SOMETIMES history itself produces ironies that the best literature can never convincingly convey.
It was fascinating to watch Saddam Hussein this week in a Baghdad courtroom, treated to all the trappings a humane society accords even its most heinous villains. Here he was, this elegantly tailored man, venting impatiently as the wheels of the legal system ground slowly before him. This monster, who once played prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner in the trial of millions of his own people, was now to be treated to the full majesty of the law’s due process — expensive lawyers to defend him, the opportunity to make his case in a crowded courtroom, television cameras to convey the proceedings to the wider jury beyond. Not quite what he provided for the wretches whose lives he brought to a brutal end with a sadistic chuckle.
But the solicitous exercise of a mass murderer’s human rights was not the biggest irony on display this week For that you had to juxtapose the events in Baghdad with developments here in Washington.
In the week that Saddam finally stands trial for his crimes against humanity, it became virtually certain that the Bush Administration will stand trial for crimes allegedly committed in making the case against him. Within the next week, Patrick Fitzgerald, a special prosecutor appointed two years ago by the Justice Department, will, it seems, announce indictments of at least one of the most senior figures in the White House.
The charges are not yet known, but they will be serious, crimes that carry prison terms. They will quite probably be devastating for an already embattled White House, undermining its remaining credibility and wrecking its eroding political effectiveness.
This is one of those legendarily complex Washington legal cases. In July 2003, as US and British forces were scouring Iraq for elusive weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Joseph Wilson, a former US ambassador and fierce critic of the war, wrote a column in The New York Times that seemed to offer a powerful example of dissembling and distortion by the White House when it had made its case for war a year before. He wrote that in early 2002 he had been sent to Niger, at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney, to investigate claims that Saddam had recently been seeking to acquire uranium from the African country to further his ambition of developing nuclear weapons.
After consulting his old contacts in Niger he reported back that he could find no evidence to support the claim. And yet, he wrote, the White House simply ignored his cautions and carried on making the Niger uranium episode an important part of its WMD case against Saddam.
White House officials were furious about the article. Several, including Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political strategist, and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby (only in America can a man have three first names) told a number of news reporters, in background conversations, that it was flawed. They explained that Mr Wilson had not been sent to Niger by Mr Cheney but by the CIA. This was significant because the White House had been engaged in a rancorous fight with the agency over Iraq’s WMD programme. Most of the CIA’s senior officials did not believe in the case for war against Iraq and spent an inordinate amount of time undercutting the Administration’s case.
In the course of these conversations, someone mentioned that Mr Wilson had been sent on his mission because his wife, Valerie Plame, worked on WMD issues at a senior level in the CIA. That fact was then published by a columnist. Knowingly revealing the identity of a covert intelligence agent is an offence, so the administration launched a criminal inquiry. After two years of investigation, and countless grand jury sessions, Mr Fitzgerald now appears to be ready to bring charges.
It is hard to suppress a sensation of awe at this unfolding spectacle. It is at least another useful counterpoint to the arguments of those who would have us believe there is a moral equivalence between Iraqi dictatorships and the Bush presidency. Where else would you have a situation in which a publicly funded prosecutor, appointed by the government to investigate itself, would come up with indictments of some of that government’s most important figures? Is America a great democracy or what?
But we shouldn’t get carried away with this sentiment. It may always be good to see powerful figures made accountable to the law. But this case does not look like one that goes after the kind of wrongdoing that genuinely needs fixing in American government.
The Bush-haters will see in it vindication for their mantra that the President and Tony Blair lied about Iraq’s WMD and smeared their critics who accused them of lying. But it represents no such thing. Indeed, not only did the administration back off the claims it had originally made about uranium, but the charge that Saddam had been seeking uranium from Niger was not compellingly disproved, either by Mr Wilson’s impressionistic report, or by British Intelligence, which continued to insist that the story was true.
What is more, no one outed Ms Plame as some kind of revenge for her husband’s embarrassing revelations. There is no evidence that Mr Rove or Mr Libby knew she was a covert agent; indeed it’s not clear she was a covert agent at all. They were simply making their case in the intra-administration dispute about Iraq that preceded the war — and pointing out that the Wilson trip fitted into a pattern in which the CIA had been energetically opposing the case that the administration was making against Iraq. For most of the past five years some at the CIA have acted like a kind of internal opposition to the Bush White House, leaking information to undermine the administration’s foreign policy. It would be quite an irony if it turned out to be the CIA’s victims who get punished.
And let’s hope we are spared the ultimate irony in all this — as the White House officials who helped to get rid of Saddam’s regime face prison, the tyrant himself is triumphantly acquitted.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
