There’s something unseemly about the glee with which some of The Washington Post is greeting the news that Saddam Hussein will be put to death.
Not that I have any tears to shed for the former dictator — he was, after all, a sadistic and brutal tyrant. But the manner in which the trial occurred and the willingness to continue with what is a barbaric practice — capital punishment — leaves me wondering about the future of this new Iraq the president keeps talking about.
The Post, which used its editorial board to help the president beat the drum for war and has been in defense mode ever since, offers one of the strangest endorsements of the expected hanging imaginable, a convoluted attempt to mesh the paper’s opposition to the death penalty with its desire to see Hussein brought to imperfect justice. Some snippets:
For those who oppose the death penalty, as we do, any execution is regrettable — and this one, should it come to pass, will follow highly imperfect judicial proceedings and may in the short term inflame sectarian divisions. But it’s hard to imagine the death penalty existing anywhere for any crime and not for Saddam Hussein — a man who, with the possible exception of Kim Jong Il, has more blood on his hands than anyone else alive. Should the world see his end in the coming days, the justice will be imperfect. But it will still be justice.
Regrettable? Fender benders and bounced checks are regrettable. The end of a life, no matter how despicable that life may have been, is certainly something else.
As for justice, the editorial admits that there were procedural flaws and political interference, significant problems that should not swept under the rug — not because Hussein may have been innocent of the crimes of which he’s been accused, but because allowing them to stand now taints the process in its infancy, leaving future trials at risk. The Post argument — that any justice in contemporary Iraq is likely to be flawed so flawed justice for Saddam is alright — is ethical relativism of the worst kind:
(T)here is something unreal about the cries of foul from human rights groups demanding perfect procedural justice from a country struggling with civil war, daily bombings and death-squad killings. The reality is that by the trial’s end, there was no significant factual dispute between prosecution and defense: Saddam Hussein acknowledged on national television that he had signed the death warrants after only the most cursory look at the evidence against his victims. That, he testified proudly, “is the right of the head of state.” Exactly what would a perfect trial be capable of discovering?
It’s the kind of argument that the Post has generally been critical of when made by death penalty advocates in the United States.
The New York Times, in its editorial today, takes the opposite view — that the trial of Saddam Hussein was a lost opportunity:
What really mattered was whether an Iraq freed from his death grip could hold him accountable in a way that nurtured hope for a better future. A carefully conducted, scrupulously fair trial could have helped undo some of the damage inflicted by his rule. It could have set a precedent for the rule of law in a country scarred by decades of arbitrary vindictiveness. It could have fostered a new national unity in an Iraq long manipulated through its religious and ethnic divisions.
It could have, but it didn’t. After a flawed, politicized and divisive trial, Mr. Hussein was handed his sentence: death by hanging. This week, in a cursory 15-minute proceeding, an appeals court upheld that sentence and ordered that it be carried out posthaste. Most Iraqis are now so preoccupied with shielding their families from looming civil war that they seem to have little emotion left to spend on Mr. Hussein or, more important, on their own fading dreams of a new and better Iraq.
What might have been a watershed now seems another lost opportunity. After nearly four years of war and thousands of American and Iraqi deaths, it is ever harder to be sure whether anything fundamental has changed for the better in Iraq.
The Los Angeles Times is more pragmatic, but just as critical of the rush to the gallows:
The most practical argument for sparing Hussein’s life is rooted not in procedural scruples or a rejection of the death penalty but in political strategy. Ideally, Hussein would have been convicted against the backdrop of an Iraqi government regarded as legitimate by all segments of society, including Sunnis who prospered under the despot’s rule. The current Shiite-led government in Baghdad falls sadly short of that description.
Assuming that Iraq’s president or vice president could commute Hussein’s sentence — and the appeals court insists that its ruling can’t be altered — the best argument for mercy is that it might appease Sunnis who regard Prime Minister Nouri Maliki as partial to his fellow Shiites. At the same time, sparing Hussein could further destabilize Iraq by outraging both Shiites and Kurds. Tens of thousands of the latter group died in a military campaign that forms the basis of a separate genocide charge against Hussein.
As with so much about Iraq, there is no simple answer to the question of whether the nation would be better off if the condemned keeps his date with the hangman. Hussein claims that he is prepared to join the ranks of “the true men and martyrs.” Iraq’s leaders need to ask themselves if that “martyrdom” will come, and if so whether it will be at too high a price.
As both Times point out, the arguments are not so much about Saddam Hussein, but about the future of Iraq, its civil society and its justice system.
Again, I shed no tears over Saddam Hussein and will lose no sleep should his life end. But sending him to death — especially after a trial that most view as flawed at best — is a failure that will reverberate for years to come.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 