Word comes down from the Internet that Sadaam Hussein will be hanged, officially for his role in the Dujail mess a quarter-century ago but partly for just being an evil jerk. A few thoughts come to mind.
Hey, it’s not my country’s legal system, but there’s a reason we mostly stopped hanging people in this country. It’s as painful and terrorizing as it is low-tech, for the people at both ends of that rope. Of course, there are many more reasons other kinds of executions should stop, too. At what point will this country re-examine the death penalty to the point of repeal? If one day repealed, will we consider it an actionable offense to violate our value of life, perhaps invading countries with the unenlightened policies of execution?
From a capital punishment-as-deterrent perspective, who, exactly, is the group being deterred? Despotic dictators? Is the message, “Don’t kill the males of a small town as retaliation for an assassination attempt that was a response to years of brutality and the opening of a war with a neighboring country?” It certainly isn’t as simple as, “Don’t kill” … or the court would have to follow Hussein to the gallows. Convenient that Iraq’s new government made sure they had a death penalty option on the books before the sentencing (though only after the dictator was captured).
If this same court had George Bush on the stands, would the result be the same? The atrocities at Dujail are well-documented by survivors. They involve home invasion, brutality, torture, imprisonment, denial of rights, four years in Abu-Ghraib prison, the death of many male Iraqis, orders given from afar … Let’s just go out on a limb and argue that Dujail is 100x more brutal-tortured-deadly than the Iraqi War. Would the 45,000 or so civilian dead merit 1/100th of a hanging by the same judges and jury?
Dujail was just one of a dozen or so cases against Hussein. It has been described as little more than a footnote — the proverbial “comma” — in the long history of Hussein offenses, until it was scheduled to lead the dirty laundry list for the deposed dictator’s trial. Will they go ahead and also try him for the other things, including using chemical weapons against the Kurds and invading Kuwait, just so those victims can have equal time in catharsis? Once dead by hanging the first time for Dujail, will they keep dropping Sadaam’s limp corpse from a platform for the other 13 corporal cases not yet tried?
I’ll be so glad when Sadaam Hussein is dead. Death and destruction will be a thing of the past, and peace will reign supreme. Right? …
