Wow. I don’t know that I’m shocked*, but Saddam Hussein Is Sentenced to Death is still a headline that knocks me over.
*In the sense that this fact is a surprise.
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Okay, I guess as a pinko liberal, I should be against his death penalty, because after all, all liberals are against it.
But somehow, I can’t. This bastard deserves it. And I hope it will be a very, very painful death.
I wonder if Saddam and Satan will become lovers, like in “South Park” ;)
I’m not really sure what greater purpose his death serves – to me, better that he serve a long and degrading imprisonment with no contact with the outside world – including newspapers, books, his Koran with no human contact whatsoever.
My wish is that it provide closure to the families of his victims and not just set in place conditions that will result in of hundreds of more innocent deaths.
One larger purpose that his death might serve is making it easier to pull our troops out. What if he were to wangle his way out of jail and back into power? Napoleon managed it. I think that is a fear many have. Once he is dead, at least one reason for going into Iraq – ending his reign – can’t be undone.
His death will make the kurds and Shiite happy and piss the Sunni population of, but it seems eveyone in that country is mad at someone or some entity.
And so close to US election time as well. HHmmmmm
I can’t agree with Charles Brubaker.
I am against the death penalty. Period.
Check out http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
She’s an Iraqi blogger in Baghdad. Her take on it is interesting.
I suspect, that although Saddam was not a good man by any stretch of the imagination, a lot of the appalling things we’ve been told about him have been downright lies on the part of our government so that we’d be willing to go to war to take him out. There were documented lies told about the invasion of Kuwait — the “tossing babies out of incubators” story for one. So I don’t doubt there have been others.
Of course topping him will serve only to make him a martyr. Not a good idea in a part of the world that enjoys a nice cold dish of revenge for dinner.
Perfect timing for the US elections though… You gotta admire the Republican strategists, they have wonderfully twisted minds.
The only better news would be if we could find some way to keep Ramsey Clark from returning to the US.
Yeah, God forbid a lawyer seek a fair trial for his client. Makes him a goddamn traitor.
Yeah. It’s not enough for him to be convicted and sentenced to death: he should have been denied an adequate defense. Clearly, show trials are what “exporting democracy” is all about.
I’d be lying if I said I was going to shed any tears for Saddam Hussein, but I’m still opposed to the death penalty. His death won’t bring back his victims, and it won’t do anything for the dozens of Iraqis who are dying every day, as we speak.
Well, Saddam dead will frustrate those people who want him back in power …
some of which are even in Iraq.
So when will we be hanging Bush–for the same crimes, of course?
Mark
So American military is the moral equivalent of Islamist terrorists?
BTW, yes, even Saddam is entitled to a lawyer. But being a lawyer doesn’t excuse (to put it mildly)questionable behavior
Stop revealing future Democratic election-winning strategies! ;-)
Saddam’s right to a defense notwithstanding, what does Clark’s questionable behavior have to do with his right to return to the United States?
I am declaring a moratorium (and apologizing in advance for the pun) on jokes about Bush’s untimely demise. As you were. =)
evil fizz
RC has a problem with being an American. Let him work out his issues elsewheres.
Sure, he has a “right” to return to the US, but a gal can dream, can’t she?
Well, I’m glad you’re confident in your ability to tell the good Americans from the bad.
EF
Did I say RC was bad or that he just had issues? (You don’t think he has issues?)
I’m not saying he doesn’t have issues. Just that those issues aren’t grounds to bar him from the US, is all.
Darleen,
I’m not sure I’m understanding you. Are you saying Hussein was an Islamist terrorist? Hussein was a terribly violent and repressive dictator, but his Baath party was secular and opposed to and by Islamists.
twf
Just posing a related moral-equivalency question … if Bush=Saddam, then American GI’s = Islamist terrorists.
All war/warriors are equal. Right?
PS… if Saddam was such a “secularist” he wouldn’t have been paying bounties to families of Islamist suicide bombers for dead Jews.
Darleen, kiddo, the bomber bounties, such as they were, were in the cause of Pan-Arabism, which was a modernist and secularist movement to which Saddam subscribed. He could have given a good goddamn about their theology; he just wanted to be shown declaring solidarity with Arabs “fighting the good fight” as they saw it.
I’m not defending the action, it’s just that Islam wasn’t the point, with Saddam. He was an aggressive, even violent secularist, except when he needed to invoke God to get out of a jam, which wasn’t often–he mostly preferred guns for that.
And, regarding Clark’s “issues”–are his problems with “being an American” problems with your vision of what an American is, or do you have references for him hating America directly?
I can add a bit to little light’s comment. Hussein was a pariah amongst certain factions in the Arab world.
I can also not shake the feeling that he did not get a fair trial. It’s not him that such a thing is necessary, but for our principles, which appear to me to be so far gone that they’ve practically vanished.
ginmar Says:
Ya think? Gee, do you think that the trial was broadcast live because it enhanced his “fair and impartial” trial or because it was needed for the two minute hates? If the judges were trained by the best from the US what’s it say when Saddam gets kicked out of his own trial for being disruptive and the trial goes on without him?
And hey, good point on the elections.
I *am* having trouble working up any sympathy for him, so I’ll just say it would have been far better if they just took him back behind the barn for a double tap, or kicked a grenade into his spider hole when he tried to surrender, rather than call this charade, justice.
I’m also anti-death penalty. But besides that, Saddam is hardly the only war criminal. He was propped into power to begin with by the CIA, and now we’re supposed to think some kind of justice has been done because he got a death sentence two days before election day? Nahh, I’m not having it. There’s a referendum on my ballot on whether the troops should be brought home. I’m voting “yes”—and so are a hell of a lot of other people. When some of the staunchest supporters of the referendum to bring the troops home now are veterans’ organizations, that oughta be clue number one. Justice stopped being served when the CIA put him into power to begin with.
He’s a ritual sacrifice. and no, obviously he’s not exactly an innocent little lambie here; but this dog and pony show will serve no good purpose. he’s not getting death because he deserves it (though he probably does, more than a lot of people do, i expect); he’s getting death because it will appease those who want some blood, some tangible evidence that by golly, we DID get the bad guy and justice WILL be done.
whatever.
Speaking of the CIA, when will we see justice done about the damage they’ve done across the world for decades? How many lives have been wasted due to their corporate and political motivated activities?
I see Sadaam’s death penalty as the predictable outcome to what blatently has appeared all along as nothing more than a charade for propaganda purposes. It has disturbed me from the beginning of this whole charade in Iraq that we still have policy makers who see the world as their pawns to enable the amassing of personal wealth for the few well connected.
This entire exercise has done nothing that serves the interests of the common American in my view. I only grit my teeth and await, as I have since it all started, for its bitter end.
I don’t see how we can sentence Saddam Hussein to death without considering the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, which were caused by George Bush’s arrogance, mendacity, and religious fervor.
Yeah, talk about your October Suprise.
I’m with you there, Ginmar. It can’t have been a fair trial. And I don’t give a damn about what Saddam “deserved”–everyone gets a fair trial. I’ve no love lost for the man, but he could have been twice everything they say he is, he still gets a fair trial, and he still has rights.
It’s like you said; it’s not for his sake. It’s for ours and history’s and for the sake of principles.
I’m all for people being brought to justice, though I’m anti-death-penalty personally. I just want actual justice to be involved, and not just sideshows and vengeance.
I really want to object to comparing Saddam to Bush, but for each point of distinction I try and come up with, I get stuck. Everything is a difference of degree, but not kind. Destruction of the environment? Check. Approval of torture? Check. Suppression of political dissent? Check. Quasi-indiscriminate warfare? Check.
At the same time, the comparison makes me uncomfortable. Gassing the Kurds, systematic violence against minority civilian groups, etc. make enough of a distinction between Bush and Saddam that I’d prefer not to lump them in together.
Also, I think it’s possible to condemn one megalomaniac dictator at a time, and Saddam is the one who’s been convicted. I’m largely anti-death penalty, but it’s still a conflicted issue for me.
Death just seems to me to be the easy way out. The only way it could be a real punishment is if hell actually exists and if he’s actually going to go there.
I have to third little light’s and ginmar’s opinions on Hussein’s trial. The trial was nowhere near fair, and I don’t think it’s right to say offing him will make everything all better again. I find it ironic when people say that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, and then we have systems like the death penalty to help the victims’ families deal with grief, or institutions like The War Against Terrorism (TWAT) to counter the terrorist acts of 9/11. Measuring how temporary these scenarios are — that fluctuates, but death never seems to be an adequate solution, an effective deterrent, or a conclusory act.
(P.S. I love how bad guys get on first name bases with people when we know they’re really kinda bad.)
I just find Saddam easier to spell. =)
Yeah, considering that in Arab cultures, the names are: individual’s name, father’s name, grandfather’s name and sometimes the tribal name.
One of the worst things about Iraq was seeing the reality on the ground and then seeing how it was reported in the media. The Ukrainians withdraw under impossible odds, with dead and wounded, under direct orders from their president? Fox news says, “The Ukrainians abandoned the city without firing a shot.” Tell that to the families of the six men who died that day. A mass grave in the town where I was stationed? Exaggerated by a factor of ten, wihch made me think that it’s not bad enough that men, women, and children are murdered. No, it’s got to be…moremore, somehow. Four hundred people murdered in their own country, by their own country—that’s not bad enough? And then when you get into real complexities—the hubris that led us to invade a country without studying its society beforehand, putting in motion that savagery we see now, akin to what would happen if our own religious rightwing fundies got set loose—-then you’re just struck dumb.
For me, it comes down to seeing the women of Iraq when I first got there. It brought to mind the depressing reality of, say, Moscow, in the late nineties. When we first got there, (in Iraq) we noted women in veils, without veils, in jeans, skirts, burkas, going to school and to work. Now they’re all in veils. Someday soon they’ll all be in burkas. We did that, not Saddam. Living miserably is supposed to be better than dying abruptly for freedom. In Russia, they had freedom—but no electricity, food, or jobs. How do you call yourself decent when that’s the choice you offer? Or worse yet, how do you call yourself decent when that’s what you accomplish because you just didn’t give enough of a shit to study beforehand? Why is a choice between freedom and shit and dictatorship and safety considered a good thing? Do guys like Dick Cheney ever hav e to make that choice?
Yup. I had similar thoughts when I saw the headlines, too.
I also think about previous US administrations who were responsible for the country’s support of Saddam Hussein during the years preceding the first Gulf War. What about all the nastiness and death that Saddam was responsible for while he was under US support? Will the responsible parties stand trial? Will any of them be put to death? Not likely. What does that say about the US’s standards of fairness and justice? (For the record: I oppose the death penalty, unconditionally.)
Also, Ginmar, your last post was an eye-opener. Thank you for relating your first-hand experiences in Iraq. If this war was ever about helping the people of Iraq (which I seriously doubt), the actual outcome shows that many things have gotten worse, rather than better—particularly for women.
For me, it comes down to seeing the dead bodies that Muqtada al-Sadr left behind in the Shia court he set up in Najaf. The word of a disgruntled neighbor was enough to receive a sentence of death. One pregnant woman was shot three times in the street while her four-year-old son watched. Then his throat was cut. Why? Because the Mahdi Army leader felt she was an immoral woman.
Muqtada Sadr was the ne’er do well son of a moderate man I’ve always suspected he despised. Saddam killed the senior al-Sadr for his very moderation and intelligence, and left the seething mediocrity that is Muqtada alive. Muqtada has adopted the methods of Saddam to acquire power. At least under Saddam, he was contained. Now thanks to our kingmaking ambitions, he is free to kill and get revenge on, perhaps, many more moderate people who might counter him.
What really gets me are the way the mass graves of the country are pointed to again and again, much the way the dead of September 11th are exhumed again and again whenever the Republicans want to wave a bloody shirt. Why do dead Muslims not inspire this country to reach out to living ones? Why do dead Americans evidently require dead bodies, civilian and soldier both, in retribution? Isn’t the real retribution for murder to live life, live it well, and assist one’s enemies so generously that they cease their enmity and become allies instead?
well, look: does anyone think that Eichmann didn’t get a fair trial? Did Saddam get as much as he did? If not, well?
I heard a UK-based Iraqi on the radio saying that “we shouldn’t hang him because then we’re no better than him”. I agree with that, and I agree with ginmar. Capital punishment isn’t so much bad because of what it does to the criminal as because of what it does to the executioner.
I predict that his execution will prove to be every bit as productive and useful as every other application of the death penalty has ever been.
[/snark]
Oh, hell, getting rid of him has sure made Iraqis’ lives better! Now they can get accidentally killed–most of the time—-in a country where they can vote if they can just survive between elections.
I’m still against the death penalty, no matter who it’s for. I do believe he should pay, and suffer, but the death penalty – by hanging? I cringe. I cannot celebrate it.
No civilized state should put people to death. One could even say no civilized state puts people to death, that that’s part of what it means to be civilized. It’s barbaric and atavistic, plain and simple, I don’t care how patently guilty the person is (and almost all the other arguments against it are just restatements of “the person might not be guilty”).
In this specific case, there are additional concerns of retaliation and martyrization. I don’t think the first is a sufficient reason not to execute Saddam Hussein, but the second is, or very nearly — it means the “penalty” is neither punishment nor deterrent.