They had to hang the son of a bitch before he was tried for gassing the Kurds. After all, you know who sold him the poison for that job, right? Saddam was going to pull Cheney and Rummy (his two old chums) into the Kurdish massacre trial so it was time to 86 the useless old fucker.

I doubt that Bush is going to get even one poll approval point out of this sorry episode. Before the cock crows midnight on New Year's Eve, three more American soldiers are going to get blown away and the Iraq War death toll for our forces will stand at 3,000.

So we massacred 3,000 of our sons and daughters so that little fuckhead Bush could use Saddam's nuts for a coin purse. Not a good trade if you ask me.

...and now we're stuck in a glue trap.

Osama bin Laden is happy tonight, and N. Korea and Iran are working even harder to get their nukes.

It is finished. No one here in the US will much care one way or the other. They never did before our lunatic President pointed, at the height of the search in Afghanistan for Osama Bin Laden, toward Iraq and yelled "Look! Over there!" and we all looked, idiots that we are.

US influence put Saddam where he was, allowed him to grow into the monster he was, then chose to kill him (and let there be no mistake about this: we did kill him) when he was no longer useful to us. Meanwhile a mass-murderer goes "marginalized" for five years.

So Saddam is dead. I probably won't lose any sleep over that fact, but my dreams may be a little troubled because of how this was accomplished. Still, the Big Question that will fail to penetrate the thick Collective American Skull is this: Is the world now any better a place than it was before Saddam Hussein's neck snapped? Will this somehow correct the maiming of one of the planet's oldest and most historically significant countries? Will it matter that Saddam will now lie alongside almost 3000 American troops and upwards of 10,000 Iraqi citizens and Iraq itself will only be plunged into ever deepening turmoil, chaos and violence?

What, exactly, has been accomplished by this "milestone" in a war that has become a millstone, an albatross, around the neck of this nation, just as ominous as that noose likely felt around Saddam Hussein's neck?

The world is less one vicious dictator, but so many more remain, so many of our making, and the nation this man dictated to will now descend into a kind of horror only a fiend could see as progress heralded by this "milestone."

It's strange, but I do care about the death of this ridiculous and horrible man, because it wasn't ours to mete out, nor was it ours to farm out. It is a fitting end to not only the reign of Saddam Hussein but also to that of George W. Bush and those who continue to enable it. What we have done is now utterly incalculable. Hell awaits. Never mind it isn't waiting on our shores.

Don't bother to ask for whom that bell tolls. You really don't want to know.

The depth of this man's evil, like the number stars in the universe or grains of sand on a beach, is beyond comprehension.

It really is ok to be against Bush, against the war, against the death penalty, against just about anything, yet still understand that the world is a better place with Saddam Hussein's vile existence extinguished.

There are lots of interesting arguments to be made both for and against Saddam's execution, as restated so well by many of the posters here so far.

But what really strikes me as most shocking about this whole entire episode is how infrequently this happens, meaning to say, the execution of a head of state, either sitting or retired.

In fact the most recent occurrence I could find of any similar event (from a quick Wikipedia scan) was the execution of Afghanistan's president by the Taliban when they took over the country in 1996. No, Milosevic doesn't count, although I guess that's debatable.

But anyway, the Taliban! Kind of a bad example to be following, don't you think?

-Adam in Philly

Most of the posters here are discussing how this fits (or mainly doesn't fit) with our conceptions of American justice. But this isn't about the American people. I suspect Saddam's death at this point is little more than a footnote to this unhappy episode in most Americans' mind. It's about the Iraqi people.

To be sure, the USG is happy that Saddam is gone now; and the logistics of the trial and execution were largely orchestrated by the US since the Iraqis don't have the wherewithal to do it themselves. But this trial and execution was never about the US seeking "revenge;" many senior American officials hoped Saddam would just die from his multiple ailments shortly after his capture to avoid this whole mess. It's about Iraq, and the nightmare that millions of Iraqis went through during Saddam's brutal two-decade reign.

It's easy for the left in the States, caught up in criticism of and loathing for the Bush Administration and it's failed adventure, to forget that missing WMD notwithstanding, Saddam Hussein was a monster. He killed people on a mass scale. The crimes of Latin American strongmen like Pinochet, for example, pale in comparison. He created and ruled over a system that destroyed the lives of countless Shia and Kurd Iraqis, and many Sunnis too. The US didn't have to force or cajole the shaky new Iraqi regime and its imperfect, nascent judicial system into trying Saddam. If anything, US influence was used to exercise a measure of constraint so that he was not tortured and then strung up in a public square for the cathartic edification of the Iraqi people.

The US will still have to deal with the pereception that this was an American-driven process culminating with a kangaroo court and execution; witness the responses on this page. It will be even worse in some quarters in the Middle-east, where it really matters. But as soon as Saddam was captured, he was a dead man, and not because of the US; it was because of the Iraqi people, and the demand from a strong majority of Iraqis from all backgrounds that some sort of justice--belated and imperfect as it may be--be meted out to their oppressor. In the end, we were just observers to this final, shabby, and inevitable act.