Moving swiftly on... - no comments

So Saddam Hussein has been convicted of crimes against humanity. Quite right too.

It's unfortunate that so few people - if you count bloggers, and the sickos who haunt the BBC's Have Your Say pages, where the most highly recommended comments are those that cast Saddam as a victim or merely 'as bad' as you know who, as even remotely representative of popular opinion - have deigned to recognise that:

• An appalling tyrant, whose crimes can and should fill thousands of pages, together with some of his lieutenants, has been brought to justice.
  
• Vast numbers of victims can perhaps achieve "closure" after many years.
  
• This took place in a court, as part of a codified legal system.
• A legal system that would not have existed if his regime had not been toppled, and a new state reconstructed in its place.
  

To worry overly about Saddam's sentence looks like evasion to me. Perhaps it's a more interesting and exciting debate for the left to have (actually it's particularly tedious), but I don't think we have the right to move straight there without either taking the time to remind ourselves why the chief actors of the former regime were on trial, or acknowledging the bullet points above.

I'm opposed to capital punishment but I don't see it as incompatible with democracy. Perhaps, when all this is over, we can offer our support to Iraqi democrats (which would be a novelty, at least) in their peaceful campaign to have capital punishment struck from the criminal code.