The US respects Iraq sovereignty

Sandy Levinson

A remarkable article by John Burns and others in the Sunday NYTimes itells the tale of American capituation to a decision by the so-called Iraqi government (I say so-called because there is no evidence whatsoever that the "government" is capable of governing anything or anybody outside the Green Zone, and even the latter is open to question) that US authorities knew to be a recipe for disaster. Relevant parts of the article are as follows:

.... The time as the helicopter took off was 5:05 a.m., and Mr. Hussein had 65 minutes to live. But as he flew over Baghdad’s darkened suburbs, he can have known little of the last-minute battle waged between top Iraqi and American officials — and among the Americans themselves — over whether the execution, fraught with legal ambiguities and Islamic religious sensitivities, should go ahead.

American opposition to executing him in haste centered partly on the fact that the Id al-Adha religious holiday, marking the end of the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, began for Sunnis at sunrise on Saturday.....

The taunts Mr. Hussein endured from Shiite guards as he stood with the noose around his neck have made headlines around the world, and stirred angry protests among his fellow Iraqi Sunnis. But the story of how American commanders and diplomats fought to halt the execution until midnight on Friday, only six hours before Mr. Hussein was hanged, is only now coming into focus, as Iraqi and American officials, in the glare of international outrage over the hanging, compete with their versions of what happened.

It is a story of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, trying to coerce second-tier American military and diplomatic officials into handing over Mr. Hussein, first on Thursday night, then again on Friday. The American push back was complicated by the absences of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and the top American military commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who were both out of Iraq on leave. The American message throughout was that rushing Mr. Hussein to the gallows could rebound disastrously, as it did....

The hanging spread wide dismay among the Americans. Aides said American commanders were deeply upset by the way they were forced to hand Mr. Hussein over, a sequence commanders saw as motivated less by a concern for justice than for revenge. In the days following the hanging, recriminations flowed between the military command and the United States Embassy, accused by some officers of abandoning American interests at midnight Friday in favor of placating Mr. Maliki and hard-line Shiites....

When the tribunal’s appeals bench announced that it had upheld the death sentences on Dec. 26, three weeks into the appeal, even prosecutors were stunned. Defense lawyers said Mr. Hussein was being railroaded under pressure from Mr. Maliki, who told a BBC interviewer shortly after the Dujail verdict that he expected the ousted ruler to be hanged before year’s end.
The suspicion that the judges had submitted to government pressure was shared by some of Americans working with the tribunal, who had stifled their growing disillusionment with the government’s interference for months. Among a host of other complaints, the Americans’ frustrations focused on the government’s dismissal of two judges seen as too indulgent with Mr. Hussein, and its failure to investigate seriously when three defense lawyers were killed. The appeals court’s apparent eagerness to fast-forward Mr. Hussein to the gallows — and the scenes at the execution itself — was, for some of the Americans, the last straw....

At 10:30 p.m., Ambassador Khalilzad made a last-ditch call to Mr. Maliki asking him not to proceed with the hanging. When the Iraqi leader remained adamant, an American official said, the ambassador made a second call to Washington conveying “the determination of the Iraqi prime minister to go forward,” and his conclusion that there was nothing more, consistent with respect for Iraqi sovereignty, that the United States could do.
Senior Bush administration officials in Washington said that Mr. Khalilzad’s principal contact in Washington was Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, and that she gave the green light for Mr. Hussein to be turned over, despite the reservations of the military commanders in Baghdad. One official said that Ms. Rice was supported in that view by Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser.

“It literally came down to the Iraqis interpreting their law, and our looking at their law and interpreting it differently,” the official said. “Finally, it was decided we are not the court of last appeal for Iraqi law here. The president of their country says it meets their procedures. We are not going to be their legal nannies.”

So what does one make of this sordid story? One could tell the story as one involving legal interpretation, so that the key statement is the last quote of an unnamed "official." But is that the right framework? Given the extreme likelihood that executing Hussein under these specific circumstances would produce an adverse reaction by the Sunnis, should the US have acquiesced as a political matter? to be sure, we could have insisted that all legal i's and t's were dotted and crossed, which they most certainly were not in the haste to execute Hussein. The "interpretations" offered by the Iraqi "government" with regard to the specifics of carrying out the execution have little more legal integrity that the "findings" of the Guantanamo commissions as to who is and is not an "illegal noncombatant."

One might be forgiven for failing to predict the presence in the execution chamber of a modern cellphone with the photo option, except by this time one cannot really be surprised, either, that this happened.

Does the supine response of Secretary Rice indicate that we are indeed throwing our power behind the Shi'ite suppression of the Sunnis, whatever the resulting carnage? That is, I think, a disastrous decision, but at least it would represent conscious policy. If, however, it is not such an announcement, then is the submission to Maliki simply further evidence of the rank incompetence at every level of this Administration? And is it not a reason for condemning our Constitution that we apparently have no alternative to accepting their continuation in office for another 743 days?
Posted 11:49 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]