Soccer Dad has an enlightening roundup of essays on the execution of Saddam Hussein, which finally inspired me to collect my thoughts.
This has been a very strange story and more than a little disturbing in so many ways. While I'm uncomfortable with various aspects of the death penalty in general, there's simply no individual I can think of who was more deserving of it. So even though the spectacle of any public execution makes me queasy, I accepted long ago that it was going to be necessary and fitting in this case -- to provide closure, to allow healing, to at least give lip service to some semblance of justice for the monstrous crimes he committed.
But in the event, the execution was badly botched from almost every angle. Charles Krauthammer has done a superb job of explaining how, and this essay really is a must-read.
Consider the timing. It was carried out on a religious holiday. We would not ordinarily care about this, except for the fact that it was in contravention of Iraqi law. It was done on the first day of Eid al-Adha as celebrated by Sunnis. The Shiite Eid began the next day, which tells you in whose name the execution was performed.
It was also carried out extra-constitutionally. The constitution requires a death sentence to have the signature of the president and two vice presidents, each representing one of the three major ethnic groups in the country (Sunni, Shiite and Kurd). That provision is meant to prevent sectarian killings. The president did not sign. Nouri al-Maliki contrived some work-around.
As the Iraq emerging from the war of its liberation (a war I have always firmly supported) appears more and more like some Frankenstein monster lurching out of control, this perversion of the principles we're trying to promote there stinks to high heaven. Some of the folks at Fox News are justifying it as simply letting Iraqis be Iraqis, and in the process are descending into their own morass of "the soft racism of low expectations." The trial and execution of Saddam Hussein provided a unique opportunity for the exercise of the essence of democracy that we're trying to export to the Middle East. An opportunity squandered in the extreme.
Moreover, Maliki's rush to execute short-circuited the judicial process that was at the time considering Hussein's crimes against the Kurds. He was hanged for the killing of 148 men and boys in the Shiite village of Dujail. This was a perfectly good starting point -- a specific incident as a prelude to an inquiry into the larger canvas of his crimes. The trial for his genocidal campaign against the Kurds was just beginning.
That larger canvas will never be painted. The starting point became the endpoint. The only charge for which Hussein was executed was that 1982 killing of Shiites -- interestingly, his response to a failed assassination attempt by Maliki's Dawa Party.
Maliki ultimately got his revenge, completing Dawa's mission a quarter-century later. However, Saddam Hussein will now never be tried for the Kurdish genocide, the decimation of the Marsh Arabs, the multiple war crimes and all the rest.
As Krauthammer suggests earlier in the essay, in the aftermath of World War II, the Nuremberg trials were pivotal in establishing that sense of closure and justice I mentioned above. And the Eichmann trial in Israel, perhaps an even closer parallel to the case of Saddam, was even more essential in permitting the healing to begin for many of the survivors. The fact that only one group of Saddam's victims was granted this relief is going to come back to haunt Iraq mightily. And in haunting Iraq it's likely to do far greater damage to the prospects for peace and stability in the Middle East.
Finally, there was the motley crew -- handpicked by the government -- that constituted the hanging party. They turned what was an act of national justice into a scene of sectarian vengeance. The world has now seen the smuggled video of the shouting and taunting that turned Saddam Hussein into the most dignified figure in the room -- another remarkable achievement in burnishing the image of the most evil man of his time.
Worse was the content of the taunts: "Moqtada, Moqtada," the name of the radical and murderous Shiite extremist whose goons were obviously in the chamber. The world saw Hussein falling through the trapdoor, executed not in the name of a new and democratic Iraq but in the name of Moqtada al-Sadr, whose death squads have learned much from Hussein.
That video, of course, wasn't part of the plan. The person who recorded it has reportedly been arrested, amid furious finger-pointing and rampant speculation. But Krauthammer is right. The image that video is burning into the global consciousness is the completely wrong image. And not because it should have been kept private, but because it should never have been permitted to happen. Not that way.
The conclusion that Krauthammer draws from all this is more than a little startling, coming from him. Read it here. (Or at the Washington Post, here.) I don't know. I just don't know.
