Heal or No Heal?

(TYPO CORRECTED) History gives me these juxtapositions, I just notice 'em. In the wake of President Ford's death, the MSM are aswim in tributes to his "healing of the nation" by pardoning Richard Nixon, the point being that the country, riven by controversy over Watergate for all of two years by that point, just couldn't take another year or two of Nixon on Trial (eat your trial-of-the-century heart out, O.J.). I was dubious of that premise at the time, but then I noticed the other event grabbing major news time this week: Saddam Hussein's death sentence, following a trial that Human Rights Watch, at least, found seriously flawed.

So the United States, a prosperous civil society with a two-century continuity of government--even through civil war!--and a generally admirable judicial system, had to be saved from the trauma of watching Nixon and his men lie, tell the truth, or an intriguing combination of the two under oath. But Iraq, a cobbled-together creation of the Brits at the end of World War One, beset by a current civil war and gifted with a government whose writ barely extends to the edge of the Green Zone and a court system that featured killings of defense lawyers and a rotating panel of judges du jour, is perfectly capable of absorbing this trial. Note well, I'm not comparing the crimes of the two Presidents: Hussein clearly was responsible for more deaths than Nixon, even if you figure that the delay in ending the Vietnam war belongs on Nixon's account. But, if mass killings were really the point, wouldn't we have insisted that Idi Amin be returned to stand trial from his exile in---Saudi Arabia?

Obviously, many Shiites in Iraq thrilled to Hussein's trial and will thrill further to his execution. But Democrats in this country would have loved to have prolonged Watergate until the 21st century. Either we're talking about healing, or we're talking about...something else.