HOWZAT

The most obvious example of victors’ justice was the Nuremberg trials. These were held in a city notorious as the heart of the Nazi movement, and the proceedings were broadcast to the German people to ram home the nature of the war crimes committed on their behalf.

Critics pointed to the questionable presence of jurists from the Soviet Union, some of whom had been involved in pseudo-legal purges in the

1930s and whose army and security forces had carried out rape and political murders wherever they appeared as “liberators”.

George Kennan, the distinguished American diplomat, said: “The only implication this procedure could convey was, after all, that such crimes were justifiable and forgivable when committed by the leaders of one government under one set of circumstances, but unjustifiable and unforgivable and to be punished by death when committed by another government under another set of circumstances.” Much of the defence consisted of the argument “and you likewise”.

When charged with waging unlawful submarine warfare, Admiral Karl Doenitz, the German officer, could point to Admiral Chester Nimitz, the American naval commander. In a separate trial a British Special Operations Executive agent helped to acquit Otto Skorzeny, the SS tyro, of charges of wearing allied uniforms while engaged in covert activities during the battle of the bulge when he testified that the allies had often done this, too.

Some of the charges at Nuremberg were inherently difficult to prove, notably conspiracy to wage wars of aggression, although this was because many of the American prosecutors were drawn from the securities and exchanges board, for whom charges of conspiracy to defraud were normative.

Nonetheless, the prosecutors and judges at Nuremberg did a remarkable job in establishing the factual outlines of Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity, pulling together mountains of documentation that still provides any serious scholar of that era with an initial template.

The idea that somehow the allies turned a blind eye to their own atrocities, a charge heard again and again in the case of Iraq, is also palpably false. To take a single example, two US soldiers were tried for killing 76 Italian prisoners at Biscari airfield in Sicily in 1943, just as US marines have been charged with the unlawful killings of Iraqi civilians at Haditha last year.

Whatever deficiencies we westerners can discern, from the point of view of the 80% of the Iraqi population who are Kurds and Shi’ites, the trial and execution of Saddam draw a line under a minority Sunni-dominated dictatorship for which, regionally speaking, one has to go back to Tamerlane and the Mongol hordes to find some evil equivalent.

Political expediency and the security situation dictated the speed of Saddam’s execution, but in due course he will be posthumously convicted when a second trial concludes. This will relate to the Anfal campaign in the late 1980s in which as many as 182,000 Kurds may have been murdered and 4,000 villages and their crops destroyed in an attempt at genocide.

The chemical attacks on the town of Halabja in the course of the Anfal campaign were so egregious that this was hived off as a third separate trial. Then there is the matter of the disappearance of 8,000 members of the Barzani tribe, and the killings of Kurds and Shi’ites after the first Gulf war.

These facts reinforce the point that while we may indeed be witnessing victors’ justice, anyone who has read a newspaper in the past three decades has also witnessed real crimes committed by culpably homicidal individuals, which in the case of Iraq have left hundreds of thousands of people with an unrecoverable void in their family, tribe or clan.

For us the death of Saddam may be a debating point or an occasion to rehearse the pros and cons of capital punishment. But for most Iraqis it is a matter of honour, justice and psychological necessity. There are some crimes for which someone really has to pay.

Michael Burleigh is Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and author of Sacred Causes: Politics and Religion from the European Dictators to Al-Qaeda Michael Burleigh