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Good News for Saddam Hussein
The neo-cons who propagated the story that Saddam "gassed his own people," i.e., the Iraqi Kurds, will still insist he did gas the Kurds, back in 1988 when he gave the order to Chemical Ali, who told the Iraqi army to commit genocide at the town of Halabja. But the news from Mohammed al-Obaidi is that the team prosecuting Saddam for crimes against humanity has dropped the genocide charge “due to insufficient evidence.”

Al-Obaidi assures me the news is true, and if it is, we should be learning about it sooner or later from our news media. It will further complicate the Bush administration’s problems in Iraq, as it had been relying on the genocide charge to justify “regime change” in Baghdad when the other rationales – WMD and Al Qaida connections – failed. I may be wrong, but if this turns out to be true, it would be a positive development in resolving the conflict in Iraq sooner, rather than later. Once the U.S. press corps focuses on the issue, it would force President Bush to re-examine his own assumptions about the rationale for unilateral action and make it easier for him to shift gears toward greater international involvement in resolving the several conflated issues in the Middle East.

As most of you know, I have for the last two years argued that whatever else Saddam Hussein did for good or ill as Iraq’s president since 1978, there is no evidence that he committed genocide. That he gassed the Iraqi Kurds has been an assertion that has been repeated so often by President Bush, Vice President Cheney and the American press that I’m sure 99.9% of the people believe it is gospel. I sent the "news" to several editors and a great many political reporters yesterday when I learned of it, but nothing yet has surfaced. Al-Obaidi tells me the news has appeared in the Arabic press. ...