Like lots of other folks, I imagine, the girlfriend and I got sucked into the Saddam death watch Friday night. I've never seen Larry King so excited for an entire hour (and adamant that CNN would interrupt commercials when it happened), only to be forced to turn the main event over to someone else. I haven't sought out the apparently unedited video of Saddam's drop, as I've got no particular desire to see any human being die, even such a shitbag as Saddam.
It should go without saying that, if I were King for a Day, I would not have executed Saddam (or anyone else, for that matter). But the way this one was carried out - as if racing to beat a deadline, during a Muslim holiday, and apparently in violation of Iraqi law - was pretty slipshod regardless of how you feel about the ultimate penalty. If nothing else, doesn't true justice - the kind that history will note for future generations - require that Saddam hung around long enough to be tried, convicted, and sentenced for all of his crimes? The Shiite massacre for which he was executed, while heinous, was small potatoes compared to what he did to the Kurds and others. Those victims, and their families and loved ones, will never have the ability to confront Saddam and his cronies and demand account for what he did to them.
Oh well. Saddam's death does round out an interesting triptych of December dictator deaths, joining Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet (another US-backed shitbag) and Turkmenistani president/loon-in-chief Sarparmurat Niyazov as those the world was happy to be rid of at the end of 2006.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
On Saddam's Hanging
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1 comment:
I was really surprised that he was executed before going to trial for other heinous acts. It was kind of an empty victory, wasn't it? Not that the death of anybody could really be considered a "victory," but it just seemed kind of pointless.
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