By Claudia Rosett, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Friday, January 5, 2007
In the short time since Saddam Hussein went to the gallows, we have heard almost every variation on the theme that his death was all wrong. He was killed too soon, in the wrong way, by the wrong people, on the wrong day, following a flawed trial. In the opinion of some, he shouldn't have been executed at all.
What's really wrong here is the transmogrification of Hussein into a sort of Everyman, in whose fate we are all invited to read some portion of our own humanity - and whose execution becomes a prism through which to focus on our private preoccupations with the universe. This is Oprah for tyrants. In a dangerous world, it does us no service.
It was Hussein himself who made this execution necessary. He was a totalitarian killer, a man who murdered his way to power and kept it at grotesque cost by working the levers of terror, torture and war. Along with the basic demands of justice, there was also the matter of security. The only sure protection against a Hussein comeback was to kill him.
Hussein enjoyed a degree of due process unknown under his own regime and stunningly novel for most of the Middle East. His execution sent the vital message that we are serious about vanquishing terror-wielding fascists who, like Hussein, threaten the basic fabric of any civilized world order.
Unfortunately, the debate now going on suggests we may not so readily be serious again. The likes of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Syria's Bashar Assad, and Osama bin Laden must be tuning in right now with fascination. What we might regard as noble and sensitive discussion, they will read, correctly, as weakness - a sign that the free world has no stomach for this fight.
Part of the problem may be the nature of instant news, which brings great benefits, but also means the focus shifts constantly, at the expense of the big picture, to the latest detail. Hussein's atrocities have been recounted before, so in most accounts they take a backseat to what the hangmen wore, how the cell-phone video got out, and which opponents of the death penalty have latched onto this monster as their poster-child of the season.
Emblematic of all this was a story that ran earlier this week in Australia's Herald Sun newspaper. Headlined, "Saddam Hussein's Gentle Side," it cited the recollections of an American military minder who shepherded Hussein through part of his imprisonment. This fellow recounted how Hussein, in his humble detention cell, liked to reminisce about happier days telling bedtime stories to his children, and how Hussein used his "short visits outside" to feed bread crusts to birds and water "a dusty plot of weeds."
These details become less poignant if you consider that whatever Hussein's kindness to birds, he gassed to death thousands of Kurds. Whatever his affection for weeds, he defused dissent among Iraq's Marsh Arabs by turning their home turf into a wasteland. And however tenderly Hussein read bedtime stories to his children, he trained his two sons to become sadistic killers. And when his two little girls grew up and married a pair of brothers who in the mid-1990s tried to defect, he had those husbands murdered.
But instead of stories dwelling on such absolutely germane matters, we are treated right now to a steady diet of outrage that Hussein - a celebrity, no less - was not handled with the etiquette due, say, a Belgian bank robber. At the United Nations, where there has still been no reckoning for any U.N. officials or for most of the member states that helped shore up Hussein's murderous regime by colluding in his oil-for-food graft bonanza, the focus has been mainly on a lofty disdain for all capital punishment. Never mind the wars launched, suicide bombers paid, and mass graves filled by the condemned. The big concern of U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour, as Hussein went to the gallows, was that he be offered every possible chance of amnesty.
We are told that the Palestinians are angry and Iraq's Sunnis are upset. Of course they are (or at least some of them). Hussein was their patron; even in the world's worst totalitarian regimes, there are a few who benefit - at the awful expense of many. What actually needs questioning is why we should pander to those who wish to pose for the cameras around his grave - indifferent in their self-interest to the lives he took, and the agonies he inflicted on millions.
The strange and deadly inversion here is that we are fighting enemies - and Hussein was one of the worst - who count it an honor and a right to murder the innocent. Meanwhile, in our public debate we treat it as shameful to execute the guiltiest of the guilty. If this is the way of our future, better hope we never catch bin Laden.
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