But instead of an orderly court process, the Shia-led government seemed intent on revenge rather than justice. The verdict guilty, with more indictments to come - a genocide charge for gassing an entire town of Kurds in the 1980s, dropping chemical weapons from helicopters, then the murder of 90 members of the Dulaim tribe, all Sunni Muslims. I ended up writing a lot of the defenses for Saddam and the other accused.ĪMOS: Still, the evidence was overwhelming, direct orders signed by Saddam presented in court. It was a last-ditch move to make this a legitimate trial with a credible defense.īILL WILEY: Because the defense lawyers were generally pretty bad. MONTAGNE: The former Iraqi dictator faces charges of crimes against humanity for ordering a mass killing of Shiite men in 1982.ĪMOS: Bill Wiley, a Canadian war crimes investigator, was observing the trial for United Nations when American officials tapped him to be an adviser to Saddam's defense team. They demanded the trial start with a mass murder indictment of 148 Shia men in the town of Dujail. You know, trying a murder case is not the same as trying a mass murder case.ĪMOS: But Iraq's Shia Muslim leaders were in a hurry, he says. ISTRABADI: This was supposed to be a practice run for the judges because they were applying international law for the first time. The grievances of Iraq's Sunnis, Shias and Kurds played out in the Iraqi courtroom.įEISAL AL-ISTRABADI: Saddam wasn't supposed to be a defendant in that trial.ĪMOS: The plan was to start with lower-level officials, says Feisal Istrabadi, Iraq's first U.N. Iraq had become a volatile mix of violence, a growing insurgency hostile to the U.S., a brewing sectarian war. RENEE MONTAGNE, BYLINE: The trial of Saddam Hussein opened today in Baghdad.ĪMOS: That chaos was the backdrop for Saddam's trial two years after his regime was toppled, seeping into the judicial process that was supposed to be a model. Except there was because we did not think about Monday morning. Of course, we can remove Saddam with no problem. You know, we are the superpower, the only superpower. They had planned to go to war way back, right after 9/11. He had warned the White House in his briefings.ĮMILE NAKHLE: In the end, they did not listen, really. HUSSEIN IBISH: I don't think it's possible to understand the willingness of so many people to go along with the fantasy of reconstructing Iraq without the anger of 9/11, the sense that we have to do something really big in the Islamic and in the Arab world, and this is something.ĪMOS: At the CIA, intelligence officer Emile Nakhle, a Middle East specialist, was alarmed by the growing chaos. As important - an announcement that Saddam would face justice in an impartial Iraqi court, a step towards the rule of law, as Washington promised, creating a new democratic Iraq, a flawed project from the start, says political analyst Hussein Ibish. RICARDO SANCHEZ: This is Saddam as he was being given his medical examination today.ĪMOS: In Baghdad, American officials announced Saddam's capture. Regime change is a rationale for the U.S. Saddam Hussein is dragged out of a hole in the ground near Tikrit, his hometown. PAUL BREMER: Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.ĭEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: December 2003. NPR's Deborah Amos reports on how it went wrong. When the U.S invaded Iraq two decades ago this week, it captured Saddam and set up a trial that was supposed to exemplify justice. He didn't, though he had used them against his own people years earlier. The White House said he had weapons of mass destruction. All we know, and all that matters, is that we got him.Twenty years ago, many Americans thought of one man when they heard the word Iraq, and that was Saddam Hussein. It doesn’t matter who Bremer is, or if people remember why he said it. “We got him” seems to be, at least in America, deeply embedded in the collective psyche.īarack Obama said it when navy seals shot Osama bin Laden in 2011 (“Looks like we got him”), and the mayor of Boston uttered it when they captured Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in 2013.Įither of these could have easily been used instead of Bremer’s remarks – and perhaps they will be used in some future iteration – but the randomness of his appearance in the original meme is part of its beautiful humour. But there’s reason to believe it will stick around, at least in some form. Or a major political party will undoubtedly use it and it will die. Younger meme-makers may find it increasingly less funny. 15 years ago today, Paul Bremer called a press conference that would go down in the annals.Īll of us remember the moment the world found out Mark Latham had just become leader of the Labor Party /ohqZatA5qk- nondescript twiitteer user December 15, 2018Īs we move further away from its origins and the cultural memory of the Iraq war, what happens next is up for debate.
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