Occasionally, like any doomed man, Saddam Hussein played with the notion of a last-minute reprieve. “He’s told us many times that we won’t be able to [avoid a death sentence in his trial],” said Khalil al-Dulaimi, one of his lawyers, in June. “He knows that the sentence has been issued from Washington.” But, at that point, he was still indulging in the fantasy that this was part of an American plan to restore him to power. “He’ll be the last resort; they’ll have to knock on his door,” said Dulaimi. “The United States will use this sentence to pressure Saddam to save it from this mess.”

By July, however, Saddam seemed to have accepted the fact that he was going to be killed, for he asked the court that he be shot by a firing squad, as is the right of a military man, and not hanged like a common criminal. More fantasy, since Saddam never served as a regular soldier.

On Sunday, the sentence of death by hanging was pronounced on Saddam and two of his fellow defendants. He responded with a clearly rehearsed tirade — “Long live Iraq! Long live the Iraqi people! Down with the traitors!” — and then left the courtroom with a little smile playing on his face, as if he had won. Which he had, within the narrow confines of what remains possible for him.

Unless the second trial that is now underway on other charges takes priority, it will take only a few days for an appeal to be considered by a panel of nine judges, and then the death sentence must be carried out within thirty days. But Saddam still wins, because in the eyes of most Sunni Arabs, he dies a martyr to the cause of Arab nationalism.

Lynched by the state

He is not a hero, and Iraq would be a better place if he had never been born. In any properly constituted international court, he would have been found guilty of the same charges he faced in Iraq. But in an international court, the trial would have had some credibility. The trial in Iraq did not.

The first chief judge, Rizgar Amin, resigned last January after government complaints that he had failed to impose order in his court (he had allowed Saddam to speak in his own defence too often). Five weeks later, his successor, Sayeed al-Hammashi, was removed when it was discovered that he had been a Baath Party member. And the chief judge appointed to run the second trial, Abdullah al-Amiri, was removed in September for being too sympathetic to Saddam.

Meanwhile, Saddam’s defence lawyers died like flies. The first to go, Saadoun Janabi, was “arrested” by men claiming to be from the Shia-controlled interior ministry police and later found dead in Sadr City, the Shia stronghold in Baghdad. The second, Adel al-Zubeidi, was shot shortly afterwards, whereupon another fled the country. And the chief defence lawyer, Khamis al-Obeidi, was arrested by men in police uniforms, and his body was found, with both arms broken and eight bullet wounds, dumped in the same place in Sadr City.

After Obeidi’s murder, Saddam’s lawyers withdrew from the trial entirely, demanding that it be transferred outside Iraq, and Saddam himself went on hunger strike. He gave that up after sixteen days of being force-fed by tubes pushed up his nostrils, and sat through the remainder of his trials with no legal representation other than a court-appointed lawyer who refused to be filmed or photographed, spoke through a microphone that deliberately distorted his voice, and was rejected as “an enemy of the people” by Saddam.

Saddam has not had a fair trial, although that, too, would certainly have found him guilty. He is the victim of a state-sponsored lynching, and so, for many people, he will die a martyr. That will make little difference in Iraq, where people have more immediate things to worry about, but it certainly does not help the cause of internjational law.