King Fahd’s many legacies

FOLLOWING his assassination by a royal prince, King Faisal bin Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud was succeeded by Khaled, the deceased king’s half brother. The succession to the throne from one brother to another set the tradition for the “horizontal passing of the royal baton”, a procedure that was to have profound implications not only for the kingdom but for the entire Muslim world.

The chosen system for succession to the Saudi throne kept power from being passed on to the younger members of the royal family, some of whom, according to Anthony Shadid, a Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent of The Washington Post, “are less wedded to the religious establishment and more eager to see the kind of reforms that Fahd and Abdullah only tentatively embraced over the past 15 years.” It is conceivable that had the throne passed on to the third generation — the grandsons of King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud and the sons and nephews of King Faisal Ibn Abdul Aziz — Riyadh’s influence on the Muslim world would have been more positive.

King Abdullah Ibn Abdul Aziz is the fifth son of King Abdul Aziz, the founder of the Saudi state, to occupy the throne. He is 82 years old. He has appointed Prince Sultan, minister of defence, his half-brother and one of the Sudeiri brothers, as the crown prince. Prince Sultan is only a year younger than the new king and is reported to be in poor health. There is now an active contest for the position of the first deputy prime minister. Whoever is appointed to that position will be second in line for the throne. The more conservative members of the royal family would like to see Interior Minister Prince Nayef, one of the Sudeiri Seven, to be placed in that position.

According to Steve Coll, the author of Ghost Wars, a highly acclaimed account of the Afghan war of the 1980s in which Saudi Arabia was deeply involved, the appointment of Prince Nayef would seriously set back reforms not only in Saudi Arabia but in the entire Muslim world. “Although the seniority rules are not strict and depend on family consensus, many see Nayef as next in line, perhaps sooner rather than later. Yet reformers see him as a powerful obstacle to change, a man close to the clergy, and inculcated with the inflexibility that comes with enforcing a sometimes draconian security regime. Nayef eschews the word ‘reform’ for ‘development,’ preferring a term that does not suggest the system needs fixing.” But, as I argue in this series of articles, the Saudi system is in need of serious fixing. Given the process some scholars refer to as the “globalization of Islam” in which various Muslim communities use the internet to influence one another, Saudi Arabia, with all its wealth, has an important role to play. That is a separate subject to which I will return at a later date. For the moment I will return to the discussion of the impact on the Muslim world in general and Pakistan in particular of the long reign of King Fahd.

King Khaled, who succeeded King Faisal, was not a charismatic figure. Recognizing the new king’s many shortcomings, the royal family appointed Fahd bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, the eldest among the seven Sudeiri brothers, the crown prince. Fahd was one of his father’s favourite sons. He was often at the side of the founding father of Saudi Arabia when important deals were being struck between the king and the country’s many powerful tribal and religious leaders. It was recognized by the members of the royal family that the young prince was being groomed for the throne but he was much younger than his many brothers and could not be put immediately in charge. He had to wait for his turn which came in 1982.

Even though Fahd was being prepared for the throne, he did not receive any formal education, only instruction in the meanings of the Holy Quran, the tenets of Wahabi Islam, and the history of Saudi Arabia. His long tenure was cut in half by a debilitating stroke in 1995, attributed by many to high living, from which he never recovered.

However, in the 13-year period between King Fahd’s accession to the throne and when power was effectively transferred to Crown Prince Abdullah in 1995 because of his poor health, he governed decisively, leaving several important legacies not only for his country but for the entire Muslim world. Some of these were to pose serious problems for the world of Islam, in particular for Pakistan. The first legacy was in the sphere of education. Fahd started his interest in the area with good intentions but the seeds he sowed were harvested in a way he had not intended.

Appointed education minister at a young age, he showed a keen interest in promoting education in his country, including that of women. He continued with his interest in education after becoming king, sending a generation of Saudis, including dozens of princes from the royal family, to be educated in the West. He and the senior members of the royal family were also interested in providing grants for educational development in the Muslim world. They chose Pakistan as one of the several countries of concentration for the kingdom’s educational efforts overseas.

According to the report issued in July 2004 by the United States’ 9/11 Commission, “awash in sudden oil wealth, Saudi Arabia competed with Shia Iran to promote its fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, Wahabism. The Saudi government, always conscious of duties as the custodian of Islam’s holiest places, joined wealthy Arabs from the kingdom and other states bordering the Gulf in donating money to build mosques and religious schools that could preach and teach their interpretation of Islamic doctrine.” Pakistan was a particular beneficiary of this type of support.

The Saudi interest in aiding Pakistan’s educational sector goes back to the 1960s. With the agreement of President Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s first military ruler, Saudi Arabia made heavy investments in Pakistan, building modern mosques and locating schools for instruction in Islam in their premises.

The most famous of these mosques was constructed in Islamabad, Pakistan’s new capital built by Ayub Khan. Islamabad International Islamic University was set up in the new mosque’s compound. The mosque was named after King Faisal and is now one of the largest places of Muslim worship in the world.

The university attached with the mosque attracted scholars and students from all over the world. Among those who came to teach was Abdul Azzam, the renowned Palestinian scholar, who was a close associate of the Egyptian physician turned Islamic militant Ayman al Zawahiri. The ultimate falling out between Zawahiri and Azzam led to the latter’s assassination in the city of Peshawar in northern Pakistan.

A link was thus established between Pakistan and students from the Arab world who wished to study their religion. At the time of their establishment, the Saudis did not realize that some of these institutions would become the centres of Islamic extremism in the world, teaching a brand of Islam that had no roots in Pakistan and inspiring their students to take up arms against all those who did not agree with their extremist view of the world.

It is ironic that President Pervez Musharraf finally moved against the attendance of foreign students in these institutions a few days before the death of King Fahd. On July 30, Musharraf told a group of journalists that he had ordered the expulsion of more than a thousand students attending these schools. Most of these were Arab and a fair number of them were from Saudi Arabia.

King Fahd may have succeeded in using education to bring some modernity to an extremely backward society had the Saudi family not been confronted, during his 23-year rule, with two serious challenges to its authority emanating from the fundamentalists. The first of these was the siege of the Kaaba in Makkah in 1979 by an extremist named Juhayman. Fahd at that time was still the crown prince.

According to one appreciation that appeared after his death, “Fahd’s personal preoccupation throughout his reign was the rebuilding of the great mosques of Makkah and Madina. The project which was managed by the bin Laden family, cost billions of dollars, but Fahd regarded the work as the most important achievement of his life.” The attack on the Makkah mosque proved to be a defining moment in King Fahd’s life and the way he governed.

Upon becoming king, he assumed the title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and strengthened ties with the conservative religious establishment of the country. According to Douglas Martin of The New York Times, Fahd’s reaction to the assault on Makkah set the “tone for the way the royal tribe responded to the accusation that it was insufficiently devout to maintain its control over the two holiest mosques in Islam.”

While rebuilding and improving the mosques, Fahd quietly pushed the agenda of the most extremist Islamic factions in the country, “ranging from vastly expanding the amount of theology taught in all schools to curbing the expanding role of women.” He had, in other words, departed from his original intention to use education to modernize the Saudi and Islamic societies and bring women into the mainstream. Instead, education became a way for advancing obscurantism.

The king allowed the universities he had founded to restrict their instruction to little beyond the Wahabi doctrine. Several of these institutions ended up spewing thousands of highly indoctrinated students into the cramped labour markets of Saudi Arabia. It was this cohort that lent its ear to the teachings of Osama bin Laden when he arrived on the kingdom’s political scene in the early 1990s. Of the 19 suicide bombers who, on September 11, 2001, crashed the planes they had hijacked into New York’s World Trade Centre and the Pentagon near Washington, 15 were Saudi citizens and most of them were educated in the universities Fahd had built. This was the second challenge thrown by the religious extremists to the royal family while Fahd occupied the throne.

Some of the conservative forces he had nurtured after the attacks on Makkah now turned on him, interpreting his agreement with the United States to station hundreds of thousands of its troops on the Saudi soil as an assault on the Islamic faith by the “revived crusaders”. This decision was interpreted as an affront to Islam and its holiest sites by the likes of Osama bin Laden. This was to be King Fahd’s second legacy for his kingdom and the Muslim world. Once again the consequences of the action he had taken were not anticipated by him.

The new face of McCarthyism

A CAMPAIGN is being orchestrated through the media to destroy the credibility of many of the most important Muslim institutions in Britain, including the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB).

The impact of this campaign — in the Observer and particularly in John Ware’s Panorama documentary telecast the other day— will be a powerful boost for the increasingly widespread view that there is no such thing as a moderate Muslim: underneath, “they” are all extremists who are racist, contemptuous of the West, and intent on a political agenda.

A legitimate and much-needed debate among British Muslims about a distinctive expression of Islam in a non-Muslim country has been hijacked and poisonously distorted. Journalists need to be very careful: we are entering a new era of McCarthyism and, if we are not to be complicit, we need to be scrupulously responsible and conscientious in unravelling the complexity of Islam in its many spiritual and political interpretations in recent decades.

The central charge of the campaign is that the MCB, its secretary general, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, and some of its most important affiliates — such as the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, the Muslim Association of Britain and the East London Mosque — condone or even actively promote ideas which, as Ware claimed in Panorama, “feed extremism”; such ideas are a “slippery slope” on which “people who become extremists start to go down”.

This reflects a growing paranoia evident on the pages of tabloids and in government about “preachers of hate” and “hate literature”. It is a paranoia which chooses to ignore that the main inspiration for British Muslim extremists is not their local mosques but television footage of Palestine and Iraq.

So what are those ideas that feed extremism? Ware veered erratically from the McCarthyite absurd to some legitimate accusations. First on the charge-sheet were examples of the former: the “conviction that Islam is a superior faith and culture which Christians and Jews in the West are conspiring to undermine”, and a “distaste for western secular culture”. This is ridiculous; I’ve yet to meet a member of any faith who doesn’t believe in the superiority of their beliefs, while fear of being undermined is similarly common. Since when has “distaste” become a cause for suspicion?

On the other hand, where the campaign makes a legitimate accusation is that there is a virulent strain of anti-Semitism and anti-Christian sentiment that appears in some Saudi-influenced strands of Islam. Ware points out that a Saudi imam invited to the East London Mosque had preached in just same way as in Saudi Arabia in sermons subsequently published on the web.

But alongside such troubling points, Ware launched an attack on the influential Pakistani religious scholar Maulana Maudoodi with some sly editing of quotes. A key figure in the ‘50s, Maudoodi advocated that Muslims look to Islam, not the West, to build their post-colonial nations. He used anti-western, revolutionary language (but never advocated violence) and was a quintessential product of his time. A younger generation of British-born Muslim thinkers find his ideas less relevant for a minority in the West.

But Ware is not interested in that kind of context or in the process by which a distinctively British Islam is evolving from this legacy. The Leicester-based think tank Islamic Foundation, founded in the ‘70s by a close associate of Maudoodi, and Sacranie, who openly acknowledges his huge debt to Maudoodi, are smeared by association.

Ware is at his most McCarthyite when he challenges Sacranie to account for an imam in Leeds who is preaching that the war on terror is really a war on Islam. Ware insists that it is Sacranie’s job to “disabuse” British Muslims of this view and put this imam “right”. Ware laid down his own opinion and, with extraordinary presumption, demanded that Sacranie impose it on the Muslim community.

In that short exchange, Ware revealed his lack of comprehension of the Muslim community. Sacranie only has as much power as the MCB affiliate organizations allow him — the idea of him putting an imam right is ridiculous. The tiny, volunteer-run MCB doesn’t have the power to police the views of its disparate membership. Sacranie and the MCB have a tightrope to walk. On the one hand, the government and non-Muslim Britain are piling on the pressure that they deliver a law-abiding, loyal ethnic minority. On the other, an increasingly restless younger generation of Muslims criticize the MCB as far too moderate, a sell-out establishment stooge cosying up to Tony Blair.

There are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make of the MCB and Sacranie — and Ware details some of them — such as Sacranie’s reprehensible refusal to attend the Holocaust memorial service last January and his decision to attend a memorial service for the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Yassin.

The MCB bears all the characteristics of a diverse migrant community’s struggle to develop a common voice — and it makes plenty of mistakes. But Ware has thrown so much mud around in the course of his programme that much more of it will stick than is deserved.

What is deeply troubling is how exacting British society is becoming of its Muslims. A new set of “cricket tests” are being imposed on British Muslims — they are expected to sign up enthusiastically to every aspect of western secular society and to jettison any part of their intellectual heritage that is critical of the West. They are expected to keep their faith entirely out of politics (yet faith plays a crucial role in US politics). Set the bar high enough and all will fail — the consequences of that on the streets of Luton and Bradford will be disastrous, and not just for Britain’s 1.6 million Muslims. — Dawn/Guardian Service

Globalization of education

“MORE WILL mean worse.” It was the British novelist Kingsley Amis who prophesied that expanding universities would lower standards. At a time of year when many students are getting ready for college, it’s appropriate to ask if he was right.

The opening up of higher education is a global phenomenon. Forty-five years ago, when Amis made his prediction, just 5 per cent of British students entered higher education. Today it’s closer to 45 per cent. And college entry rates are even higher in the United States. In 1960, 45 per cent of high school graduates enrolled in college. Now it’s 65 per cent.

Similar expansion has been going on all over the developed world and, at breakneck speed, in Asia. All told, the world has something in the region of 100 million students.

So if Amis was right, and more does mean worse, then the deterioration of higher education should be occurring on a global scale.

Of course, it isn’t. Instead, what is occurring is an intensification of the competition among the world’s universities.

Universities perform a number of functions, and politicians too rarely distinguish one from another. One function is to achieve economies of scale in research. Another is to ensure that the most intellectually able young people attain their full educational potential. A third is to promote the international exchange of knowledge.

On this basis, American universities are generally doing well, but they cannot be complacent.

The British experience demonstrates that it is less, not more, that means worse. Since 1976, public funding per student in Britain has declined by more than 40 per cent; private money has come nowhere near filling the gap. As a result, average academic pay in Britain is now less than half what it is in the United States.

It’s no wonder so many British academics have, like me, opted to pursue their careers on the other side of the Atlantic.

At the top, the financial difference between American and European universities is mainly a matter of accumulated wealth. The combined investments of the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge — the richest European universities — are about $5 billion. Compare that with Harvard’s endowment of $23 billion — more than twice the financial assets of all British universities combined. And Harvard is not that far ahead of its American rivals. If Oxford and Cambridge were to relocate to the United States, they would rank no higher than 15th in the university wealth list.

Money matters. For one thing, it buys excellence in research. Between 1901 and 1950, the top American universities were not much richer than their European counterparts. In that period, Americans accounted for just 28 of the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences. Since 1950, the top American universities have been building up their endowments through relentless fund-raising and canny investment.

Not surprisingly, with their bountiful research budgets and salaries, they have come to dominate scientific research. All told, 159 of all the Nobel science prizes awarded between 1951 and 1997 went to Americans.

A high proportion of the rest went to non-American academics working at American universities.

But what about educating our brightest young people? Has college expansion been — as it was intended to be — a step toward meritocracy?

The news here is less good. Despite the increase in college enrolments, recent research by economist Gary Solon shows that social mobility in the United States has declined markedly since the 1960s. On average, American sons are now roughly twice as likely as their Scandinavian counterparts to remain stuck in the same income band as their fathers. That’s not quite as bad as socially rigid England, but it’s getting there.

Statistics like these periodically prompt liberals to demand improved “access” to elite universities. Yet the reality is that declining social mobility has less to do with American universities than with its high schools. It is the patchy quality of state secondary education that is the problem, combined with the rising cost of private education.

In the United States, 83 per cent of high school graduates from families in the top fifth in income go to college, compared with just over a third from the bottom fifth. The best explanation for that disparity is that rich families can afford the private schooling that more or less guarantees their children will go to college.

The third role that universities play is international. Here too there are grounds for concern. It used to be that most Asian students who wanted to study abroad opted for the United States. But last year — partly because of visa restrictions, partly because of America’s tarnished international image — there was a 45 per cent drop in the number of Chinese graduates coming to the United States. By contrast, there are about 38,000 Chinese students in British universities, and that figure appears to be rising.

American colleges may trump Europe’s nationalized, cash-starved universities when it comes to high-end research. But they do not seem significantly better than their British counterparts when it comes to educating people from the lower end of the income scale. And they may be more vulnerable than they think to European competition in the global higher education market.

No, despite Amis’ prophecy, more has not meant worse. But American colleges cannot sit on their laurels if they are to remain what they tend to consider themselves: the very best. —Dawn/Los Angeles Times

The writer is a professor of history at Harvard University, US.

Looking beyond Gaza evacuation

PUBLISHED on April 30, 2003, the roadmap for a Middle East settlement, sponsored by the Quartet (comprising the US, the UN, Russia and the EU) called for a comprehensive settlement based on a two-state solution. The roadmap specified that “the settlement will end the occupation, which began in 1967, on the basis of the Madrid Conference, the principle of land for peace, UN Security Council resolutions, 242, 338, 1397, agreements previously reached between the parties and the initiative of (then) Crown Prince Abdullah, endorsed by the Beirut, Arab League Summit...”.

The roadmap envisaged three phases in which the hoped for settlement was to be reached involving, in the first phase, reform and security on the part of the Palestinian Authority and the lifting of Israeli siege; in the second phase, the establishment of a Palestinian state “with provisional borders” and in the third, the settlement of “all permanent status issues” which would involve the question of permanent borders, the status of Al Quds, the rights of Palestinian refugees, security arrangements and the formal ending of the conflict.

That the roadmap is way behind schedule is clear from the fact that the settlement of all permanent status issues, scheduled for 2005 in the roadmap, is nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, the ongoing pullout from Gaza, initiated unilaterally by Sharon’s government, is seen by many independent observers as a ploy to relieve pressure for the main pullout from the West Bank, where most of the 250,000 Jewish settlers reside.

Since all major issues had been left over for the third phase under the roadmap, the Palestinian leadership had been calling for moving over to the final phase, which alone could give substance as well as finality to the proposed settlement.

Far from considering this possibility, Israeli spokesmen, commenting on the ongoing evacuation in Gaza, have insisted that the Palestinians performance on political reforms and security measures would determine the question of any progress towards the second and the final phases, thus calling into question Israeli intentions about the establishment of a viable Palestinian state and an agreement on permanent borders, Al Quds, refugees and security provisions.

In considering any real prospects for a final settlement on the above major issues, it would be useful to recall the Clinton proposals which were the most explicit, far-reaching and comprehensive ever advanced by any United States administration. Furthermore, in the judgment of many independent observers, the Clinton proposals “approximated the ultimate compromises which would be required on both sides, if an agreement had to be reached.”

Clinton had claimed that his proposals “responded to the essential needs of both sides if not to their desires.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehad Barak was said to have “provisionally” acquiesced in the proposals, while Yasser Arafat’s aides were said, at one stage, to have given qualified acceptance, while hedging their acceptance with a number of reservations.

However, the Clinton administration passed into history without grasping the opportunity, in spite of last minute frantic efforts by both sides.

In presenting his proposals, Clinton had said inter alia that they “contained the outlines of a just settlement, giving the Palestinians the ability to determine their own future on their own land, a sovereign and viable state, recognition by the international community, Al Quds as the state’s capital, sovereignty over the Haram and a new life for the Palestinian refugees.”

However, while the Clinton proposals were the most far-reaching and comprehensive — and his efforts to wrap up a deal was a tribute to his involvement in the Middle East issue as well as to his intellectual dynamism — these made a different reading in fine print. The details, as spelt out, raised question marks over the proposed Palestinian state’s viability and sovereignty.

Although Clinton had spoken of maximum contiguity for the new state, this objective was marred by the proposed retention of part of occupied territory by Israel, together with further swaps of one to three per cent to facilitate inclusion of 80 per cent of the Jewish settlers in Israel, proposed retention by Israel of 15 per cent of the West Bank’s border with Jordan as a security zone and the planned incorporation of Jewish and Armenian neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem into Israel.

On the issue of territory, while at Camp David in mid-2000 the Israelis had not gone beyond offering the return of 80 per cent or thereabouts of the West Bank, and US representatives had spoken of return of 90 per cent of the occupied territory, the former president had gone beyond this in his final offer to Palestinian and Israeli representatives (on December 23, 2000, barely a month before the scheduled relinquishment of his presidency) by proposing return of 94 to 96 per cent of occupied territory.

As for the issue of the Palestinian refugees ‘right to return’, the belief of the PLO and the Palestinian diaspora throughout their history, this was for the Israelis a non-starter since the inclusion of three million Palestinians in a country with five million Jews and one million Arabs would have changed the Jewish character of the Israel state.

In the words of Yousuf Sered, chairman of the Israeli Meretz Party, “we can survive without sovereignty over Temple Mount. We cannot survive with the right of return.”

Clinton, while acknowledging “the moral and material sufferings” of the Palestinian refugees had spoken, while ruling out the “right of return” to Israel, of the latter’s readiness to join in an international programme of refugee rehabilitation. Clinton had proposed a right of return to the proposed Palestinian state as well as settlement in the present host countries with the latter’s agreement and admission of a limited number to Israel, subject to the latter’s decision.

On Jerusalem, Clinton had proposed the general principle that all Arab neighbourhoods would go to the Palestinian state and all Jewish and Armenian neighbourhoods to Israel.

It should, however, be mentioned here that this principle was enunciated only in respect of East Jerusalem occupied by Israel in 1967 and not for West Jerusalem which had been incorporated in the state of Israel on its founding in 1948.

On the issue of Haram al Sharif/Temple Mount, Clinton proposed Palestinian sovereignty over ‘the Haram’ and Israeli sovereignty over the “Western wall and the space sacred to the Jews, of which it is a part”, thus leaving a seemingly unavoidable ambiguity about sovereignty over the Al Aqsa compound.

It may be mentioned here, that the PLO had in recognition of historic Jewish interest in Al Quds, proposed (in the context of Palestinian sovereignty over the whole of East Jerusalem), the declaration of Jerusalem as an open city as well as special arrangements for the holy city which would guarantee access to religious sites for people of all faiths.

The security provisions proposed by the Clinton administration made a considerable extent in the sovereign nature of the Palestinian state. In addition to an international force which could only be withdrawn with the consent of both the parties, the plan proposed the phasing out of Israeli withdrawal over as long a period as 36 months; while the international force was gradually inducted.

There was also to be a small Israeli force stationed in fixed locations in the Jordan valley for a period of another 36 months after the expiry of the 36 months period of the main Israeli withdrawal. Israel would also have three early warning stations on Palestinian territory and the option of emergency deployment on Palestinian territory in case of a declaration of national emergency by Israel.

While some of these security provisions were understandable as a short-term measure, they needed to be materially changed in scope and duration, if the PLO’s acceptance had to be secured.

In the wake of the Gaza evacuation, efforts are being made by the Israeli lobby and neocon elements in the US establishment to hold up progress towards the international conference envisaged in the US-Sponsored roadmap “for launching a process for a final settlement of permanent status issues including borders of the Palestinian state, Jerusalem, refugees, settlements and security”. This is being done on the ostensible ground that all the pre-requisites mentioned in phase one of the roadmap, relating to political reforms, security and other measures required on the part of the Palestinian Authority have yet to be fulfilled.

Another period of drift is likely to reignite the tense and explosive situation, nullifying the progress made with the Gaza evacuation. It is up to the US administration to use its weight in accelerating progress towards a final settlement.

The Palestinians and Israelis, on their part, should realize that no agreement would be possible without giving due weight to each other’s genuine needs and legitimate concerns.

The writer is a former ambassador.

Saddam changes lawyers

THE news from Baghdad is that Saddam Hussein has fired all his defence lawyers and wants new ones. His eldest daughter, Raghad, representing the family, chose Khalil Dulaimi to take over from the long list of international lawyers who were in the act. There is an old Iraqi saying: “Too many lawyers muck up a trial.”

It is no surprise that an alleged mass murderer should change lawyers. The Hussein family wants the best defence that money can buy. And it is no secret they still have enough in Swiss banks to go for broke.

I asked a lawyer in this country how he would defend Saddam.

He said, “Well, I have never defended someone accused of mass-killing Shia Muslims before. But if I were asked to take the case, I would first announce that Saddam is innocent of all charges and the Iraqi government is using him as a scapegoat.”

“You wouldn’t cop an insanity plea?”

“No. It would be hard to find a psychiatrist who’d testify that Saddam is really insane.”

“But,” I said, “he still says he’s the legal president of Iraq.”

“Every deposed head of state says that.”

“So if it’s not insanity, could the killings be called crimes of passion?”

“It has to be considered. It depends who is on the tribunal. Will they consider murdering thousands of people a passionate act? A better plea is Allah made him do it.”

“That would never be accepted in an American court.” I said.

“That’s why I’d be glad it’s happening in an Iraqi court. I would move that evidence of torture and poison gas not be put in the record because it has nothing to do with case and will only prejudice the jury.”

I said, “It’d be worth a try.”

“Then I would offer the prosecutor a deal. My client would become a government witness and rat on members of the Baathist Party. In exchange for this, he would get a light sentence and would be put in a witness protection programme in Fallujah.”

“What will he give them?”

“The places where he is still hiding the weapons of mass destruction that President Bush keeps talking about.”

“That would be a big boost to explaining why we got into the war. You might even make a deal for community service. Baghdad can use all the community services it can get,” I said.

The attorney said, “If I were his lawyer, I would make Saddam look very sympathetic. I would trim his beard and make him wear a starched white shirt and a blazer that says Mosul Yacht Club. The world will be covering the trial, so except for his alleged murders, he would look like everyone’s grandfather.”

“Would you insist on TV cameras in the courtroom?”

“Yes. I would insist they be there to make sure Saddam gets a fair trial. Also, I would fight any gag order, because I would hope to write a book about the trial for millions of dollars.”

“Of course you wouldn’t do this pro bono,” I said.

“No way. I would charge $800 an hour, and he would pay it — God willing.” —Dawn/Tribune Media Services