An undignified end

On December 31 2006 · 6 Comments · In Diary

Saddam

Saddam is dead, and cameraphones and internet video come into their own. The jerky style of footage you’d normally associate with bad dancing at weddings will now become synonymous with the rather undignified end of a dictator.

Bush described Saddam’s execution as a milestone. That’s not how it looked. It looked and sounded rather shambolic – shouts of ‘Allahu Akhbar’, someone helpfully suggesting Hussein ‘Go to hell’, and the flashing of several cameras as Hussein hung crumpled, his head at an incongruous angle. In the end, there is little satisfaction to be had from this. I’m not quite sure what kind of person relishes the sight of a human being being killed. I didn’t feel like justice had been done, I felt a little sick. All of the executioners wore ski masks – this was probably for fear of reprisals by Saddam’s supporters, but it mainly brought to mind images of the masked executioner from TV and movies. Much as firing squads never knew whose gun contained live rounds, apparently for executioners, anonymity is still essential. Someone has to pull the trigger, flip the switch or open the trapdoor – we’d just rather not know who.

Justice is defined as “the administration of law or some other authority according to the principles of just behaviour and treatment”. Just therefore requires definition in order to understand justice. Just is “morally right and fair, or appropriate and deserved”. Did Saddam get what he deserved? Yes, almost certainly. Few will miss Saddam, and he was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. Still, does it make you feel good to see him hanging? Not me.

I’m not quite sure why I put his photo here. Probably some morbid fascination with what happened. The fact that the photo of his dead body is on the front page of the BBC website suggests that this morbid fascination is shared by at least a few other people, the kind of fascination that sees the crowds gather at public executions. What Bush describes as a milestone seems more like a sad anti-climax. It might give a few people a little satisfaction to see him dead, but it won’t now make the slightest difference in Iraq or anywhere else. Saddam was a spent force when they pulled him out of his bunker, so all we got was a good ole’ hanging.


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  • Daniel

    I agree, I see no reason to execute Saddam.

    Too many people are already dead, this was an old man whose power (Iraq) was long gone. He could have lived in a jail till he died.

    I remember hearing how Japanese soldiers cried when they saw how well Americans treated their prisoners when Japan was defeated. That is compared to Japans treatment of their POW’s.

    I had always felt that was a key difference between two parties at war. War which is never humble and never should be, but the treatment of the conqured is the key issue IMHO.

  • http://www.spikydog.com/ Nathan

    Thanks Daniel.

    There is a slight difference between Saddam and the PoWs you referred to. Yes, Saddam was a prisoner of war, but he also ended life a convicted criminal, responsible for mass murder, and had he been alive long enough for the second trial against him to reach completion, he would in all likelihood have been found guilty of genocide in the gassing of around 200,000 Kurds.

    Don’t get me wrong. Saddam was a nasty bastard. For him to have been punished relatively quickly when various others of his ilk (Nazi war criminals, Pinochet, Pol Pot) were rarely more than inconvenienced by detention is something of an achievement. I’m mainly saying that we don’t have to approve of the way he was punished, even if we agree that punishment was appropriate, and that the current situation in Iraq won’t be improved by killing him.

  • Yazi

    Saddam deserved this, and I don’t feel it was unnecessary. He didn’t give his THOUSANDS of victims a chance to die in prison, especially as almost all of them did nothing wrong.

  • http://theanswers42.blogspot.com/ Margaret

    I’ve never understood why some people are so keen on execution as a “punishment”. Some forms of punishment are more cruel than others – stoning for example – and it’s been proved that decapitation doesn’t kill immediately, but once someone’s dead, that’s it; their punishment is over and they never have to think about what they’ve done or what’s being done to them. Unless you’re a religious person who believes people rot in hell (which is nonsense), why end someone’s life, so he or she will never have to suffer again?

    This seems more like revenge to me.

    Life imprisonment without privileges, on the other hand, is a punishment. Whatever you do, it won’t change what’s happened.

  • NL

    I’m against capital punishment but if it pleases the Iraqis that he persecuted then I’ll defer to their will. The news of the chaos of Saddam’s execution only increases my opinion that religion and tribalism are pointless negative influences on any society.

  • Iain

    One of the news programmes I saw reported that Saddam Hussein had been executed for crimes against humanity. I’m sorry, I find that phrase to be a hideous construction.

    The American singer songwriter Steve Earle is a fervent campaigner against the death penalty in his country. One one of his live albums he says “I’m opposed to the death penalty because of the damage it does to my soul. I object to my government killing people, because my government is supposed to be me and I object to *me* killing people”.

    Yes there are actually many arguments in favour of capital punishment, just no moral ones. There is a tawdriness to it beyond the simple immoral act of killing someone. I don’t care about the mathematics of this – yes he’s responsible for appalling acts of imhumanity and the deaths of many, many thousands of people. The fact that he was wrong to do so makes it implicity wrong to kill him as any form of justice.

    A million wrongs do not make one right. In fact, from what I gather about the footage being distributed around the internet they have actually imparted an unnecessary diginity to the demise of this appalling dictator.

    Sorry to be so preachy about this.