Iraq were arrested and sent as hostages or "human shields" to strategic sites around Iraq.
By the invasion and its human consequences and byproducts, Saddam Hussein was challenging the world. There was nothing new or unique about his methods, to be sure. They were the same methods, government by terror, that he had long used to rule over Iraq itself.1 These methods are regrettably common and widespread in the world. As a practical matter, governments are seldom held to account for the crimes they commit against their own people.2 But by invading Kuwait and subjecting its people to these methods, Saddam was rejecting any minimum of restraint. He was, by implication, asserting his right to invade, and then use police state methods of the harshest kind, against any people anywhere who might be within his physical power.
This, aggressive war, was recognized at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after World War II as the most fundamental crime of war. It was for this crime, above all, that a dozen or so senior Nazi officials went to face the hangman. It is, above all, for this same crime, and for the numerous crimes that resulted from it, that Saddam Hussein and his chief lieutenants ought to be ________
1Samir al Khalil, Republic of Fear (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 46ff.
2Leo Kuper, The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 173. brought to book.
It is perhaps too easy for us to be cynical about war crimes trials, especially on the charge of making aggressive war. It is true that the trials are held by the victors, and the vanquished are in the dock. War crimes trials thus always have the possibility of becoming simply a legalistic form of vengeance upon the defeated.3 In the wake of public calls for war crimes trials of Saddam and his associate, even the American popular press has called attention to this.4 And the victor in any war can find a reason wh...