Saddam should not have been hanged. He should not have been, because judicial execution is not a morally defensible practice. Apart from other reasons, it brutalizes the community that inflicts it.
And Saddam should not have been hanged now, before having to come before a court to answer for his greatest crimes.
It would be nice, though, if those who wrote as if his execution was on all fours with his crimes displayed a better sense of proportion.
One:
Ending his life with a variant of the inhuman punishment he once meted out so lavishly was just another kick against human rights.Two:
Mainstream middle-class sentiment in Europe now regards the death penalty as being as ethically tainted as the crimes that produced that sentence.Here, for contrast, is Jason Burke:
In 2003, back in Sulaymaniyah, I sat down in a prison cell with a captured Baath party torturer. 'How old was the youngest person you ever tortured?' I asked him. 'Oh, about two or three,' he said unapologetically. 'We didn't torture the kids themselves obviously, but holding a toddler over a boiling saucepan is a very good way of getting their parents to talk.' Why do I return to all this? Because I can't help but be happy that Saddam has been executed.
.....
The fact that Saddam is now dead, whatever the manner of his passing, is a rare bit of positive news. Given the nightmare that is Iraq today, I'll save my sympathy for those who suffered under his bloody reign and those who still suffer today.
