Political will

Next to the gallows, Chemical Ali:

At the age of 61, severely weakened by diabetes, the defendant, Ali Hassan al-Majid, leaned heavily on a walking stick for the 18 minutes it took the judge to read guilty verdicts on counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Unlike his cousin Saddam Hussein, whose shouted defiance nearly drowned out the judge who sent him to the gallows last year, Mr. Majid offered no protest until the judge ordered bailiffs to lead him from the iron-ribbed cage that serves as a dock.

“Thanks be to God, now I’m leaving,” he said gruffly, as he turned to limp from the courtroom in the old Baath Party headquarters, a place where his reputation as a man who relished handing out summary sentences to Kurds, Shiites and other supposed enemies of the old government — and overseeing the executions himself, with a ghoulish pleasure evident in official videos — made him almost as feared as Mr. Hussein.

If the pattern set in Mr. Hussein’s case is a guide, Mr. Majid’s automatic appeal could be completed in little more than a month, with his hanging soon after.

Ali sounds exactly like the sort of person who would, in the course of an organic transition, ultimately have to live down his crimes. But part of the process of bringing people like al-Majid to justice has to be nurturing the political will to bring people like al-Majid to justice. Hurried trials like his--trials with foregone conclusions, that occur in the midsts of unrest and civil war--do less to secure actual justice than they do to stoke already-inflamed segments of Iraqi society.