Two emails from readers:

Your post raises a fascinating question about the relationship between justice and due process, a topic that can be traced all the way back to Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy. In that tale, the case of Orestes, who is guilty (beyond any doubt) of murdering his mother, ends in a hung jury that is decided by the goddess Athena, who votes for acquittal. The lesson, apparently, is that a tie goes to the runner.
You will argue, of course, that Saddam’s case is nowhere close to a tie. But since you raise the issue of precedence, isn’t it also important, for the sake of precedence, to preserve the principle of presumption of innocence? Your comparison of Saddam to the villain in a movie is misleading because, in movie land, we always know beyond a shadow of a doubt–due to the film’s narrative structure–that the villain is guilty. Short of a direct conduit to God of the type you mention or participation by a goddess on the jury, real life doesn’t prove that type of crystal-clear narrative structure; hence the need for due process and presumption of innocence. To state baldly that “all reasonable people understand that Saddam is deserving of whatever fate befalls him” is to short-circuit those principles.
Call me a card-carrying-ACLU-Saddam-lover if you like, but I’m disappointed.

And…

Mr. Goldberg,
Regarding your recent Corner post on Saddam’s trial, it seems to me all the blather about whether he can get a “fair trial” breaks down because of one simple fact: The rules of Criminal Procedure are designed to protect individual citizens from the state. Given the relative imbalance of power and means between the two, strict rules of procedure help prevent arbitrary and capricious prosecutions and put the onus on the state to prove an individual’s guilt. In the case of a person like Saddam (or any other dictator, past or present), it becomes absurd to speak of “fair trials” because the person involved essentially WAS the state; thus, the basic calculus involved in ordinary criminal procedure doesn’t apply. Saddam is not some poor, essentially anonymous individual who needs to be protected from the crushing power of the state; his trial is essentially the trial of the state – the state which he ruled and which was indistinguishable from his will and whims. Saddam’s crimes as dictator, and thus of the state he ruled, were so public, so well-known throughout the world, so obvious and clear to anyone sane person, that traditional procedural nostrums such as “innocent until proven guilty” are absurd when applied to his case.
Everyone throughout the world knows that Saddam’s rule was an endless stream of unmitigated crimes. We don’t need a “fair trial” to tell us this. Saddam’s trial should, frankly, skip the “guilt phase” and just skip directly to the “penalty phase”. Personally, I was for just shooting the guy in his rat hole – a nice ready-made tomb. Failing that, he should have been given a Ceaucescu(sp?)-style trial: Arrested on Dec 24, the Romanian dictator was tried and convicted before a military tribunal on Dec 25 and executed later that same afternoon. Swift, efficient justice of the kind needed in Saddam’s case. I also think the swift public condemnation and execution of Saddam might have helped serve as a catalyst for the stabilisation of Iraq, essentially helping to rally the nation together as one to exorcize, so to speak, some of their national demons through the execution of the dictator who embodied all that was evil in their past (see Rene Girard’s scapegoat theory for more on how this process may have worked). Instead it looks as if we’re going to have a long, drawn-out (and hugely expensive) farce of a trial on our hands, during which Western leftists and media types will wring their hands endlessly about whether the trial is proceding “fairly”.

Me: My short response to both: Democracy and civilization depend on ritual as much as barbarian societies do. It’s just that our rituals serve a larger rational purpose (please, let’s not start a Hayekian thing about all customs serving rational ends, you get my point). As I said, I’m in favor of a fair trial for all sorts of reasons, but fairness to Saddam himself isn’t one of them. I would have considered it no less unjust — and arguably a better policy — if the first soldiers who found Saddam shot him on sight. But, as a commenter and reasonable person I see no reason why I shouldn’t say something what I believe to be true: that Saddam is obviously, and many times over, deserving of death. Let the process treat him fairly. Let the rituals proceed. And then hang him in the square.