Just saw someone on a cable news channel — one of the CNNs, I think — cheering the death of Saddam Hussein…and this wasn't an enslaved Iraqi who was happy about this. I could understand and maybe even enjoy the glee of someone who suffered actual damage under the Hussein rule. This was some lady who lived in Ohio or something, and she just thought hanging ol' Saddam was the greatest thing in the whole world. After all, a very bad man got executed. She was so happy about this that, just for a moment, you could forget that there are still plenty of other very bad men out there. Some of them have the potential to be more destructive to Ohio, if not the entire world, than Saddam ever was.
She repeated at least twice, the oft-heard line that "Saddam gassed his own people." I always thought that was an odd way of arguing that he was a murdering dictator…like it wouldn't have been so bad if he'd only gassed someone else's people. That, we could forgive and maybe even respect.
It's when you gas your own people that someone's got to put a stop to you. Eventually. The alleged gassing of his own people took place in March of 1988 and this country did a lot of friendly business with Hussein after that. (Incidentally, I said "alleged" because some pretty strong arguments have been made that the story isn't true. I don't know if it is or it isn't; only that it wouldn't make him any less of a monster if it turned out to be a bogus report.)
Joshua Micah Marshall, over on Talking Points Memo, made the following comment about Hussein's execution and the whole Iraq War in general…
This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur — phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.
Probably true. The news out of Iraq lately has been awful, just awful. 106 American soldiers are dead in December, making it the bloodiest month of the year…and you have to remind yourself that that number doesn't reflect all the pain and loss. It doesn't include dead non-soldiers, for one thing, and there are a lot of those. It doesn't measure arms blown off or the inevitable lasting emotional scars that come in any war. It also doesn't measure dollar cost or the fading of worldwide honor or any number of other downsides which must be weighed against whatever good we think we're achieving. This situation continues while Bush remains at his ranch, reading My Pet Goat or whatever he's doing while he decides on a new Iraq strategy one of these days.
I mean, it's just like with Katrina: What's the hurry? We can take our time. We're getting things accomplished. Why, just the other night, we killed a guy who'd gassed his own people.