Let justice be done

The US mid-term election results have many lessons, but one of them, as Christopher Caldwell argues on page 14, is that most Americans believe that the war in Iraq is over, and that it has been lost. This reflects a broader, bone-deep fatigue in the West with the war on terror generally: a perception that the price we have paid has been too high, that our governments have systematically misled us, and that the whole enterprise stinks of arbitrariness and illegitimacy.

This is why the sentencing this week of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and the jailing of the British al-Qa’eda terrorist, Dhiren Barot, were so significant. True, the two trials could scarcely have been conducted in more radically different circumstances. The former Iraqi dictator was held to account in hearings marred by rickety procedures and overshadowed by the threat of brutal reprisal. Barot was sentenced in the safer setting of Woolwich Crown Court. But what connects the two trials is the message that the rule of law lies at the heart of this war.

It is one of the most important principles at stake in this struggle — one of the many unbridgeable gaps between Islamism and the values of global democracy. But the rule of law must also be a means as well as an end: it is hugely important that the war consists of more than regime change, botched propaganda by the West, faltering reconstruction of shattered states and domestic battles over the spread of Islamic fanaticism in Western mosques. It is essential, too, that due process plays its part, that the law is applied without fear or favour, and that justice is seen to be done. As Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential frontrunner, has argued, it is not enough to close the Guantanamo camp and hope that all will be forgotten.