Why it went that way

Mario Loyola's post at the Corner today sheds a bit of light on the whole of Sadaam's trial and hanging that I tend to agree with. Could his final moments been better handled? I suppose so, but at the end of the day he got far better than he truly deserved. And that's the point:

Some have questioned why Saddam was executed on the basis of less than two hundred murders when he was responsible for hundreds of thousands losing their lives. The answer is not just that the particular crime in question was so easily traceable through documentary evidence to Saddam's personal agency, but also that it is important for people to see that even a crime this "small" justifies this punishment.

None of this has to do with the due process rights normally presumed for an individual criminal defendant in a state proceeding where there is a vital concern to protect individual rights from the power of the state. War criminals use the power of the state to commit their crimes. By abusing the powers of state, they opt out of the protections of state. The Allies would have been fully within their rights under customary international law to put the senior Nazi leaders in front of firing squads without any judicial process at all. Indeed, among the Allies, many senior leaders worried about the restraining precedent that would be set by the Nuremberg trials, which arguably went far beyond the sensible requirements of humanist and ethical restraint. The Nuremberg trials were show-trials in the best sense. Their purpose was not justice, but publicity, as Eisenhower appreciated.

The Iraqis who conducted the trial and execution of Saddam behaved with more restraint than I would have been inclined to show him. He was lucky that he was not tortured to death and buried in an unmarked grave, as many Iraqis would have liked to see. He was given more justice than a summary execution not to protect his dignity but to protect our own, and so that all could see real justice being served for real crimes.

What is most shocking to me about war critics who dismiss his execution is the ease with which they wave away the hundreds and thousands of hours of real torture—and I don't mean waterboarding, but rather sulfuric acid poured in the eyes, electric shock on the genitals, digits ripped from the hand with pliers, and worse—which Saddam inflicted on tens of thousands of innocents in Iraq. In today's Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby remembers more of Saddam's horror stories. You need a heart of stone not to be consumed with hatred for Saddam.

As Peretz suggests, Saddam has earned an eternity of torment. The debate over the decorum of his execution makes me wonder, as Christopher Hitchens has, whether we really understand the brutality of our enemies—and whether we ourselves are capable of the brutality which may be necessary to defeat them.