01.08.07

The Hanging

Posted in Uncategorized at 12:39 am by kevin

New Year, new attempt to keep up with the blog…

While I am generally opposed to capital punishment, the arguments that lead me to that conclusion for criminal cases (even clear ones) simply don’t apply to Saddam - for better or for worse, it was not a traditional criminal process, and I could certainly be convinced that there’s nothing wrong with that outcome. However, I found myself shocked (though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, given the conduct of this enterprise throughout) as the carelessness, brutality and incompetence displayed in the execution.

Two articles really bring the point home:
NYT: Before Hanging, a Push for Revenge and a Push Back
BBC: Divisions deepened by Saddam’s death

So, what’s the problem, really? The problem, in a nutshell, is that Iraq today is sectarian clusterfuck and the manner of the execution has only exacerbated it. First, a little background (many readers will be familiar with the remainder of this paragraph, so feel free to skim down). There are two main “branches” of Islam: Shi’a and Sunni. The specific differences are religiously significant, but not really relevant to this piece (though Wikipedia certainly has a decent summary). Even though Sunnis comprise a majority of the world’s Muslims, they are a minority of Iraqis. However, one member of that minority was Saddam Hussein, who during his lengthy and brutal rule missed few opportunities to advance the interests of the Sunnis at the expense of the Shi’as. After the fall of Saddam, democratic elections resulted in an overwhelmingly Shi’a government, which wasted little time in settling old scores. The recent cycle of violence, often referred to as “the insurgency”, is less a guerrilla effort against the American occupation (though that’s certainly a component) and more a boiling over of the sectarian conflict that has been brewing for a good long while - in effect, a civil war. To be fair, while history made the present outcome somewhat likely, the military and especially political mismanagement of the postwar period has made it considerably worse. For instance, the de-Ba’athisation policy essentially guaranteed that a great number of Sunnis were stripped of their power and thrown to the mercy of the Shi’a majority all at once - a recipe for sectarianism and score-settling.

With that context, the timing and conduct of the execution appears to have almost deliberately stoked this conflict further. Consider:

- Both Sunnis and Shi’as celebrate the Muslim holiday Eid al-Adha. However, the Sunnis’ observation begins a day earlier than the Shi’as. What did the Maliki government manage to do? Schedule Saddam’s execution on the worst possible day, symbolically speaking: the one day that it affected the Sunni holiday, but not the Shi’a.

- As has been widely reported, guards and witnesses in the execution chamber chanted “Moqtada”, referring to the Shi’a cleric (and, by the way, not so much a great guy himself). It’s hard to think of a clearer way to signal that the purpose was not justice, but naked revenge. Yes, Saddam was a monster and certainly deserved what he got; I’m not claiming the outcome was un-just. But intent matters, both intrinsically and - especially in this case - politically.

- Saddam was executed for a relatively narrow scope of crimes: his massacres against Shi’as in a particular town. While overwhelmingly barbaric, objectively speaking these weren’t the worst crimes of his regime. The purpose of the Saddam tribunal as Americans and much of the world perceived it was to be an Iraqi Nuremberg - an airing of all the regime’s evils, exposed in all their mundane horror. Instead, by executing Saddam before the trials for other massacres (especially against the Kurds) and war crimes even commenced, the Iraqi government robbed pretty much everyone outside the Shi’a community of their opportunity to document, expose and convict the regime.

In short, by executing Saddam at a time and in a manner so clearly prescribed by sectarian passions rather than justice itself, the Iraqi government has only inflamed those passions, which form the greatest threat to Iraq, further.

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