I’m late in commenting, but wanted to note I found it interesting that Saddam Hussein should be put to death at the very moment when the state of New Jersey began seriously to consider abolishing the death penalty as contrary to “evolving standards of decency.” I’ve long based my opposition to capital punishment on the argument that no government in the world has the moral standing to take the lives of its citizens. That’s certainly true of the current Iraqi government, although I’m the first to admit that Saddam was not just any citizen. David Hirst’s unsparing obituary should resonate through the ages.
So should Christopher Hitchens’s parsing of the political implications, which are clear enough: the Maliki government threw Saddam to the absolute worst of the Shia fundamentalist gangsters and torturers — the very people who ran the foul prison that the British military attacked in Basra around Christmas time. Go figure that out — the U.S. and UK are trying to shore up a Shia-dominated regime that they’re simultaneously doing battle with in the south of the country. It makes about as much sense as anything does in this war.
By the way, the conditions inside this prison were as follows: “… more than 100 men were crowded into a single 9-meter by 12-meter cell, or 30 feet by 40 feet, with two open toilets, two sinks and just a few blankets spread over the concrete floor. A significant number showed signs of torture. Some had crushed hands and feet … while others had cigarette and electrical burns and a significant number had gunshot wounds to their legs and knees.” Alas, the Rumsfeld Pentagon and the Cheny-Bush White House, having approved torture in their own facilities, have no moral leverage whatsoever to wield against the Shia. They’ve created the climate in which the Shia hardliners flourish. The Saddam hanging is merely another vivid illustration of this.
As Hitchens also notes, now there will never be a full accounting of the Kurdish genocide in the late 1980s, and that’s just fine with the Bushies, some of whom had a direct hand in aiding Saddam during that very period. Hitchens:
Every Kurd I know was eager to see this episode [the Anfal genocide] properly aired in court and placed on the record for all time, with its chief perpetrator on hand to be confronted with his deeds. Instead, the said chief perpetrator was snatched from the dock—in the very middle of his trial—and thrown as a morsel to one of the militias. This sort of improvised “offing” is not even a parody of the serious tribunal that history demands.
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