to put an end to a regime that had murdered many thousands of its own people and had been responsible for two major wars? After all, aren't some of the people who want Washington to do something in Darfur the same people who so rigorously opposed the Iraq war on moral grounds? What if we could pacify Darfur -- immense, arid and without population centers -- at the cost of 139 American lives? What is the morality of that? Two hundred thousand have already died there. Should we intervene? Pardon me for raising the question without answering it. I do so only to discomfort, if I can, some of the people who are so certain of their moral righteousness when it comes to the Iraq war. I want to know why the crimes of Saddam Hussein never figure into their thinking and why it was morally wrong -- not merely unwise -- to topple him....
A few months back I cited an article in the January issue of National Geographic. Lewis M. Simons traveled to Iraq to report on Camp Slayer, where scientists continue to examine the "new forensic evidence of Saddam Hussein's murderous regime." He noted a Clark University Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies estimate that Saddam's regime had murdered up to 240,000 men, women, children and infants. Here are some of the victims and how they died:
Patterns of neat bullet holes peppered skulls and garments, many of them the baggy trousers peculiar to Kurdish men. Staring at cardboard boxes filled with skulls in plastic bags and skeletons precisely arrayed on steel gurneys, inhaling the oddly metallic death smells.... "As you work with the victims, especially the children -- their clothing, the baby bottle, the little shoes, just like the ones we bought for our daughters years ago, the little hands, so expressive in death -- you have to try not to get into the heads of the monsters who did this, or it becomes overwhelming. You look at a perfectly knitted baby bonnet with two bullet holes in it, and you think, these could be your own kids," [said an American forensic scientist]. "The women often had children with them and received, perhaps, the blessing of being shot once at close range. All of this is based on clear evidence, not speculation." [He] pointed out an entry hole at the top of the skull ... an exit hole near the left socket, and a radiating crack in the left cheek ... female, mid-30s, five foot four to five foot six....
Simon also noted:
Initially, X [an Iraqi forensic scientist] gladly agreed to be identified in this story. But shortly before it went to press he got word to me of death threats against him and his family.... The threats most likely where made by Sunni supporters of Saddam Hussein, who are striving to diminish evidence against the former dictator.
So far, Saddam's trial has been a missed opportunity to remind the world of the horrors of his dictatorship. In Cohen's words, what a "damn shame."