“It was a time when the notion of justice was perverted and conflated with revenge. The urge to achieve a higher good and temper our embarrassment with the ugly aspects of our humanity led us to believe more violence would validate our own souls. The people of this era forgot that Hussein was the evil man and that no more violence and death was necessary to prove his evil is beyond ours.” This history book of the future continues, “However, his death was not celebrated widely in the United States. Some part of the popular consciousness was mournful and even disgusted with the execution it had encouraged. So, they argued not the purpose of his death, but why the tyrant was insulted before his descent through a trap door with a rope carefully fitted around his soon-to-be-snapped neck.”
I have few doubts this is how history will judge us for hanging Saddam Hussein. Nonetheless, I disagree with this assessment. The traditional punishment for capital crime in Iraq is death, and so long as his life can cause unrest in those who seek a final revenge, the best the Iraqis could do was to eliminate him and move beyond his hateful legacy. While some call hanging “barbaric,” I don’t see a moral hierarchy for methods of execution. Are we really more civilized because we choose to strap our murderers to a table and sedate them? Granting death anonymity is not a virtue, just a sign our society is trapped in an awkward phase of progression.
When Iraqis hanged Saddam, it gave the American people a clear lens into how this war is really going. We did our damnedest to pretend there is some sort of noble civility in a hanging, and we handed the tyrant to an authority with a bloodlust resembling the French Revolution. In the Iraq war, we did our damnedest to pretend this man posed an imminent threat to our well-being, and we let neoconservatives, who believe the mass loss of civilian life is worth some abstract geopolitical end, run the war for us.
How could there be anything but revenge for an Iraqi authority that excludes the citizens who made up Saddam’s military force? The decision to exclude those who held power for decades from the only livelihood they know and empower activists who have lived and suffered under his thumb was a blunder that has ruined the Bush presidency.
The weak government we support cannot depend on America’s goodwill as a base of political support in a country that feels our incompetence cost them the stability of their nation. So, the Iraqi prime minister gives a wink and a nod to terrorists like Muqtada al-Sadr. However horrific the crimes he commits, the Iraqi government is still probably doing the average civilian a favor, because any attempt to crush him would lead to a civil war that would last for decades.
Now Saddam’s death is forever entombed within the mausoleum of history. It is a shining beacon for the decadence of mankind and prime example of the consequences of nationalistic fears that still plague the modern world.
The American people are recognizing that the Iraq war is a profound indictment of our nation state. It represents a fundamental inability to grasp the world around us. This failure was spurred by indifference, fear and a neoconservative philosophy that mirrors the religious battles of the Middle Ages. It is a philosophy that discounts the value of present lives, our treasure and stability for some inevitable utopian end, undoubtedly concluding with the triumph of our way of life. These days, we claim to fight not over what god to believe in, or which parts of an ancient book to read, but a political and economic system that is divinely correct. The architects of this war believe themselves to be gods, with the ability to create and contain the subtleties of political action by the force of a military.
Nonetheless, I sincerely hope President Bush is right for the sake of our security and the stability of the world. But experience, logic and common sense make it clear that his vision of a peaceful Middle East is misguided and incompatible with reality.
So that leaves us where we stand now. The tyrant is dead. There is no good or bad, no right or wrong, only consequences. The “son of a bitch” is now lying beneath our feet, as one Iraqi execution witness told NBC during the initial celebration. Now we must decide whether a measure of justice as the catalyst for more injustice is truly progress.
Bassey Etim ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in political science and journalism.
