A SPEEDY TRIAL FOR SADDAM

With the execution of dozens of Iraqi army recruits, continued kidnapping of foreigners and aid workers and daily insurgent attacks, few people are talking about the fate of Saddam Hussein. His trial has been delayed by the violence and the inability of the Iraqi judicial system to handle its most important case. The delay is harming U.S. efforts to stabilize the country and ease it toward a democratic government, Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum wrote this week.

A trial would remind Iraqis that Mr. Hussein was a tyrant who relied on corruption to keep himself and his cronies in power. By highlighting this past, the United States could help the country’s citizens realize that their future could be bright now that he is gone.

“What if the insurgency, the bombs and the massacres are happening precisely because there has been no national discussion of the past?” Ms. Applebaum asks.

She goes on to make a good case why this could be so. Average Iraqis need to remember how bad they had it under Hussein. Then, they might realize that they should band together to save their country, not fight against one another to break it apart.

“A complete trial of Hussein, one that showed the extent of the corruption, forced collaboration, violence and terror he imposed on the entire nation, might help Iraqis understand that all of them – Shiite, Sunni, Kurdish – suffered in different ways,” she writes.

A further problem is the lack of information about the country’s past, present and future. Leszek Balcerowicz, the Polish finance minister during his country’s economic transformation at the beginning of the 1990s, sees parallels between post-communism and post-Baathist Iraq. Because there was no free press before 1989, Poles knew little about the real state of their country. After 1989 there was a lot of information, and it was all negative. Bombarded by the notion that everything was terrible many Poles began to idealize the past and reject the present.

This leads Applebaum to conclude: “Increasingly, everything that is wrong in Iraq, from the malfunctioning infrastructure to the ethnic tensions, is blamed on the U.S. occupation. A wider debate about how Iraq got to where it is – how Hussein mismanaged the country, murdered whole villages and stole the nation’s money – might help persuade Iraqis to invest in the present.”

There are many obstacles to overcome before Mr. Hussein can be put on trial. But Ms. Applebaum makes a strong argument that they should be overcome soon.