Hank Kalet

John Nichols puts the hanging of Saddam Hussein in context, as does Robert Fisk in The Independent. (Here is what I wrote yesterday.)

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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

File this — the mayor’s promise, basically, that the Route 522 extension will be done this year — as too long in the making.

The highway, which has been held up for a variety of reasons, is on the cusp of completion and should make a difference on Ridge Road through Dayton and could take traffic off other east-west links.

So, let’s hope the DEP can get out of the way and let this thing get done.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

The South Brunswick Post has been dragged into the Sri Lankan civil war. Not that we want to be in the middle of this, but a couple of stories we’ve written in the past few weeks about an event at Crossroads North Middle School — an outside event not affiliated with the school district — that featured a speaker who has served as a legal adviser to a group designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization.

We were not at the event — sponsored by a group called the South Asian Community Association — and did not find out about it until about two weeks after it occurred when we received an e-mail about it.

The initial story was pretty straightforward, outlining what we knew of the event — that it was a celebration called Heroes Day and that the main speaker was Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran, who was identified on a number of reputable web sites as a legal adviser to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a group designated by the U.S. Department of State as a terrorist organization.

We decided to do a follow on the story, hoping to give the South Asian Community Association a chance to explain what it is and what its goals are. The group, however, seemed less interested in saying what the did than in answering the terrorist charge and pushing its agenda on the Sri Lankan civil war — which is rather telling I think. The group’s spokesman offered some numbers that are difficult to verify, given that there are no reliable sources on the subject. That led to a slew of responses on the Web site, a call from the Sri Lankan embassy in Washington and this Web posting.

The British and American governments have condemned the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the so-called military wing of the Tamil independence movement, for their tactics, designating them as terrorists. The Tamil Rehabilitation Organization has not been designated, but appears to be a controversial group — Sinhalese Sri Lankans view it as an LTTE lite, if I read the Web posts correctly, while ethnic Tamils see it as a charitable group.

Everyone has an ox to gore in this, so to speak, as the history of the peace talks would seem to indicate, making all claims somewhat suspect.

The growth of a more assertive Sinhala nationalism after independence fanned the flames of ethnic division until civil war erupted in the 1980s between Tamils pressing for self-rule and the government.

Most of the fighting took place in the north. But the conflict also penetrated the heart of Sri Lankan society with Tamil Tiger rebels carrying out devastating suicide bombings in Colombo in the 1990s.

The violence killed more than 60,000 people, damaged the economy and harmed tourism in one of South Asia’s potentially prosperous societies.

A ceasefire and a political agreement reached between the government and rebels in late 2002 raised hopes for a lasting settlement. But Norwegian-brokered peace talks have stalled and monitors have reported open violations of the truce by the government and Tamil Tiger rebels.

Escalating violence between the two sides in 2006 killed hundreds of people and raised fears of a return to all-out war. There has been no meeting of minds over the rebels’ demand for an independent Tamil homeland in the north and east.

Sri Lanka suffered its worst disaster in late 2004 when giant waves generated by an undersea earthquake off Indonesia swept ashore, killing more than 30,000 people and devastating swathes of the coast.

This, like all civil wars, is a complicated clash of ethnic resentment and competing ideologies that features a central government with control of the military battling a rebel group that has resorted to violence and terror. The terror tactics, while morally indefensible, are not surprising — see the Irish Republican Army or the Palestinian Liberation Organization– given the history of these kinds of conflicts. (Mike Davis offers a useful history of car bomb — parts one and two — that can stand in as a history of asymmetrical warfare.)

propaganda, of course, is one of the war’s weapons, as is the passionate commitment of its partisans — and the Post finds itself smack in the middle.

I do not know enough about the Sri Lankan troubles (to borrow the designation the Irish have used to describe their own civil war in Northern Ireland) to know which side to believe, if any. My sense is that both bring legitimate grievances to the table and it is my belief that violence of the sort carried out by the LTTE — indiscriminate targeting of civilians — fails every moral test I know.

My heart goes out to the Sri Lankans affected by this disastrous civil war — Sinhalese and Tamil alike — and I sincerely hope that a ceasefire can be arranged and that the war can come to a close.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

Rutgers’ did it, dismantling Kansas State in the Texas Bowl by a lopsided 37-10 margin. This is good news for Rutgers fans and the school — even if the fuddy-duddies on WFAN couldn’t get themselves jazzed up for it. And, just as significantly, the team is likely to continue its growth and get better — at least that is what the sports writers are saying this morning.

The positive spin I am offering does not mean that my concerns about the money we are spending — and by we I mean New Jersey taxpayers who, afterall, contribute a bit of change to the school’s budget — on the coach and the program have evaporated into the ether. They remain concerns, but these are the rules under which live (i.e., that American universities place too much emphasis on how their football and basketball teams do, more emphasis, in fact than on the classroom), rules that do need to change, so we might as well have something to root for.

* * *

A random thought from The Star-Ledger:

Spero Dedes, the announcer on the NFL Network, said Rutgers was from “South Jersey” three times. Then there was the New York/New Jersey crowd comment. And the reference to the “South Brunswick” campus. This is the cable network we’re supposed to demand? Sounds like the USFL Network to us. …

This was a surprise give that a) I live in South Brunswick, b) I have edited the South Brunswick Post for the past 11 years (and was a reporter in South Brunswick for three) and c) I graduated from Rutgers and spent a year in the Rutgers Graduate English Department.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick