The Coffeespy

I’ve tried to keep a cheeky tone over the holidays but it’s been tough.  With the passing of Gerald Ford and James Brown it seemed more of the world I knew was slipping into the past.  Then we watched as Saddam Hussein, a vicious dictator that allowed rape to be used as an interrogation tactic, as he was prepared for hanging.  While the New York Times is adamant that Hussein went to his death as some mythical man of iron, I saw nothing but a sad, defeated old man full of fear.

The Moderate Voice (your dust is pardoned, folks) looks at how history is shaping up as we speak.  It’s an interesting glimpse at how varying accounts can come out of the same event.  I’d submit that simply watching the video is enough.  In fact, I’d highly recommend watching the video (with or without the actual hanging) before reading any articles one way or the other.

The ’sphere has reacted in mixed fashion.  The left talks about how it either doesn’t matter or makes light of it, as though any person’s death is inconsequential.  The right seems to be fairly matter-of-fact about the event.  The gist of it summed up nicely at Protein Wisdom:

Was his public execution justified?  Of course it was.  Will his death halt the insurgency?  Of course it will not—though I believe it will have a greater impact than many opinion shapers are allowing, particularly insofar as it provides a kind of psychological relief for the many Shia oppressed and brutalized by the thuggish Ba’athist regime.

For me?  Well, I’ve had an on-going discussion with my sister-in-law’s boyfriend, a Colombian student here on a diplomatic visa, concerning many things, Iraq being one of them.  He seems to believe that we had no right to do anything in Iraq since we’re the ones who enabled them to begin with.  Of course, that’s easy for anyone who grew up during the Cold War to explain away.  Communism was the giant ogre then, worrying about consequences twenty years down the road hardly mattered if we were all going to be consumed in global nuclear war.  Try getting that through a student’s skull these days, though.

I thought the video of his preparation was simple a sad event.  A dingy concrete room where a rope was hung through a chipped hole in the ceiling.  Executioners wearing ski-masks.  Grainy videos taken from various angles.  It struck me that the only person with any sense of normalness about him was Hussein, normal being fearful in this situation.  I wondered at what future generations would think seeing this video because it looked a lot like he had been kidnapped and killed, not sentenced and executed.

Then I went back and reviewed.  Before I went to Iraq with the Army, I read up on the history.  I read how we supplied Iraq to stand up against Iran.  I read how those supplies were used by a ruthless man to cement his powerbase by gassing his opposition.  While others were debating whether or not WMDs were a justification for war, I simply needed to see a gassed mother clutching her gassed baby to know it was the right thing to do.  As sad as the man looked before his hanging, it did not excuse Halabja and it did not excuse rape as an option for political retaliation.

It may seem trite, but Will Munny said it best: “Hell of a thing, killin’ a man. Take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.”  Hussein received the appropriate penalty.

Note: I tried to find some left-leaning quotes that weren’t hate-filled, but when I read the Huffington article linking Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon to enabling Bush to move on Iraq I guess I gave up hope.