Saddam Hussein Trial Quotes

even Saddam Hussein rocked a pocket square when he was on trial—a man should never defend his war crimes without one.

I cannot forget the figures of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein, who made terrified fiefdoms out of their "own" people and mounds of corpses on the territory of their neighbours. I was glad to see each of these monsters brought to trial, and think the achievement should (and one day will) form part of the battle‑honours of British Labour. Many of the triumphant pelters and taunters would have left the dictators and aggressors in place: they too will have their place in history.

In selling the War on Iraq, it became important to stress that Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons, and equally important to avoid the fact that he had done so with U.S. assistance. George Orwell wrote in 1948, “Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral color when it is committed by ‘our’ side.…The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”1

I believe that no nation can aspire to develop if it cannot master its language. When a nation allows its legislation to be written by people with poor command of its language, then this damages its self respect. How can a nation fool itself about protecting human rights when it cannot properly define what they mean in law?

In his columns, Buchanan, much like the generation of conservatives immediately after the Second World War had done, consistently referred to the Nuremberg war crimes trials as a form of victor’s justice. In essence, he depicted a moral equivalence between Churchill’s England and Hitler’s Germany. It all came full circle in 1990 when Buchanan defended Saddam Hussein by invoking Hitler’s example in the final days of the Third Reich. It was the height of folly, Buchanan wrote, to insist that Saddam Hussein exit Kuwait. His reputation in the Arab world would be toast. “Even Adolf Hitler,” Buchanan wrote, “preferred to die, a suicide in his bunker, than agree to such a disgrace”—as though Hitler was not already amply disgraced in April 1945.7