Now I must admit this came as a surprise to me. Christopher Hitchens: liberal Kurdophile, Iraq war booster and neocon horse whisperer, inveighs against the lynching of Saddam ... an embarrassing event in which the U.S. played the part of the Southern sheriff handing the negro inmate over to the white mob. A clip:
The disgusting video of Saddam Hussein's last moments on the planet is more than a reminder of the inescapable barbarity of capital punishment and of the intelligible and conventional reasons why it should always be opposed. The zoolike scenes in that dank, filthy shed (it seems that those attending were not even asked to turn off their cell phones or forbidden to use them to record souvenir film) were more like a lynching than an execution. At one point, one of the attending magistrates can be heard appealing for decency and calm, but otherwise the fact must be faced: In spite of his mad invective against "the Persians" and other traitors, the only character with a rag of dignity in the whole scene is the father of all hangmen, Saddam Hussein himself.
ow could it have come to this? Did U.S. officials know that the designated "executioners" would be the unwashed goons of Muqtada Sadr's "Mahdi Army"—the same sort of thugs who killed Abdul Majid al-Khoei in Najaf just after the liberation and who indulge in extra-judicial murder of Iraqis every night and day? Did our envoys and representatives ask for any sort of assurances before turning over a prisoner who was being held under the Geneva Conventions? According to the New York Times, there do seem to have been a few insipid misgivings about the timing and the haste, but these appear to have been dissolved soon enough and replaced by a fatalistic passivity that amounts, in theory and practice, to acquiescence in a crude Shiite coup d'état. Thus, far from bringing anything like "closure," the hanging ensures that the poison of Saddamism will stay in the Iraqi bloodstream, mingling with other related infections such as confessional fanaticism and the sort of video sadism that has until now been the prerogative of al-Qaida's dehumanized ghouls. We have helped to officiate at a human sacrifice. For shame. ...
Indeed. Hitchens makes the point that I've been making -- that to yank Saddam Hussein out of the Anfal trial in order to serve him up to the Shiite militias is beyond repugnant, and beyond stupid. It's a slap in the face to the Kurds (a key point for Hitchens,) who were the victims of the Anfal campaign, to the tune of some 180,000 people, and not only did it deny justice to them in the form of a trial and full airing of grievances, it denied the world the opportunity to put Saddam in some form of perspective, not to mention the fact that it created a rallying point for militant Sunnis everywhere: Saddam himself. Now, the brutality remains starkly on our end, as we sat, "shamefaced and silent" in Hitchens words, while a savage mob of Sadrists took pistol shots at a dead man they didn't have the guts to overthrow when he had actual power. How very brave of them. Read the entire column. For once, given who wrote it, it's worth every word.
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"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
