Keeping faith with a bloody tradition

I WAS SITTING with President Jalal Talabani of Iraq earlier this month when Iraqi television was broadcasting the trial of Saddam Hussein. The hearings had shifted into their second phase, concerning the mass murder of Iraq's Kurdish minority in the 1980s, and video footage of gassing and shooting had been played in court, to ram home the anguished statements of numberless survivors.

By Christopher Hitchens

December 31, 2006