Princeton, N.J. — "For these crimes," wrote Hannah Arendt during the Nuremberg trials, "no punishment is severe enough. It may well be essential to hang Göring, but it is totally inadequate."
Saddam Hussein's punishment will surely be inadequate too - all the more so if he is executed too soon.
The Iraqi war crimes tribunal's first case against Mr. Hussein, which opens Oct. 19, charges him with the 1982 massacre of at least 143 men and boys from the village of Dujail. This was meant to be a test case of manageable scope and strong evidence. Unfortunately, Laith Kubba, a spokesman for Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, says that once the court has reached a guilty verdict in the Dujail case, the near-certain sentence of death "should be implemented without further delay."
But if Mr. Hussein is executed for the Dujail killings, he will never be called to account for the larger atrocities on which he was arraigned in July 2004: killing political rivals, crushing the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq in 1991, invading Kuwait in 1990, and waging the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1988, including gassing Kurdish villagers at Halabja.
It is easy to understand the temptation to get the high-profile trial over with quickly. The lives of the tribunal's officials - including the young chief investigative judge, Raid Juhi, who confronted Mr. Hussein in a televised courtroom showdown - are at constant risk from the raging insurgency. And the international tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where Slobodan Milosevic has dragged his trial into its fourth year with his theatrics, furnishes a cautionary example. A shorter trial would afford less time for Mr. Hussein to make defiant final speeches to Arab nationalists.
What's more, the tribunal is a political football. The Dujail trial is set to start just four days after Iraq's referendum on its draft constitution - a time when ethnic rivalries will probably run high - and not long before the Dec. 15 elections. Saleh al-Mutlak, a former Baathist who led the Sunni delegation's rejection of the draft constitution, has accused the Iraqi government of speeding Mr. Hussein to trial in order to win election-season political points, presumably with Shiites and Kurds. Mr. Mutlak menacingly warns that the trial could touch off more violence.
Nonetheless, the Iraqi tribunal would do well not to rush Mr. Hussein to the gallows. A hasty execution would shortchange Mr. Hussein's victims and diminish the benefits of justice. Baathists would be all the more likely to complain about a show trial. Kurds would rightly feel that they were denied their day in court for the Anfal campaign. Shiites in the south would also be deprived of a reckoning.
A thorough series of war crimes trials would not only give the victims more satisfaction but also yield a documentary and testimonial record of the regime's crimes. After Nuremberg, the American chief prosecutor estimated that he had assembled a paper trail of more than five million pages. A comparably intensive Iraqi process would help drive home to former Baathists and some Arab nationalists what was done in their names. The alternative is on display in Turkey, where the collapse of a war crimes tribunal after World War I paved the way for today's widespread Turkish nationalist denial of the Armenian genocide.
In June, Mr. Kubba said that Mr. Hussein could face as many as 500 charges, but that Iraqi prosecutors would pursue only about 12 well-documented counts. Now it may be down to just one. Because Iraq and the United States have chosen the hard road of courtroom justice, the war crimes tribunal should see it through. The Dujail case is a good start but not a good finish.