Current reports are that the bunker he was in is now “dust.”
I suggest that this is a very, very poor outcome for the US. There was no coherent Iraqi military organization left anyway, and now this threatens some of the long-term goals. To wit:
The Iraqi people are still scared of this dude, and without a prisoner or a corpse, its likely many of them may, for awhile, struggle to believe that it’s really over and move on.
More importantly, we now go through months (years?) of fevered speculation that Saddama bin Laden is hiding in (Iraq, Iran, Syria, Paraguay, whatever). I guess we’ll hear if DNA can tell us something from the ruins; but the pan-arab, jihad-versus-satan nuts won’t believe that anyway, and rather than disillusioning/dispiriting them, the myth of the escape will encourage them.
There’s no reason to believe in any supposed DNA evidence, because according to reports that I’ve heard, from multiple sources, the U.S. has no DNA record for Hussein. No DNA record = nothing to compare against = no way to confirm a kill on Hussein. Even if we “parade a body around,” we can’t claim to be sure that it’s him.
Ethrilist, in Call of Cthulhu, isn’t it true that sometimes it’s not dead even if you have the body?
A trial like that would be very amusing. Unless the proceedings were tightly controlled, old Saddam would get to rehash the whole legal basis for the invasion. And if it were tightly controlled, the international court would be seen by many as an illegitimate pawn to American adventurism.
What I want to understand is Why they went through the trouble of bombing the bunker in the residential area if The US is saying “Saddam doesn’t matter”?
So they Killed four families with overkill weapons to take out an irrelevant person? Hmmmm.
You can’t have it both ways guys just admit you need to kill him and he is important or else you are going to turn more Iraqis sour on their liberation.
Who needs shovels? Given what most people think of Hussein, I figured we’d have him pegged for keeping her body in a cellar somewhere, sitting in her favorite chair, wearing her favorite dress.
Even if Saddem is alive and eventually captured, it ain’t gonna happen:
This is not a UN-approved war. The UN is playing no role in the war.
The International Court in the Hague is a UN court. See #1 above.
While the USA is a signatory country to the International Court because it is a member of the UN, the USA does not recognize Court decisions unless it wants to do so, and it is in the interest of the USA to do so.
Let’s face it, Saddam Hussein is never going to be properly “dead”, any more than Hitler was or Osama will be.
Whatever evidence is found, whatever DNA tests are carried out, there will remain strong pockets of belief that he is alive, and pockets of support for him, and doubtless neo-Baath movements just as we have neo-Nazi movements.
So for me his life/death is not particularly relevant. He will be back, in some form, just as Hitler is alive and well today, symbolically, in the form of neo-Nazi jackbooted thugs in various western nations.
Rumour and conspiracy theory is a very strong force in this part of the world (and indeed in many parts of the world). People believe what they are told by their peers (and Arab peers are other Arabs, not the US) or they believe what they want to believe.
So it is not about how or whether one should “vapourise” Saddam, but how one should vapourise his legacy, his image, his memory.
You forgot about the empting a couple magazines into the corpse, dousing it with gasoline, and setting it on fire.
Without Saddam’s body, I don’t think it will cause anymore trouble than a couple wacko neo-Baathist parties running around in a couple years, annoying but containable. And even with his body, you would still have nutcases like him going around anyways.
Anyway, if he was captured there’s no way we’d turn him over to the UN or the ICC for a trial. They’d probably pin a medal on him. No, what we’ll do is turn him over to our new puppet Iraqi government. They don’t have to try him for war crimes. They can just put him on trial for the thousands of murders he’s commited over the decades of his rule over Iraq. No need to get fancy, the Iraqis will figure out what to do with him.
