My seven-year-old son keeps asking me when Saddam's trial will start. He's not terribly fond of the guy. I give him my best (but still somewhat lame) answers: after they've gathered all the evidence, and worked just out who will try him. Then I go into the required song and dance on due process, EVEN for Saddam.

But there's another tack, with strategic and moral justification. Just kill Saddam. That's what writer and Portland blogger Michael J. Totten argues in this Tech Central Station opinion piece. Due process is not the issue here, says Totten. The facts are already clearly known. Nor is this about the death penalty, which, Totten says, he hates.

The first order of business is establishing peace and security in Iraq. Saddam's very existence obstructs that process. Saddam Hussein is no Jeffrey Dahmer. He has comrades loose in the streets; murderous, terrorizing, suicide-bombing fanatics. They murder aid workers and civil servants. They kill humanitarian envoys from the United Nations. They impale themselves on coalition forces, and massacre their own Iraqi countrymen. They are thugs and terrorists who declared open war on their country and civilization.

If Saddam Hussein lives he will call to them. If Saddam Hussein lives he will rally them without speaking a word. You can bet your bottom dollar they will demand his release. They could do what a Chechen death squad did in Moscow: take 700 hostages in a theater, wire it tight with explosives, and -- as Christopher Hitchens would put it -- demand the impossible, and demand it at gunpoint.

Saddam Hussein is a danger as long as he breathes.

Totten has a point.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at March 1, 2004 09:59 AM

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