A verdict in the first criminal case against Saddam Hussein is expected two days before a key US midterm vote that has become a referendum on the Iraq war -- but any benefit for President George W. Bush's Republican Party was unclear. The verdict is to be presented on Sunday, just ahead of Tuesday's vote in which Bush's Republicans appeared poised to lose control of Congress.
Attorneys for the former Iraqi president and some US leftists suspect the Bush administration arranged for the verdict to be presented just ahead of the vote. Yet US policy observers are skeptical about the impact it would have on the election.
"I would be very reluctant to even speculate on that," said Carroll Doherty, a researcher at the Pew Research Center. "The only thing I would say is to this point: Iraq is the main issue in the campaign. It has energized Democratic voters," she said.
Stephen Hess at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, said he thought the impact would "be relatively modest."
Most US voters already "have a pretty strong idea about how they feel about Iraq and how it affects their vote," he said, although it is "always possible" that the Saddam verdict could sway undecided voters.
"It would certainly be headline news and it would be used by the Republicans and by the president to remind people why the United States were in Iraq in the first place," Hess said.
"And possibly it would used by some people who are left-wing bloggers to say, 'Hey, isn't (it) some sort of a conspiracy?'" he said, referring to the timing of the verdict.
Polls show that Republicans will likely lose control of the House of Representatives, and may lose control of the US Senate, largely due to concern about the war in Iraq.
Thirty-three of the Senate's 100 seats are open for contest, along with all 435 seats in the House of Representatives. Voters will also elect governors in 36 US states.
Bush's popularity rose sharply when Saddam was captured in December 2003. The president's poll numbers have since plunged, currently hovering just below 40 percent.
"The Bush administration cares more about the November elections than the lives of US troops, the Iraqi people and the rule of law," said Ramsey Clark, one of the lead attorneys on Saddam's defense team.
Clark, US attorney general from 1967 to 1969, noted "the high probability that death sentences (in the Saddam case) will cause greater violence and irreconcilable division in Iraq."
Saddam and several co-conspirators, including former vice president Taha Ramadan, face execution by the Iraqi High Tribunal handling their case over the killing of 148 Shiite villagers from the Iraqi village of Dujail in 1982.
Another of Saddam's lawyers, Bushra Khalil, warned Wednesday that a guilty verdict on Sunday could plunge Iraq and the region into violence.
"Any death sentence will be explosive for Iraq and the region. Any death sentence will be hell for the US Army" in Iraq, said Khalil, speaking in Beirut.
Khalil said the Sunday date for the verdict proved the trial was being used by the Bush administration as "propaganda."
Saddam himself addressed the High Tribunal's presiding judge, asking that the verdict not be announced on November 5 because it would reinforce Bush's Republican Party in the elections.
"The propaganda machine will seek to show that Bush has achieved his strategic goal" in Iraq, Saddam said.
On the Internet, in US leftist discussion forums and among some bloggers, there is a strong suspicion that the date was chosen on purpose to benefit the Republicans.
"Given the Bush administration's history of timing national security-related actions to the political calendar, has the date for the verdict's release been set to provide maximum political benefit for the administration and congressional Republicans?" asked a blogger on the DemocraticUnderground.com discussion site.
Tom Engelhardt, writing in the leftist The Nation magazine, notes that the verdict comes "curiously enough, just two days before the midterm elections. It's the sort of the thing that -- you would think -- any reporter with knowledge of the US election cycle ... would at least note in an article. But no, you can search high and low without finding a reference to this in the mainstream media."
US Ambassador in Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad rejects the charges, insisting that the date was set by Iraqi judges and that Washington had no role in the decision.
Saddam and his co-defendants are currently facing charges in a second trial concerning the death of thousands of Kurds in the 1988 Anfal campaign, in which government forces razed thousands of villages in northern Iraq. They face the death penalty if convicted.
