Hanging by a Thread

Cruel despots tend to die violently, but when the U.S. handed Saddam Hussein over to his Iraqi executioners, the feeling was both medieval and barbaric. Perhaps--just perhaps--this act would have felt morally right if it had happened years ago. Before Abu Ghraib, the secret CIA prisons, suicides at Guantanamo, and the abandonment of basic rights for 'enemy combatants' like Jose Padilla. As it stands, those things can't be erased, and now Saddam's execution feels like part of a pattern.

There was always a huge problem with George Bush's justification for this war. When he claimed that it stood for a 'clash of civilizations,' he seized the moral high ground--clearly he meant that Western civilization was holding back the barbarians. Al-Qaida is barbaric. But to counter them by raining down mechanized death on innocent people, as we did during the 'shock and awe' campaign is barbaric, too, and destroys the moral clarity of fighting terrorism.

We aren't supposed to be fighting for cheap oil, more SUVs, or even our skins. We're fighting for values that the Bush administration seems far too ready to violate. Terrorism claimed 3,000 American lives on 9/11, and with a stretch we can blame 3,000 combat fatalities on radical jihadis (it will always be an open question how many U.S. troops have died needlessly in a unilateral war that had no provocation). In response we have wrecked an entire country and killed at least 100,000 of its citizens by the best international estimates.

In that context, the execution of Saddam Hussein feels like frontier justice little better than a mob lynching. There is a World Court that the former dictator could have been turned over to. He should have stood before the world to face every one of his senseless crimes out of respect for the victims and survivors of thirty years of atrocities. Taking that course would have been civilized.

It's sickening that Fox News could run a banner declaring that Saddam's end is a relief to Wall Street. Saddam's end comes as a relief to nobody except those who wanted revenge on the most primitive level. George Bush was governor of a state where capital punishment is meted out with righteousness and even relish on a wholesale basis. My own position is against capital punishment, but that's not the issue here. The sad truth is that America's moral position in Iraq--and the world at large-- hangs by a thread, and the execution of Saddam made the thread thinner than ever.

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