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If he wasn't being trumped up as a martyr, then why is the White House distancing itself from this whole mess?:
| quote: | U.S. Wants To Focus On Saddam, Not Hanging
White House Talks Up 'Justice' Of Sentence, Not Execution Missteps
(CBS/AP) The U.S. government worked Wednesday to distance itself from the ugly details of Saddam Hussein's execution and tried to focus on the symbolism of the former dictator's death sentence.
"There seems to be a lot of concern about the last two minutes of Saddam Hussein's life and less about the first 69 (years), in which he murdered hundreds of thousands of people," White House press secretary Tony Snow said. "That's why he was executed."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007...tr=HOME_2327520 |
Quite true Spinmeister Tony. Let's not focus on handing Saddam over to lynch mobs in masks, chanting al-Sadr's name in mocking fashion, and unfortunately seeing the most poised person in the whole affair turned out to be Saddam himself. Disgusting, to say the least. AJ at AmericaBlog said it best:
| quote: | The Bush administration turned over Saddam to the Iraqi government prematurely . . . to a band of thugs-as-executioners . . . who wore not uniforms but leather jackets and ski masks . . . who shouted Shia chants, including invocations of Moqtada al-Sadr . . . all of which was illicitly videotaped and then emailed around Iraq and throughout the world . . . on, no less, one of the holiest days of the Sunni religious calendar.
Virtually everything that could have been screwed up, was. And now, against virtually all odds, Saddam managed to look good by dying and the Iraqi and U.S. governments are scrambling to do damage control in the face of massive Sunni demonstrations, international condemnation, and the general disgust of pretty much everyone who knows anything about Iraq.
http://americablog.blogspot.com/200...on-matters.html |
And this story says much from a writer who's fervently supported the Iraqi invasion by Bush from the getgo:
| quote: | Keeping faith in a bloody tradition
Click here to find out more!
By Christopher Hitchens
January 3, 2007
I was sitting with President Jalal Talabani of Iraq last month when Iraqi television was broadcasting the trial of Saddam Hussein. The hearings had shifted into their second phase, concerning the mass murder of Iraq's Kurdish minority in the 1980s, and video footage of gassing and shooting had been played in court, to ram home the anguished statements of numberless survivors.
There was something both satisfying and unsettling about the juxtaposition. It is fitting that Iraq's first elected president is a Kurd, but I couldn't help noticing that he didn't much want to be drawn out on the subject. The party that he leads - the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan - is an affiliate of the Socialist International, which opposes the death penalty. In the grimmest days of the "Anfal" - Mr. Hussein's Quran-inspired name for the genocide - one of the Kurds' best friends was Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the late president of France, whose most lasting monument will be his abolition of the guillotine. It was she who had proposed to the Iraqi opposition that it should become the first Middle Eastern government to do away with capital punishment.
This did not happen, of course. Instead, the death penalty remains on the books in Iraq, and the execution of Mr. Hussein took place at dawn Saturday. (It is probably not a coincidence that the verdict of the Iraqi appeals court against Mr. Hussein specifically stated that nobody - including the president of the country - had the right to commute the sentence of death.)
It's too bad. There are a number of things that should cause qualms about the trial and the sentence of Mr. Hussein. For instance, both were caught up in the sectarianism that now dominates everything in Iraq. To some, it is enough that Mr. Hussein was convicted of massacring the inhabitants of a Shiite village, Dujail, in 1982, and his hanging need not have anything specifically to do with his much larger and even crueler crimes against Kurdistan, Kuwait, Iran and the Iraqi people more generally.
Further, it's unclear what benefits his execution brings. I have heard of Shiite politicians who say that Mr. Hussein's death will help repress the Sunni insurgency by depriving it of a figurehead and rallying point and by destroying the chance of a Baathist restoration.
This seems to me the most extreme foolishness and stupidity. There was no chance in any case of Mr. Hussein returning to power, and it seems just as likely, if not more so, that his execution will inflame violence rather than calm it. (And on the subject of "execution," many of these same Shiite leaders are linked to death squads that murder their fellow Iraqis every day and night.)
Almost every transfer of power in Baghdad for the last half-century has been accompanied by the killing of the previous incumbents. British-backed Prime Minister Nuri Said was dragged through the streets and torn to shreds in 1958; his remains were then dug up and run over by cars. I remember, as a boy, seeing one of his replacements, the pro-communist Abdul Karim Qassim, on television, his head lolling after the attentions of a Baathist firing squad.
The most lurid of all these moments, in this most bitter and harsh society, came with the sadistic video that Mr. Hussein himself made of the purge of his party after his seizure of power. Nobody who has seen that footage - of terrified men dragged by goons from the room while the survivors weep with fear and relief and Mr. Hussein indulges in a luxurious cigar - is likely to forget it. And this atrocity was only the curtain-raiser to further orgies of mass murder and torture of which we have unimpeachable evidence from the regime's own archives.
"After such knowledge," as T. S. Eliot asked in Gerontion, "what forgiveness?"
Jonathan Randal, a former Washington Post correspondent, repeated this question in the title of one of the best books on the subject of the Kurds. For many Iraqis, nothing could possibly begin to cancel the recent past except an act of exemplary vengeance. And - to argue against myself further - for many other Iraqis, there could be no security or peace of mind while Mr. Hussein continued to breathe.
It was rather the same with Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, where citizens could not get the oppressor out of their minds and where a new start was unthinkable to many until he was certified as dead.
This, in essence, also was the psychological underlay of the Nuremberg war crimes trials: The beasts had to die, and to be seen to have died. One could not bear to live on the same planet as them, and the memory of their victims would be profaned if they were long outlived by their murderers.
It is for this combination of fear, insecurity and agony that some favored the execution of Mr. Hussein in public, or at least on television. Without this assurance (or perhaps even with it) many citizens would have difficulty believing that the tyrant was gone. This moves us almost into the realm of exorcism - as if there were not enough "faith-based" horror in Iraq as things stand.
But Iraq is not going to be free of beasts just because Mr. Hussein has gone through the trapdoor. And some of the beasts who still roam the country will be the ones applauding the loudest.
Commenting on the killing of Nuri Said in 1958, that great student of Mesopotamia, Freya Stark, reflected on "the savagery for which Iraq in her long history has ever been notorious ... the pendulum swing of murder, ancient and long familiar, which has made the pattern from the day when the first Ali was stabbed in Kufa, and probably long before. Even the massacre of the Prophet's family is no novelty on that soil."
It would have been no offense to justice if Mr. Hussein had been sentenced to spend the rest of his days in prison without the possibility of parole, but it would represent a break with that sanguinary tradition.
And it might be no bad thing if Americans, especially those who supported the breaking of his death grip on Iraqi society, found ways of conveying their distaste for this rushed and vindictive - and partial - version of a process of reckoning that ought to have been sober, meticulous and untainted.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and the author of "A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq." This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
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I don't agree with Hitchens very often when it comes to Iraq and foreign policies, but I think he has some interesting points here. Hanging Saddam does not help our case, nor will it help quell the violence in Iraq in any manner.
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Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...
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