Hanging was no puppet exercise

Hard as it is to imagine, some people around the world are taking exception to the execution of Saddam Hussein.

If ever there were a candidate for the death penalty, surely Saddam would be it – a dictator who ruled by cruelty and terror, slaughtering his own people in the name of control. Respect for human life, one would think, leads to the conclusion that someone who acts with such profound contempt for its value, and does it on such a scale, forfeits the right to his own.

Saddam displayed no remorse, even in his final moments. The unfortunate cell phone video recording of his execution, displaying shouting and cursing from the audience and defiance from the convicted, indicates that Saddam was someone whose ego had not been dented by doubts about what he had done to his country. Dictators from Fidel Castro to Slobodan Milosevic tend to exhibit the same imperviousness to acknowledgement of the evils they have done. Their hard protective shell does not allow for remorse or pity for their victims.

Some have fallen for the ploy of Saddam’s final letter, which called for Iraqis “not to hate, because hatred does not leave space for a person to be fair.” To think of Saddam as a leader in national reconciliation is amazing, but some people do. A friend of mine who had met Saddam Hussein in the 1980s said that he justified the mass murder by chemical weapons of 5,000 Iraqi Kurds by the need to impose discipline. That was Saddam’s way of effecting national reconciliation when he was in power.

Others feel that a national leader should not be subject to the death penalty. That would mean that murdering people on a grand scale, in the fashion of Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot, makes you less culpable than murdering people on a one-on-one basis. Obviously, this argument makes no sense.

Unfortunately, the argument that so far has surfaced the most is that Saddam’s trial was the victor’s justice carried out by a puppet government. In the words of one writer on the BBC Web site, it was a “sordid, barbaric climax to a series of events triggered in the name of democracy and justice yet mired in the lies, deception and moral jingoism of two governments whose own conduct became no better than that of the man they deposed. For Iraqis, justice may have prevailed, but the arrogance and sheer political incompetence of the United States and the whole of the British Labor party (for they are all responsible) has left a terrible legacy that will fester throughout the world for decades to come.”

Now that Saddam has passed into history, how far should we go in exploring and answering these arguments? In order to legitimize Iraq’s future, we should take the time to do so rather than allow another set of myths about Iraq to mushroom, like the myth that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction despite the mass murder of the Kurds in the 1980s and the use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers in the Iraq-Iran war.

It was precisely to give legitimacy to the judgment that the United States declined to persecute Saddam after his ignominious capture just over three years ago. There were advantages and drawbacks to this approach, but ultimately it was the right one. Had we followed the pattern of the Nazi Nuremberg trials after World War II, victor’s justice would certainly have been charged (as it was about Nuremberg as well).

An international tribunal would have been another option, though the case of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic showed how limited that approach can be. Milosevic, of course, died of a heart attack after making a mockery of the tribunal in The Hague for years at a cost of millions of dollars.

In the end, it was only fair that Iraqis be allowed to reach the final verdict over the man who had held their country in his iron grip for over 20 years. That the trial at times turned into a farce was to a far greater degree due to Saddam’s antics in the courtroom and threats of hunger strike than anything done by the justices, who persevered in the face of great personal danger. What is important now is that the evidence is preserved and remains accessible for history’s verdict on what happened in Iraq.