i agree with what host said above and find that i have little to add to it.
the range of responses in this thread is interesting: i have not been particularly shocked by any of it, chocking it up to difficulties that accompany anyone's efforts to look at fiasco squarely.
if you exclude any coherent pretense to justice having been served here--justice being a function of proper procedures having been followed in a context generally understood to be legitimate--none of which applies in this case, no matter what you think about saddam hussein--the remaining considerations are political. this article from today's guardian is fairly eloquent:
Quote:
Milestone on the road to nowhere
Monday January 1, 2007
The Guardian
Saddam Hussein's execution is likely to make little difference to the fate of the country he ruled so cruelly for more than two decades. Few can now doubt that he was guilty of terrible crimes against humanity - his own people and others - and showed not a shred of remorse. Millions around the world were able to watch the grotesque, sordid spectacle of his final, defiant moments, cursing "Americans, spies and Persians" to the very end. It is hard to imagine that Iraq's bloody divisions could get very much deeper. Reactions there - and there can be no mistaking the jubilation alongside the apathy and the fury - have predictably been split entirely along sectarian lines.
The spate of killings that followed was equally predictable; Saturday's 90 or so dead was a fairly average daily toll. Even with Saddam buried, the violence seems to have an unstoppable momentum of its own. Nuri al-Maliki's government signed his death warrant, but it has been unable to defuse or crush the Sunni insurgency, end the routine suicide bombings, kidnappings and murder, or ensure that its own Shia security forces do not act as sectarian death squads. A government whose writ barely runs beyond Baghdad's Green Zone and whose commitment to justice consists of little more than killing the tyrant is hardly a government worth the name. It could have been done differently. The twisted politics of war and occupation poisoned the judicial process that allowed hooded thugs to place the noose around Saddam's neck, taunting him as they did. That process was fundamentally flawed. Neither judges nor lawyers showed an understanding of international criminal law. Witnesses testified anonymously, defence lawyers were murdered and a judge was removed under government pressure. A UN or international tribunal in a neutral venue would have been better.
It bears repeating that the death penalty remains a cruel and unusual punishment. It was only a matter of time before the lightly sanitised official version of the execution was supplemented by uncensored mobile phone pictures of the whole tawdry event - snaps from the scaffold for our digital age. Perhaps (an unintended useful consequence?) they will win new recruits to the abolitionist cause.
Saddam went unrepentantly to the gallows because of one atrocity: the killings of 148 Shia villagers after a failed assassination attempt in Dujail in 1982. But justice, and the memory of his many thousands more victims, would have been better served if had stood trial for the "Anfal" campaign against the Kurds for which he and his accomplices were accused of genocide. The same is true for the crushing of the Kurdish and Shia rebellions after the 1991 Gulf war, and for his invasions of Kuwait and Iran. It may be naïve to believe that a different judicial course might possibly have served some putative process of truth and reconciliation to help heal Iraq's wounds. But it is certain that nothing but vengeance and retribution are served by the brutal and public manner of his end.
The hanging took place as President Bush (breathtakingly hailing it as "a step towards democracy") was consulting advisers at his ranch to plan his next Iraqi move - anticipating the moment when US fatalities, which have already surpassed the dead of the 9/11 attacks, reach 3,000. At least there was no American awkwardness at the use of the death penalty. That had a squirming Margaret Beckett repeating Britain's principled opposition to it but bizarrely "respecting" Iraq's sovereign right to use it. Saddam's crimes were committed in the name of sovereignty too. His execution can only augur badly for the future of a ruined country that is now worse off in so many ways than it was in the darkest days of his dictatorship. The condemned man boasted he was prepared to die as a sacrifice for Iraq. But this ghastly milestone of his death will do it no good at all.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1980909,00.html