Justice for Saddam

Nevertheless, the counterrevolutionary terror mounted by veterans of Saddam's security services and foreign jihadis will not end with his capture. Saddam's arrest may encourage Iraqis to believe the Ba'athists will not be returning to power -- that the torture cells and raping vans of Saddam's security apparatus will vanish with the tyrant's demise -- but a vicious struggle for power remains to be won.

To ensure that the new Iraq that comes out of this power struggle will by rooted in the rule of law instead of arbitrary power, it is crucial that Saddam be given a fair trial -- but a trial that documents for the world the true scope of his crimes. Kanan Makiya, author of "Republic of Fear" and a longtime foe of the Ba'athist regime, says Saddam's trial must be not simply "the trial of a man, but much more than that -- the trial of an entire system."

For many years, Makiya and other Iraqis have been compiling documentation of Saddam's mass murders. In the aftermath of the regime's fall, the Iraq Survey Group, a CIA-linked US unit under former UN weapons inspector David Kay, has taken control over what Makiya estimates to be more than 2 million pages of Ba'athist documents. This promises to be an extraordinary source of evidence for any trial of Saddam -- the system's own bureaucratic testimony to the genocidal massacres of Kurds, Shi'ites, marsh Arabs, and all too many others.

The Bush administration should pledge to make these captured documents available -- intact and unexpurgated -- to whatever court will sit in judgment of Saddam. The Iraqi Governing Council just last week promulgated a law creating a tribunal to try Saddam before Iraqi judges assisted by international advisers. Because Saddam's trial concerns the world, it would be best to arraign him before an international tribunal. Since the future of Iraq and its neighbors may be shaped by a credible exposure of Saddam's crimes, the impartiality of the court that judges him must be unquestionable.