Remember this casus belli? (That is, justification for war)...

From the "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq":

"Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against other nations and its own people;"

Well, as John Burns reports from Baghdad in today's New York Times, another one of the former regime elements who used these WMDs against his fellow Iraqis appears to be just about to bite the dust:

As the judge pronounced five death sentences on the man Iraqis know as Chemical Ali, the defendant seemed on Sunday to be a shadow of the merciless enforcer who oversaw poison gas attacks that killed thousands of Kurdish villagers in Iraq’s northern uplands nearly 20 years ago.

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. . .

As the Times reports, this sentence brings to seven the number of top officials who have been sentenced to death for their crimes against the Iraqi people under the regime of Saddam Hussein. Four of these have been executed. As the Times continues, this marks the end of the Anfal trial, Saddam's name for his campaigns against the Kurds in which an estimated 180,000 men, women, and children were killed when Iraqi forces bombed and razed hundreds of Kurdish villages, and tortured and starved to death many of the survivors because he suspected the Kurds of having been traitors during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1987).

Even though there hasn't been much interest in this trial - either in the Iraqi or the international press - there are even more such trials to come. As the Times continues:

The next case will be the so-called Intifada trial, involving the suppression of a Shiite uprising across southern Iraq in 1991 that followed the Persian Gulf war, in which, Shiite officials say, at least 150,000 people were killed. . .

At least 10 other trials are being prepared, Iraqi officials say. One will focus on the poison gas attacks in March 1988 that devastated the town of Halabja in Iraqi Kurdistan, where as many as 5,000 people are said to have been killed. That attack, more than anything else, drew international attention to the plight of the Kurds under Mr. Hussein. It was separated from the Anfal trial because of its notoriety, and its deep resonance among the Kurds.

Other trials will center on the killing of prominent religious and political figures under Mr. Hussein; the killing of hundreds of members of a prominent Kurdish political family, the Barzanis, in the 1980s; the persecution of the Shiite marsh dwellers of southern Iraq; and an incident in 1993, when another half-brother of Mr. Hussein’s, Watban Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, arrested dozens of Baghdad market-sellers for alleged profiteering in foodstuffs, then had them hanged from lampposts after trials that lasted less than a day.

Note this interesting commentary on "Western legal-monitoring groups":

For the Kurds, the Anfal verdict’s significance was heightened by the fact that five of the six defendants were found guilty of genocide. While Western legal-monitoring groups have expressed doubts whether the Anfal campaign met the international legal definition of genocide, in the sense of a systematic attempt to wipe out an entire ethnic or religious group, Kurdish officials in Iraq had said that guilty findings on the genocide charges would add momentum to the claim by Iraqi Kurds that their survival can be assured only by an entrenched autonomy within Iraq.

I wonder, by contrast, how many of these same Western legal-monitors support the Armenian's claim to genocide with respect to Turkey's actions during World War I. I hope somebody does this analysis (as I'm too busy at the moment).

Highlights from the trial of "Chemical Ali" you probably didn't even realize was going on

Such has been the extent the media has ignored this trial. But thanks to John Burns, we now have this dispatch in today's New York Times:

When the man Iraqis know as Chemical Ali made a final plea of innocence to the Iraqi High Tribunal last week, the court’s public galleries were all but empty, and there was not a single Iraqi or foreign reporter on hand.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam Hussein’s cousin, was once the most feared man in Iraq after Mr. Hussein himself. Mr. Majid earned his grim sobriquet for his role as the overseer of the so-called Anfal campaign of the late 1980s, in which tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds were killed, many of them in poison gas attacks.

As Burns continues:

[Mr. Majid and his five co-defendants] pleaded innocent of any involvement in atrocities in the Anfal offensives, which took their name, at Mr. Hussein’s direction, from an Arabic word meaning “spoils of war.” In closing pleas, they said they had nothing to do with the chemical attacks, village demolitions, deportations, torture and mass executions of men, women and children that Kurdish survivors described in excruciating detail in 59 days of testimony.

Chemical Ali as Burns went on to report, testified that he "never issued an order for the use of these weapons" or "heard of them being used." According to prosecutors, at least 50,000 Kurds died in these poison gas attacks which occurred in 1987 and 1988.

Sentences are expected to be issued as early as mid-June.

As the Times continues:

Court officials have said that they envision several more trials, including a series of cases that will center on the Shiite uprising against Mr. Hussein after Iraqi forces were driven from Kuwait in 1991. Shiite leaders say as many as 150,000 people were killed during the uprising, many of them lined up at mass graves in the desert and shot.

But as Burns continues:

With Mr. Hussein dead, interest in the process among Iraqis, and beyond Iraq, has dwindled.

With tens of thousands of dead since the American invasion, and almost every day punctuated by the mass killings caused by roadside bombs and suicide attacks, the horrors of the Hussein era, in the minds of many Iraqis, have receded before the chaos that has ensued.

Color me skeptical, but somehow I doubt these "many Iraqis" in whose minds "the horrors of the Hussein era. . .have receded" are neither Kurdish nor Shiite.