The Saddam Spectacle

If Iraqi executioners have a particular expertise with the gallows, it is because Saddam gave his country so much practice. Hanging, shooting, gassing, beating, Saddam and his Baathist state made a cult of them all. Depraved and sadistic, Saddam's was the polar opposite of the banal bureaucratic evil Hannah Arendt famously saw in Adolf Eichmann.

That is precisely why the show trial and videotaped hanging that ended the dictator's life, far from elevating the rule of law, were so dangerously in tune with all else askew in US-occupied Iraq. Iraq's impatient politicians and their US handlers wanted the legitimacy conferred by a Saddam trial but the assurance of Saddam's certain, fast demise. In the United States, feckless governors get to look tough by signing death warrants. In Iraq, Saddam's hasty execution was a chance for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to appear decisive--after a year in which he conceded his country's governance to death squads and militias. Saddam's hanging permitted George W. Bush to make a show of going to bed undisturbed, while Iraq's ongoing catastrophe, with Saddam three years gone from the scene, has Bush's own generals and party leaders in revolt.

Iraq's leaders, it is clear, made efforts to cover up the embarrassing truth. Official video released within hours had no soundtrack and showed only the masked executioners arranging the noose on the dictator's neck; officials promoted grossly sanitized accounts of the final moments. The Shiite executioners' taunts, Saddam's ripostes, the toothless cries for dignity from a lone witness--all became evident only in a cellphone video that, however grotesque, at least portrayed the entire judicial exercise for the lynch party it was.

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