Why Saddam should be saved from the hangman

Christopher Hitchens says that Saddam should be saved from the noose and concludes: If he is dropped through the trapdoor, we will never get to hear Saddam Husseins response to two very important historic events—the Anfal campaign to exterminate the Kurds in the 1980s and the sanguinary way in which he restored himself to power after the Kuwait war. And there will always be the suspicion that he might have pointed the finger at Western complicity in both of these terrible episodes. He should have been indicted by an international tribunal well before 2003, and the refusal of the American and British governments to act on this suggestion—made most notably by the British MP Ann Clwyd and her organization, Indict—will always be a standing reproach to our statecraft. I have always found the term "victor's justice" an absurd one—the courts are invariably set up by the powers that be, and how would "loser's justice" have looked in Nuremberg or at The Hague? But it is for the losers, or in other words the victims, that justice should be sought in the first place. It is a shame that the Kurds were not part of the centerpiece of this trial, just as it is impressive that their leaders are the ones most in favor of magnanimity. And these, by the way, are the people that every liberal in the world is currently arguing that we should desert.