Iraq will fall, but will we capture Saddam alive? And what might we do with him if we do catch him?

WASHINGTON – No one can know the future, but I’ll make this bet: One way or another, we are looking at Saddam Hussein’s final days. The Bush administration won’t stand down until there is “regime change” in Baghdad, and any war against Iraq means the end of Saddam. So the question is this: In the absence of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship, what happens to Saddam Hussein?

Everyone agrees that a handful of scenarios would be immensely welcome. If, for example, some ambitious courtier were to assassinate Iraq’s leader, few tears would be shed, and the likelihood of war would be reduced, if not eliminated. But Saddam’s security is such that any ambitious officer willing to kill Saddam would have to be suicidal as well – a contradiction.

I would imagine that the United States has explored all these avenues, and rejected the option. Indeed, Secretary of State Colin Powell said as much last week when Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., asked him if it wouldn’t be easier just to bump off Saddam. Secretary Powell’s response was long and detailed – reflecting a government-wide quest for an answer – and included the fact that “we don’t know where (Saddam) is at any given moment.”

The other scenario is exile. Some of the world’s least desirable statesmen – those, at any rate, who survived regime change – have disappeared into oblivion. Idi Amin of Uganda, for example, resides in Saudi Arabia and Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti lives in France. Neither suffers acute discomfort, but both are decidedly obscure. Such an option is probably unavailable to Saddam Hussein. Saudi Arabia has pointedly announced that its quota of ex-dictators has been filled, and if Saddam tried escaping to, say, North Korea we would probably shoot down the plane.

The United States has historically argued – correctly, in my view – that it is better to allow maximum leaders to go into exile than to threaten them with annihilation or prosecution. That is because any strongman who knows he will be killed out of hand, or put in the dock for crimes against humanity, has every reason to hang on to power, at the cost of untold innocent lives and treasure. In the case of Iraq, the cost of some extra years of life for the 65-year-old Saddam Hussein is a reasonable price to pay for the end of his tyranny.

Unfortunately, the world seems determined to avoid the discount. Poor Slobodan Milosevic, for all his sins, killed nowhere near as many fellow citizens as Saddam, and never invaded two sovereign neighbors. Yet there he is in The Hague, on trial at the moment, likely to be in custody for the rest of his life. Why should Milosevic be imprisoned while Saddam Hussein spends his dotage in some villa? If Saddam’s crimes are as bad as everyone says, some sort of Nuremberg-style tribunal is inevitable.

To be sure, the easier course would be summary justice. Already the Bush administration is trying to decide what to do with Osama bin Laden if he should be taken alive. Any sort of civil trial would require sharing sensitive information with bin Laden’s lawyers, which does not please our intelligence agencies. A military tribunal for a foreign terrorist would accomplish the same objective without observing constitutional niceties. But it would not be justice, American-style.

Leaving bin Laden where he’s caught – say, Pakistan – might do the trick: We wouldn’t ask questions about methods of interrogation, and allow Pakistan’s courts to work their magic. But this might be politically impossible. Osama bin Laden is the most wanted man in American history, and too many Americans have a personal stake in seeing him brought to American justice.

Which brings us back to Saddam Hussein. Every effort was made to kill him during the Persian Gulf War, but he managed to elude the smartest of our bombs. Since then, of course, the technology has improved, and we know a little more about his haunts and habits. But killing him in combat may prove as difficult as assassination. While no one can predict the depth of Iraqi resistance, it is possible that victory would require a battle for Baghdad. Street fighting in the Iraqi capital would not just be difficult for American and British soldiers – remember Mogadishu? – but would multiply the odds for Saddam’s survival.

To be sure, he has vowed to go down fighting, and may well do so: Even Hitler found the fortitude to shoot himself in the end. But you never know. Burying Saddam Hussein under rubble would require the kind of saturation bombing that, in our post-Dresden-Hiroshima world, is hard to justify. And while the temptation to dispatch a surrendering Saddam would be great, shooting prisoners on Fox News is equally objectionable.

So we are left with the prospect of Saddam Hussein in custody – shorn of his power, just another mass murderer with a mustache and beret – and the gratifying problem of deciding what to do with him.

Philip Terzian is the associate editor of the Providence Journal.

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