Dead dictators tell no tales

IN 1987, Libya’s leader, Muammar Qadhafi, led me by the hand through the ruins of his Tripoli residence, showing me the bedroom where American 2,000 lb bombs, launched in an attempt to assassinate him, had killed his two-year old daughter.

The bombing of a Pan Am airliner filled with Americans two years later may have been revenge for this attack. Murder breeds murder.

Now, the latest irksome Arab leader is in Washington’s gun sights. Time seems to be running out for Iraq’s fugitive former president, Saddam Hussein.

Chances are Saddam, like his sons, will be killed in a Bonnie and Clyde shoot-out. He is unlikely to be captured, unless incapacitated.

The Bush administration will be delighted not to put Saddam on public trial. Dead dictators tell no tales. The White House would much prefer to display a bullet-riddled Saddam as a trophy to divert mounting criticism over US casualties in Iraq and the litany of falsehoods it used to drive America to war.

If put on public trial, Saddam Hussein would have a field day revealing the embarrassing alliance between his brutal regime and Washington. For example:

* CIA’s role in bringing the Ba’ath Party to power in a 1958 coup, opening the way for Saddam to take control.

* US, Israeli, Iranian destabilization of Iraq during the 1970s by fuelling Kurdish rebellion. Washington’s egging on the aggressive Shah of Iran in the Shatt al-Arab waterway dispute, a primary cause of the Iran-Iraq war.

* US secretly urging Iraq to invade Iran in 1980 to overthrow that nation’s revolutionary Islamic government.

* Covert supply of Saddam’s war machine by the US and Britain during the eight-year Iran-Iraq conflict: biological warfare programmes and germ feeder stocks, poison gas manufacturing plants and raw materials. Billions in aid, routed through the US Department of Agriculture, Italy’s Banco del Lavoro, and the shady bank, BCCI. Heavy artillery, munitions, spare parts, trucks, field hospitals, and electronics.

Equally important, the US Defence Intelligence Agency and CIA operated offices in Baghdad that provided Iraq with satellite intelligence data on Iranian troop deployments that proved decisive in the war’s titanic battles at Basra, Majnoon and Faw.

* The murky role played by Washington just before Iraq’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait. The US ambassador told Saddam, “The US takes no position in Arab border disputes.” Was this a trap to lure Saddam to invade Kuwait, then crush his army, or simple diplomatic bungling? Saddam could supply the awkward answers.

In short, Saddam was one of America’s closet Mideast allies during the 1980s, a major recipient of US military and financial aid. Saddam’s killing of large numbers of Kurds and Shia rebels occurred while he was a key US ally. Washington remained mute at the time. When Bush Senior called on Kurds and Shia to revolt in 1991, the US watched impassively as Saddam slaughtered the poorly armed rebels.

Better a bullet-riddled Saddam, or one executed by a military kangaroo court in Guantanamo, or hanged by the new, American-installed ‘Vichy’ Iraqi regime in Baghdad.

Saddam should be handed over by the US to the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague that is currently trying Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic and other accused Balkan war criminals. After all, it was Washington that engineered Milosevic’s delivery to the Hague, an act for which the US deserves high praise. What applies to Milosevic applies equally to Saddam Hussein.

In fact, it would be better for the Iraqi leader to stand trial at the newly constituted International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. But the Bush administration, in one of its most shameful acts, has refused to join this tribunal or cooperate with it.

Should Saddam be gunned down, like his two sons, there will be glee among many Americans and rejoicing in the White House. But Saddam Hussein is not a simple gangster or a prize elk. However odious, he was the leader of a sovereign nation and government recognized by the US.

Killing foreign heads of state violates international law and the directives made by three American presidents. Dropping 2,000 lb bombs on sites where Saddam was believed to be is called attacking ‘leadership targets’ in the new Orwellian Pentagonspeak, but it’s still old-fashioned murder from the air. Gunning down Saddam will also be murder, or, to use a politer term, assassination.

America, the world’s greatest democracy, has no business murdering foreign leaders. Such behaviour is criminal, immoral, undemocratic, the law of the jungle. Past US attempts to murder foreign leaders have proved self-defeating.

Last week, Task Force 20, a trigger-happy US military hit squad hunting Saddam, killed between five and eleven innocent Iraqi civilians in a botched Baghdad raid. This outrage is worthy of Saddam’s former secret police.

George Bush may yearn to drape the body of Saddam over his jeep and show it off to neighbours around Crawford, Texas, but he should be forcefully reminded that the American president represents the laws of the land. Bad enough that the White House waged a totally unnecessary, unprovoked, undeclared war on Iraq based on outright lies, this grave offence should not be compounded by cold-blooded murder, no matter how odious the intended victim. — Copyright Eric S. Margolis, 2003.

Australia acts unilaterally, too

AN Australian-led peacekeeping force has landed in the Solomon Islands, to the almost universal relief of the 450,000 people who live in the small island state.

Civil war broke out between rival ethnic groups on the main island, Guadalcanal, in 1998, and rebels from the neighbouring island of Malaita staged a coup in 2000. The intervention makes every kind of good sense — and yet there is something peculiar about it.

Violence and insecurity have become chronic in the Solomons, raising fears among the neighbours that it was becoming a classic ‘failed state’. “You are looking at cabinet not being able to meet,” said Foreign Minister Laurie Chan. “We have to go to different locations for it. You are looking at militants shooting at the prime minister’s house.” And the region’s response has been sensible, if a bit belated.

Australia reversed its long-standing policy of non-intervention in the troubled Melanesian states that ring it to the north and east and took the lead in organising a peace-keeping force. Smaller regional states — New Zealand, Fiji, Samoa, Papua New Guinea and Tonga — contributed troops as well, though three-quarters of the 2,225-strong force is Australian. The mandate is solid: the Solomons government has officially asked for help and passed a law permitting the peacekeepers to use reasonable force to disarm the militias and restore order.

So why, you wonder, did Australian Foreign Minister Alex Downer feel compelled to issue a chest-pounding statement that “Sovereignty in our view is not absolute. Acting for the benefit of humanity is,” as though Australia were doing this without the Solomons consent. Then you realise that he is actually proclaiming a doctrine of limited sovereignty for the smaller and weaker states of the region. And although this is a classic United Nations-style peacekeeping operation, the UN is not involved — because Australia does not want it involved.

Australia under Prime Minister John Howard’s conservative government has joined the small club of English-speaking industrial countries that have granted themselves the right to act unilaterally, allegedly in the best interests of all. Unlike Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, who clings to the fantasy that this policy is compatible with a multilateral global order — and quite unlike Canada and New Zealand, which refused to join the club at all — Howard has signed up for the full neo-conservative project that captured the Bush administration in Washington after 9/11. That most certainly includes sidelining the United Nations.

Australian Foreign Minister Alex Downer made a point of bypassing the United Nations in his key speech on the Solomons on 26 June, criticising the UN and the principle of multilateralism in general as “a synonym for an ineffective and unfocussed policy involving internationalism of the lowest common denominator.” What was needed instead, he said, was more “coalitions of the willing” to tackle specific security threats outside the UN framework, like the one that took Saddam Hussein down earlier this year.

John Howard’s New Zealand counterpart, Prime Minister Helen Clark, had a few words to say about this in May, as she tried to counter domestic criticism and US pressure to fall in line with American policy as Australia has done. “It would be very easy for a country like New Zealand to make excuses and think of justifications for what its friends were doing, but we would have to be mindful that we were creating precedents for others also to exit from multilateral decision-making.”— Copyright

Global challenges & Pakistan

IT WAS heartening to see the foreign Office publicly debating at a seminar its own role in meeting the global economic challenges. Like all earlier envoys’ conferences, the four-day conference of our envoys in major capitals of the world must also have focused on this subject. A set of recommendations, as always in the past, may have emerged from the conference to be officially converted into policy guidelines for all concerned ministries and departments.

What happens (or does not happen) next is common knowledge. Policy guidelines emanating from previous envoys’ conferences are nowhere to account for. One does not recall if there is any mechanism for “integrated and coordinated” follow-up and implementation of the outcomes of our envoys’ conferences that could facilitate regular monitoring and review of progress in implementation of the decisions and guidelines by the relevant governmental agencies. If there is none, every major ministry should have a small review and monitoring cell headed by a senior officer and there should be periodic inter-ministerial coordination meetings among the heads of these cells.

But this is not the principal focal point here. I was struck by the candid acknowledgement by Foreign Secretary Riaz Khokhar, in his reported concluding remarks at the seminar that “Pakistan was not prepared to face the challenges of the future”. If he said so, he has spoken the truth.

I am sure the foreign secretary’s remarks about the performance of the economic ministries were meant to be only a reference point for the larger systemic complacency and inertia He was perhaps reminding our policy-makers that in order to meet the myriad challenges of the new age, Pakistan will have to be stable internally and have an agreeable profile externally. Internal strength requires political, economic and social stability achieved through strong and functional political institutions, viable economy, moderate and progressive outlook and rule of law. The external image of countries is always predicated on the policies that they follow at home and their ability to live in peace with the rest of the world, especially neighbours.

Agonizingly, since independence, Pakistan has been wallowing in political and economic uncertainty and has had neither domestic stability and social cohesion nor peaceful borders. Its post-independence political history has been replete with endemic crises and challenges that perhaps no other country in the world has experienced. It has gone through traumatic experiences, including costly wars and perennial tensions with India, loss of half the country, territorial setbacks, political breakdowns, military take-overs, economic stagnation and social malaise.

During the last two decades, Pakistan has also been the hotbed of religious extremism and obscurantism. Proxy wars have been fought on our soil. Sectarian violence has taken a heavy and tragic toll in terms of innocent lives of both Pakistanis and non-Pakistanis. Even mosques and churches were not spared as scenes of cold-blooded communal and sectarian killings. The recent sectarian killings in Quetta were no less than a carnage which has no parallel anywhere in today’s world.

Over the years since the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Pakistan has been burdened with a massive refugee influx and afflicted with a culture of drugs and guns, commonly known as the “Kalashnikov” culture, which has been tearing apart our social and political fabric. The constant erosion in law and order has had an adverse impact on the country’s climate for investment and economic development and progress.

What an unmatched tally of woes for a young nation, which from day one of its independence has lived with the phobia of an “external threat” to its survival. The history of the last fiftysix years, however, shows that the real threat to our country’s survival and stability has been from within, not from outside. We have remained a house divided against itself. Had we not messed up the things in East Pakistan ourselves, the 1971 debacle could have been avoided.

Unfortunately, Pakistan’s difficulties have been exacerbated by decades of political instability, economic stagnation, rampant corruption, general aversion to rule of law and constant erosion of law and order. This is not what the founders of Pakistan had envisioned when they led the struggle of the Muslims of South Asia for a separate homeland as a fortress of their freedom, pride and dignity.

For reasons of domestic political instability and insecurity with a brittle law and order situation and also the continuing tensions with India (now with Afghanistan too), we have been unable to harness the unique asset of our geographical location for our economic growth. Religious extremism and terrorism-related problems afflicting the region tend to further reinforce misperceptions about Pakistan in the world’s councils today. Foreign business interests are hesitant to invest their capital in Pakistan because of a domestic and regional environment that is perceived as politically and economically unstable and uncertain.

India, on the other hand, has been steadfast in terms of both its democratic experience and economic performance. Today, it enjoys global respect as the “largest democracy” and one of the “largest economies” of the world. It is attracting a lot of international attention as an emerging economic power and a huge market with vast opportunities for trade and commerce. The lead taken by India in areas such as information technology, spearheaded by a well-placed and well-respected expatriate community in the West, has brought laurels to that country’s fast growing economic and business community. Taken together, these factors have placed India prominently on the radar of the global economic powerhouses.

For now at least, the time seems to be on India’s side. Even though India is spending only 2.8 per cent of its GDP and Pakistan is spending around six per cent of its GDP on defence, the power asymmetry is growing. The Indian economy is on a steep growth path with an average annual growth rate of seven per cent, whereas our growth rate is hovering around less than four per cent.

What is important in today’s context is the need for Pakistan to be stable politically and strong economically with a moderate, liberal and progressive outlook and impregnable security. We have had enough political and social fragmentation. Despite our huge natural and human resources and strategic location advantages, we have been left far behind in the global race for economic advancement. It is time our leaders and institutions rose above their narrow vested interests and moved out of the vicious cycle of “confrontation and collusion” and take the road to “national reconciliation and reconstruction”.

A strong and stable Pakistan imbued with Islamic ideology and democratic values would give us the confidence and capability to meet the global challenges. We need an effective and realistic but low-key foreign policy premised on economic diplomacy and friendly relations with all (enmity with none) and focused on protecting Pakistan’s vital national interests. Pakistan should be a factor of strength and stability to our neighbouring regions and must pursue and promote mutually beneficial regional cooperation within the frameworks of Saarc and Eco. Regional cooperation must transcend narrow bounds of prejudices, misunderstandings and political differences.

On the economic front, we must recognize that the cutting edge of any country’s external policy is commerce and business. These are the new determinants today of a country’s relevance in the international community. We must ensure consistency in our macroeconomic policies with greater emphasis on self-reliance and a conducive environment for investment and private sector activity, including a stable law and order situation, modern infrastructure and highly qualified professionals and skilled labour.

We must enable and inspire the private sector to become more dynamic, diversified and responsive to the ever-changing demands of the international market. Besides encouraging value-addition for higher export earnings, we should provide maximum exposure to our industry to higher standards of quality and demand in world markets. Confidence of the foreign business community needs to be restored through an effective mechanism for quality control and settlement of commercial disputes. Monopolies, particularly in the automobile sector, should be eliminated or rationalized to protect consumers’ interests. Bureaucratic and procedural impediments also need to be removed to encourage foreign capital and export-oriented joint venture collaboration.

We also need to address our social problems. A culture of social integration and cohesion should be developed to reinforce national unity and cohesion. Education must be placed on top of priorities in our development planning and budgeting. Let us match India in this field and establish IT centres of excellence.

The government must engage all segments of society to effectively deal with extremism, obscurantism and violence of any sorts or scales. As part of national reconciliation and reconstruction, a vigorous effort needs to be made to promote an environment of tolerance, understanding, responsibility and moderation, while curbing extremism, militancy, violence and fundamentalism. To project our image as a disciplined and forward-looking nation, balance and consistency must be reflected in all expressions of national behaviour, including art, music and architecture.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Presidential system: the paradigm shift

THE current row over the LFO has assumed such serious proportions that it has eclipsed the achievements of President Musharraf’s three-year term.

The most credible achievement has been the wiping out of corruption from the government. We realized for the first time that honest government officials can make such a difference to the morale of the people and to the advantage of the economy. The transparency element introduced in governance and the competence of the managers is rebuilding our image as a respectable nation.

Macroeconomic indicators, the banking reforms, the buoyant stock exchange, the surge in exports, an unprecedented level of remittances, and the largest-ever foreign exchange reserves are things worth noting as the benchmarks of progress. All this speaks in favour of technocracy.

Our fiftyfive years’ history tells us that coincidentally it was during civilian democracy what we experienced most of out declines and failures. This is not to advocate military rule as a better alternative. But the problem lies with the parliamentary form. Our experience of the past five and half decades has taught us that such a form of government has not proved effective or appropriate for us. One the other hand, one sees a lot of merit in the presidential form. When will we learn our lessons. It is time to consider a paradigm shift. We were among the most respected nation when we were under the presidential system. Our economy was buoyant, our economic planning was widely admired and many wanted to adopt our system. Our country was considered safe for investment and for all nationals and religions.

We were positive and progressive under that system of government. We did have our problems and shortcomings but nothing that we could not sort out with a participatory approach. We were heading for true democracy under that system. It is a stroke of bad luck that we were derailed from the track of the presidential system.

Ours is inclined to be a power centric culture. If we look at the history of Pakistan, we will notice that even though military rulers held the president’s office, even a democratically elected prime minister claiming a ‘heavy mandate’ went in for absolute power. Every politician in power has loved to act the president. The examples of Z.A Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif have not faded from the people’s memory. Yet they pretended to hate the presidential system. Politicians keep good relations with the bureaucracy to cover up their weaknesses and shortcomings. They need the parliamentary form of governments because they can then use this relationship to meet the demands of their voters. As a minister a politician is two in one an executive authority and a legislator. Hence he will oppose the presidential system which does not offer the same privilege. Here lies the conflict, but should self-interest supersede national and public interest?

How can the presidential form of government be used successfully in Pakistan?

First let us acknowledge that we are Pakistanis and are therefore not like the Indians. We are a society on this side of the Indus and have our cultural, ethnic, and linguistic heritage, which is different from that of India. So if the parliamentary form of government is successful in India, it need not necessarily be successful in Pakistan. As a society we are going through a transitory phase to establish our own identity. We need to develop a positive and constructive mental attitude to the question of our identity. We must also establish our Islamic and traditional values, ethics and principles — which should be tolerant and respectful toward all. In this way we can integrate as one society, keeping our linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversities to form a harmonious blend. We must move towards being a better integrated nation and society.

Next we need to introduce the presidential system. I would like to add that we must recognize that the system gives ample representation to the people by the introduction of the devolution plan and the local bodies. The devolution plan suits the presidential form of government. It gives recognition to the grassroot level individual and the voter at that level. The interest of the constituency of the Nazims is better representated and serviced by the Nazims than by the MPAs and MNAs.

Next as we can see the presidential system supports a strong centre. It is nonetheless a democratic system based on adult franchise. It however separates the executive from the legislator. The legislators perform as lawmakers and also monitor the executives such as the president and the governors.

Given the Pakistani scenario and the negative influence, such as horse trading and undermining of the state, it is logical to consider a strong centre rather than loosely federating units. This also gives an opportunity to the voters to select the political party of their choice, and bring in the lower house members of their political party. The members of the lower house cannot blackmail or intimidate the government on the basis of withdrawing support. Yet the checks and balances are natural to the system.

Secrets, scandals and spies

BRITAIN has always had a soft spot for scandals involving national secrets. There was the 1930s Cambridge spy ring, with Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who worked for the British Secret Service but turned out to be longtime spies for the Soviet Union. Even better if the scandals involved sex.

The early 1960s Profumo affair, in which a politician’s young mistress may have had Soviet ties, led to the resignation of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. But the latest intelligence affair, the suicide of Defence Ministry advisor David Kelly, has a different and more somber cast to it.

It has enmeshed Prime Minister Tony Blair, the British Broadcasting Corp. and members of Parliament in an ugly dispute and a flurry of conspiracy theories that may ruin reputations and careers.

Kelly, said to have supplied the BBC with information showing that the Blair government “sexed up,” as the British phrase has it, intelligence on Iraq, has become a proxy bludgeon against the prime minister and the BBC.

That he is judged to have committed suicide under intense media pressure inevitably raised comparisons to Vincent Foster. He was the Clinton friend and colleague enmeshed in the Travelgate scandal, something utterly trivial when compared to a cause for war.

In both cases, political opponents quickly churned up whispers that it might not be suicide, but a government-sponsored act. Kelly, who reportedly told BBC correspondent Andrew Gilligan that the government did not have much of a case in claiming that Iraq could launch biological weapons within 45 minutes, invites another comparison closer to home.

In the 1930s, Ralph Wigham, a member of the Foreign Office, handed Winston Churchill vital documents showing that Nazi Germany was arming itself to the teeth while Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was doing nothing.

Depressed by the pressure of handing over documents and the impending war with Germany, Wigham committed suicide. Is Kelly a Wigham in reverse, showing that the government was exaggerating? The BBC says Kelly was Gilligan’s main source. But Kelly, before a parliamentary investigative committee, said it wasn’t so. Meanwhile, Blair and the BBC are scrambling. — Los Angeles Times

Judgment at Mosul

THE United States, unlike other civilizations, has never experienced the adolescence of a Medieval Age. In the brief two hundred and twentyseven-year-old span of its existence as a political entity (it is by far the youngest country in the First World), it has gone directly from a rebellious childhood to an imperious, superpower adulthood.

It has been spared, for example, the state-organized public hangings at London’s Tyburn where bodies of criminals were hanged in the open and then left to be viewed by an inquisitive populace. It has never witnessed the brutal exercise of personal authority that the Mughal emperor Jahangir showed when he had his impudent son Khusrau’s supporters impaled on stakes outside the city of Lahore and kept there on display in the heat. And despite America’s support for the French Revolution, it did not have to witness its nationals’ heads being severed by the silent blade of a guillotine, and then be displayed aloft on spikes before a bloodthirsty crowd.

To some who have watched the gruesome images displayed by the American authorities recently of the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein (the sons of America’s former ally Saddam Hussein), first bullet-ridden and untouched and then shaved, shampooed and sutured like canvas body-bags, it would seem as if America is making a deliberate, belated attempt to compensate for that deficiency in its upbringing.

Anyone who is still a friend of the United States (and there are yet many who are not paid to be) cannot but deplore the senseless brutality being perpetrated on the Iraqi people. The justification offered for this carnage is war. If the unprovoked attack on Iraq is a war, it is the most unorthodox of wars — a war without a lawful beginning, a one-sided war, a war without a foreseeable end. This may be the first war of its kind, but it is not the first war in history.

In 1762, over a decade before America’s Declaration of Independence, the French philosopher Jean Rousseau defined war in his treatise Du Contrat Social: “War, then, is not a relation of man to man, but State to State, in which individuals are enemies only accidentally, and not as men, nor even as citizens, but as soldiers; not as members of their country, but as its defenders.’

Rousseau’s definition resurfaced during the preparations by the victorious allies for the war-crime trials of the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg in 1945, after the surrender of Germany. One segment of opinion argued (as many in the present Bush administration are doing today in the context of Iraq) that the Nazi leaders were criminals anyway and did not deserve a trial at all. Those who could still remember the reasons why the First and the Second World Wars had been fought took a moral and more humanist view.

The opinion of the latter was articulated by Robert H. Jackson, a US Supreme Court justice who soon after his appointment as the chief US counsel at Nuremberg, wrote in his pre-trial report to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 7, 1945: “To free them [the Nazi leadership] without a trial would mock the dead and make cynics of the living. On the other hand, we could execute or otherwise punish them without a hearing. But undiscriminating executions or punishments without definite findings of guilt, fairly arrived at, would violate pledges repeatedly given, and would not set easily on the American conscience or be remembered by our children with pride.’

Jackson developed this theme during his brilliant opening speech at the trial, when he argued: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.’

The Nuremberg trial was perhaps the first time in history that congruence was allowed to occur by the victorious between the rules of war, legal principles, ethical values and moral imperatives. The humanitarian issues were complex, involving genocide and mass extermination, and at times were without precedent in the history of human experience.

It required a continuous determined focus on the manner in which war was conducted, not the causes of it. As Telford Taylor, the chief US prosecutor, advised his superior, chief US counsel Robert Jackson: “The question of causation [of the war] is important and will be discussed for many years, but it has no place at this trial, which must rather stick rigorously to the doctrine that planning and launching an aggressive war is illegal, whatever may be the factors that caused the defendants to plan and to launch. Contributing cause may be pleaded by the defendants before the bar of history, but not before the tribunal.’

The Nuremberg trial lasted almost two years, and although it was conducted with exemplary professionalism and patience, the outcome was not what the jurists had hoped. Justice in the end was made to yield to post-war realpolitik. The allies needed the goodwill of the German people more than the pyrrhic satisfaction of revenge. The past like the war-dead needed to be buried.

Revenge, it is said, is a dish best eaten cold. The Americans remembered this maxim at Nuremberg. They chose to disregard it at Mosul. Today, there is no one strong enough to question the arbitrary actions of the United States, no more than there was anyone powerful enough then to prevent Hitler from invading Poland, Czechoslovakia, France and most of Europe until it was too late.

War cemeteries all over the world are crowded with the remains of persons (including combatants from the subcontinent) who fought in World War II. They died defending, each in his or her own way, the values that they were led to believe were commonly applicable to all mankind. They died to preserve what is worth protecting in civilization. Their sacrifices will have been a waste if the result, half a century later, is that the same two nations — wartime allies then and again now — should imitate in Iraq the very inhumanities they had condemned at Nuremberg.

When Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin, he gave his chauffeur specific orders that his and Eva Braun’s bodies should be burned beyond recognition, and then buried without trace. Mussolini was not so careful. He allowed himself to be captured. He was shot by Italian partisans. His body and that of his mistress Clara Petacci were brought to Milan and strung upside down in a public square for viewing. Milan and Mosul have become gory twin cities of sorts.

There will always be persons who will argue (just as some did against the Nazis at Nuremberg) that Uday and Qusay Hussein were irredeemably evil. They had committed atrocities against their own people and therefore deserved to die. In any case, being sons of Saddam Hussein was reason enough. There will be others who will wonder whether justice had been served by their pre-trial execution. A few may even ask what crime an innocent fourteen- year-old boy killed with them had committed, except for the genetic defect of being Mustapha Hussein, the grandson of Saddam Hussein.

That fourteen-year-old, had he lived, might one day have gone on to study law. Who knows? It might conceivably have been at an American law school. There he would undoubtedly have read about the Nuremberg trial and come across the Latin maxim ‘Nulla poena sine lege’. Whether one translates it into English or into Arabic, it carries the same meaning: No punishment without law. It was the legal principle that formed the very basis of the Nuremberg trial and would have been heard repeatedly in the courtroom battles there. It was never uttered, not even once, during the long gun battle at Mosul.