Watching the news of Saddam's capture on TV a couple of weeks back, it took me a minute or two to figure out what that strange screeching sound in the background was.
It was, of course, the "international community" hitting the brakes, skidding to a halt, turning on a dime, careering up the kerb and into the garbage cans, and roaring off down the road in the opposite direction.
Up to the moment he'd popped up out of the spider-hole, the international jet-set's line was that, deplorable as Saddam's rule might be - gassing Kurds, feeding folks feet-first into industrial shredders etc - it was strictly an internal matter for the Iraqi people and other countries had no business interfering.
The minute the old boy was in US custody, the international jet-set's revised position was that gassing Kurds, feeding folks into industrial shredders and so forth were crimes against the whole world and certainly not a matter for the Iraqi people. Instead, we need a (drumroll, please) UN-mandated international tribunal.
This is what the Zionist neo-cons would call chutzpah.
So the same crowd who were demanding that the US hand over more control to Iraqis are now insisting that under no circumstances must it hand over control of Saddam to Iraqis. President Bush understands that the multilatte transnational establishment's interest in this case is not to pass judgment on Saddam but, by reasserting its authority, to pass judgment on the US, on its illegitimate war, illegal occupation, barbaric justice system etc.
The argument of the trannies is that only a Hague tribunal can confer "legitimacy" - "legitimacy" being one of those great sonorous banalities that are at the heart of what's wrong with the international order, which, in the main, confers the mantle of legitimacy on a lot of "illegitimate" thugs. Thus, just under a year ago, the UN legitimised Gadafy's Libya by making it chair of its Human Rights Commission and Saddam's Iraq by making it head of the UN disarmament panel.
Since then, Saddam has been toppled, and Gadafy has surrendered up his own WMD programme to the Brits and Yanks. So the fellows in need of "legitimacy" right now are the international institutions presided over by Kofi Annan and Co, who look, to put it at its mildest, utterly irrelevant.
So the only strategic significance of Saddam's trial is whether the transnational establishment gets rehabilitated or sidelined. The argument in favour of an international tribunal is that a full accounting of Saddam's crimes will be made before the whole world.
Really? Slobo's been yakking away in The Hague for two years now, and can you name a single thing that's come out in the trial? Or anyone other than the participants and Belgrade Supergold FM who's following it?
Anyone who doesn't know about the mass graves and torture in Baathist Iraq is someone who's chosen not to. A lot of people fall into that camp, for example, weapons-inspector-turned-Saddamite-shill Scott Ritter.
"The prison in question was inspected by my team in January 1998," he told Time magazine, a propos one grisly institution. "It appeared to be a prison for children - toddlers up to pre-adolescents - whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein.
"It was a horrific scene. Actually, I'm not going to describe what I saw there, because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I'm waging peace."
Mr Ritter is rare in the extent of his depravity: he saw the horror close up and opted to turn his back. But in the interests of "peace" many others in the transnational elites did the same from a safe distance. It's too late for them to claim that the stuff they covered up now needs a full airing in an international court.
So keep the jet-set out. I can't put it any better than the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Hoshyar Zebari, in his magnificent performance before the UN Security Council.
"One year ago," he told the bespoke apologists for his country's tyrant, "this Security Council was divided between those who wanted to appease Saddam Hussein and those who wanted to hold him accountable.
"The United Nations as an organisation failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years, and today we are unearthing thousands of victims in horrifying testament to that failure."
As for those who dismiss the present Iraqi leadership, "I'd like to remind you that the Governing Council is the most representative and democratic governing body in the region."
Kofi Annan didn't take kindly to this impertinence. "Now is not the time to pin blame and point fingers," he said, i.e. pin blame on and point fingers at him and his pals.
But why not? Things are going relatively swimmingly in Iraq since the UN and the NGOs hightailed it out of town in late summer, and the only reason anyone's bothering to point fingers at Kofi is that he keeps trying to butt back in. The proper response to anything the Secretary-General says ought to be: "Are you still here?"
So any trial needs to take place in Iraq. True, there's a lack of Iraqi judges: the party officials who fulfilled that function under Saddam are out of the question, and any surviving justices from the pre-Baath days would have to be spry octogenarians who were appointed to the bench when they were barely out of law school.
Nevertheless, someone managed to turn up 35 exiled Iraqi judges to attend a conference in Washington last spring, and perhaps there are Baghdad law students who left their homeland and became barristers elsewhere.
I'd be in favour of a panel of, say, four Iraqi judges presided over by an eminent coalition chappie, perhaps US Chief Justice Rehnquist or, perhaps less controversially, a chief justice from an Australian state.
His function would be similar to that fulfilled by Rehnquist at the Clinton impeachment trial in the Senate: he'd preside and provide guidance and hear objections, but the vote to fry Saddam would be taken by the Iraqi judges.
As for the legal niceties, unless - as happened in Gustav Husak's Czechoslovakia - a dictator is canny enough to negotiate a transition to democracy, his subsequent trial will inevitably be as much about politics as justice.
As Chris Stephen pointed out in these pages a week ago, in between agonising over this and that legal nicety, with Milosevic the prosecution has spent two years making its case, he'll get two years to respond, then there'll be appeals, and judgment, if it ever comes, will have been deferred a decade.
That suits the successor government in Belgrade, which shunted Slobo off to The Hague, not for any high-minded concerns about "legitimacy" but because they wanted to avoid the political problems of trying a still relatively popular figure.
Saddam, sadly, cannot make the same claim, at least outside the Greater Tikrit city limits. But, even if he could, letting him swank around like Slobo in a 10-year dinner-theatre run of Perry Mason is nothing to do with justice.
To allow the transnational jet set to reclaim Saddam would be to reward them for their indifference to Iraqi suffering. Let's get on with it in Baghdad.