The long-awaited verdict on how Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and other potential war criminals of his brutal regime will be brought to justice is in (see " Trial by Errors, " News and Features, February 28). They will face — as widely predicted — an Iraqi court that will likely be handpicked and stage-managed by US-led occupying forces without the scrutiny of the United Nations or any other international group.

It’s an open question, however, whether the efforts to indict and try Hussein and his cronies will be rendered moot by the US-led coalition’s attempts to target top Iraqi leaders for assassination. One of the most-wanted Iraqi war criminals, Ali Hassan al-Majid (better known as " Chemical Ali " ), was apparently killed in the bombing of Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city.

A cousin of Saddam Hussein, al-Majid was responsible for a genocidal campaign against the Kurds, in 1987 and 1988, that included the use of chemical gas. Such campaigns are exactly the sorts of crimes prohibited by international law, and trying the campaigns’ perpetrators could help to flesh out and solidify that law.

Because many of the crimes committed by Hussein and other top officials were perpetrated before the establishment of the new International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, a separate UN tribunal similar to those now operating to bring justice to Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia would have be convened. (The ICC can try only cases of crimes committed after its July 2002 founding date.) Such an international tribunal — staffed, perhaps, with Arab judges and legal experts — could represent a giant step toward establishing civil society throughout the region. It would also avoid the taint of " victor’s justice " that would inevitably surround trials of Iraqi officials convened by the US or its invasion allies.

The Bush administration sees it differently, however. Back in February, US ambassador for war-crimes issues Pierre-Richard Prosper told the Phoenix that " we want to see a process in a free Iraq that has a strong Iraqi role, and co-leadership in that process. " That is just what the Bush administration proposed on Monday — that a new Iraqi government, installed with US assistance, should try the cases.

Of course, present-day Iraq lacks the first thing required for such trials: competent and fair judges. A new Iraqi government would need either to use the country’s existing judges and legal framework to try Saddam and others, or to purge the existing legal system and appoint new judges — mainly from the expatriate community.

Either approach has massive pitfalls. Judges culled from the Iraqi expatriate community would hardly be seen as " Iraqis " by the rest of the nation. And former US ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith (who investigated " Chemical Ali " and other Iraqi war criminals as a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) told Chris Matthews on the Monday edition of MSNBC’s Hardball that trying such cases before currently sitting Iraqi judges would be " crazy. " " Every judge in Iraq has administered injustice, " Galbraith said. " This is a Nazi-style regime. Only the Nazis were around for just 12 years. These people have been in power for 35 years. There’s no such thing as a clean Iraqi judge of this regime. "

The message is clear: an impartial and international trial for whatever is left of Saddam’s regime is the only truly fair way to proceed. Anything short of that will defeat the core principle that justice must not only be accomplished in fact, but must also be seen as such.