Letters to the Editor
-
Timing of the execution
One other thing I neglected to mention in my previous post but now occurs to me after seeing others here like Ebonius attempt to explain the "rushed" timing of the execution.
Maybe it wasn't just dirt on the poison gas attacks, but also the fact that every additional day Saddam was in the courtroom was another day for him to grandstand in front of the cameras and incite more unrest and violence throughout the country.
I'm imagining some think tank consultant in Washington shuffling around numbers (or the idea of numbers, anyway) and thinking to him/herself, "well, if we off Saddam, there's going to be more violence and more deaths, but these are deaths that are going to happen anyway, just in slow motion every day as people watch Saddam preen around on Al-Iraqiya TV. So let's just get this over with now." (...at which point my imagined think tank consultant dissolves into a cloud of logical fallacies)
=Adam in Philly
-
Twisted Logic
How can "Professor" Cole possibly twist the deserved death of blood soaked dictator into "revenge"? I just love the logic that absolves a man of his personal responsibility for the death of so many of his countrymen, in much the same way most other commentators try to blame all of his crimes on the US. Sorry, this is the Timothy McVee clarity moment - when someone so guilty of heinous crimes gets the justice he so richly deserves, and there is really no justification for denying it.
Gassing at Halajaba? Suppression of the Shia in southern Iraq after the first Gulf War? Destruction of the southern marshlands in Iraq? The famous meeting of the Ba'ath party where his enemies names were called and they were led out to be shot? Does anyone seriously believe that Saddam was manipulated or directed to do these things?
But the part of the article that I admire the most are the assertions: "since the U.S. invasion he has gradually emerged as a symbol of the humiliation that the once-dominant Sunni minority has suffered under a new government dominated by Shiites and Kurds." Humiliation? Would that be perhaps as in "loss of running the country and control of all the good jobs and oil revenues? (even though we are only 18% of the population).
Of course, we also have the obligatory slap at the Shia - "Hanging Saddam on Saturday was perceived by Sunni Arabs as the act of a Shiite government that had accepted the Shiite ritual calendar" Or perhaps alternately as just executing Saddam before the end of the (western) year ends?
When I read this and most other articles with statement like "Iraqis began to yearn for the oppressive security of the Saddam period." I am stuck by the moral bankruptcy in the intellectual community - that suggests that life in a dictatorship is now the preferable alternative to the potential for a free society. The "blood feuds" that you describe tearing Iraq apart are a direct consequence of allowing the "stability" to fester so long in this region as one group runs rampant over the other. If the invasion of Iraq has shown anything - it is that the tensions and pressures built up over decades cannot be easily contained - and they do not get better on their own.
But revenge? No, justice was served today - and Saddam's death was one in Iraq that was richly deserved.
-
Tribunal looks cheap questionable right up to the end
Regarding the executiuon footage now on the web as illustration of the final step of the tribunal:
I could care less that Saddam goes bye-bye. (couldn't happen to a more deserving fellow) but the typical ridiculous Iraq chaos that swarms around him in that dank cellar of a room is FREAKY. It looks like a mafia hit or something, not anything remotely state-sactioned. Dudes in cheap leather coats and ill-fitting trousers running around half-giddy trying to kill saddam as fast as possible.
It's just an observation, but as a U.S. citizen in a society where ceremony even at executions is the standard operating procedure, when it's absent at these kinds of dire moments it's kind of, well, I don't know... earnestly ghoulish? Don't you think?
Is Iraq such a mess that they couldn't even get uniformed guards to at least be present in the room?
I'm probably making too much of it, but when the "good guys" look identical to the "bad guys" that's really bad PR. I mean, jeeze, Saddam looks like the only one there with any dignity. How messed up is that?
-
the real problem
I have no problem at all seeing Saddam Hussein swing for his crimes. I don't even have a problem with the idea that "we" did it, albeit via the catspaw of an allegedly Iraqi court. After all, he was our creation from the get-go, and it's only right that we bear the reponsibility of dealing with him. (We should also be paying at least a generation's worth of reparations to the Iraqis -- and that doesn't mean letting Halliburton et al profiteer off the reconstruction costs, either. It means paying Iraqi firms and staff, so they can try to reverse their current brain-drain, and have at least a chance at rebuilding a functional society. But that's a rant for another day.)
What I do have a very big problem with is the rush to judgement -- and the highly selective prosecution. But I'll leave it to Jonathan Scwartz, who is much more eloquent than I could ever be, in his posting at Tom Tomorrow's blog, "This Modern World:"
"I realize I shouldn’t be shocked by anything anymore…but I am shocked and frightened by the way this has happened. I honestly never believed the Bush administration could get away with preventing Saddam from speaking about his longtime collaboration with the U.S., which started in the late fifties. (Of course, Saddam may have had his own reasons for not, uh, emphasizing this.) And I really didn’t think they could off him with no trial for the large-scale crimes we assisted with. But apparently they can. It’s just a few steps short of an intra-mob hit.
This is a scary, scary world."
(Original posting, complete w/amusing photo, here:
http://www.thismodernworld.com/)
And it's not one bit less scary with just one of the monsters put down. There's plenty more in that closet, including the others that we've created -- and are creating daily.
What's even worse is that we're not fooling anyone (the whole world knows he was our tool) except the American public, of whom I'd bet that not even 1 in 10 knows that we supported Hussein for decades, and supplied those horrible, awful WMDs that he did use on his own people -- before they became the excuse for this catastrophic war.