Thursday, May 19, 2005
KIM BEAZLEY'S FRIEND
Bob Ellis feels sorry for Saddam:
Saddam Hussein can’t watch television, read newspapers, telephone his wife or consult his lawyers. He can read novels, though, write poetry, tend a small rock garden. No television interviewer can go near him, no friendly or hostile biographer, no prosecutor from the ICC. Unlike everyone else in the democracies, he cannot ask for bail, or asylum, or (something John Paul might have given him) asylum in the Vatican.
The reasons aren’t too hard to guess. Under international law, Saddam is still President of Iraq, the war that overthrew him having been illegal, unsurrendered and unconcluded, and he, a lawyer, knows this. He might say so to an interviewer and might moreover mildly ask why Americans bombed and burnt his property and murdered his sons and fourteen-year-old grandson. Why, in particular, they burned his yacht. What good did that do? Are the Americans crazy?
Poor Saddam, all yachtless and missing his dead rapist sons. Ellis feels his pain. Hit the link above and you’ll discover that this sad-man-for-Saddam isn’t a fringe identity howling from the margins; last week he was in Kim Beazley’s office helping craft the opposition leader’s budget reply speech.
(Via Raff, this site’s Ellis editor)