The Death Of Saddam

Proving once again the unprovable adage that things happen in threes, former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has joined former US President Gerald Ford and former Soul Godfather James Brown in eternal repose this week.

The difference is that Saddam was killed by human hands, fulfilling the execution of a sentence handed down by what history could easily refer to as a kangaroo court some years from now. It will depend on who's writing that history.

Saddam was a brutal dictator who perpetuated tyrannic minority rule, abusing his countrymen to further his personal agenda. A sociopath who started torturing animals as a child, he fulfilled every stereotype of a bloated medieval monarch: raping the Iraqi treasury for his own luxury, handing out death sentences to reduce political opposition, sanctioning torture for fun and profit.

In short, the guy was a real asshole.

The question in my mind really isn't "does he deserve to die", because people deserve to forfeit their lives for a lot less than that. But I actually disagree with Saddam's death sentence on several fronts:

I'm not a big fan of the death penalty in general, for almost all of the standard anti-death penalty reasons. I say "almost" because there's so little doubt of the man's complicity in so much vile behavior that the "possibility of innocence" argument holds no sway here. But it is the mark of a larger, more enlightened, and nobler society to rise above the "eye for an eye" sentencing mentality, which could never be carried out here since Saddam had fewer than several dozen thousand eyes. Yes, it's a more viscerally satisfying solution to many, and certainly cheaper, but less civilized, as brutal as the crimes that were committed, and in the end, it's not going to deter the next schmuck dictator from anything.

There's no better way than to rally the former Ba'athists and minority Sunnis than to martyrize the guy who gave his life thumbing his nose at the government now occupying their country. As we've been finding out over the last 3+ years, our own leaders viewed the Iraqi attitude toward Saddam through the most naive and sycophantic lenses available. Like it or not, the dude had some sort of a fan club, who now have guns, water bottles filled with C4 and twelve penny nails, and a real grudge against the dudes in the sand-colored uniforms. Killing Saddam is just one more reason for Akbar down the street in old Tikrit to bitch about American propagandizing and finally pick up a rocket launcher aimed at your neighbor's nephew. Or your own nephew. Or daughter. Or husband. You get it.

Old Saddam was hardly unique in the universe of dictators. He was only one of a 40 or 50 card set. And not even on the 2002 All-Star Dictator team when we took him down. Compare him to luminaries like the recently deceased King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Borat's Kazakh pal Nursultan Nazarbeyev, Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il, and Zimbabwe shortstop Robert Mugabe. Do we need to take those guys out, too? Why not? Every word said about Saddam Hussein is true about at least two dozen other world leaders. When does it end? Or is it really--gasp--just political cover to explain away the covert motivations of a simplistic-minded group of Americans who by accident of birth and cynical manipulation of the 2000 elections, blundered their way into power? We can't arrest and kill them all. Nor should we.

Someone's going to come back and say that this is the Iraqi government and Iraqi people doing this--that he was convicted in an Iraqi, not American, court, and executed by Iraqi, not American, hands. That, friend, is drinking the Kool-Aid with a big ol' bendy straw. One or two words whispered in Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki's ear by his American handlers determined Hussein's fate. It's not for the Iraqi people's benefit, surely; Saddam's sentencing pales in comparison to the issues faced by the Iraqi government and people today, rent by civil war, trying to pull together security, energy, and transportation infrastructures with hose clamps and duct tape, and getting a meal and drink of clean water. Not killing Saddam doesn't cause a big problem in day-to-day Iraq, so this becomes a symbolic gesture. And right now, the United States of America is running the Iraqi Department of Symbolism.

One final point: Saddam wanted to die. He craved martyrdom for himself. In effect, a better punishment would have been to let him rot for his remaining 12 or 15 years of life in an unheated, uncooled 8'x8' cell in an Iraqi prison without access to the media or his followers. Defeated, broken, and irrelevant, discarded in favor of the true future of Iraq. That's how he should have ended, not at the end of a rope.

Look: at the time of the invasion--and even today's New York Post article about Saddam's execution admits this--Iraq posed no serious threat to American security. No, the excuses were just that, and now this execution is made of as much hot air and bull feces as was the pretense handed to the American public in Q1 2003. He was a monster and bastard, no doubt; but there were more reasons to leave him alive and suffering than to turn him into more fuel for the fire of violence burning in the Middle East.