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Saturday, 30 December 2006
Saddam's Death Bookmark and Share
I had to turn off the TV-news. 

This is a solemn, important moment.  It's not a joyous one.  An evil man deserved to die.  His elimination was necessary — not close to sufficient, but necessary — for achieving, over time, a semblance civilized stability in Iraq.  The celebration in the streets, though, the dancing and firing guns in the air, does not augur well for that achievement. 

This wasn't victory.  It didn't end suffering.  It was, in the heat of a war that has actually gotten more vicious and more uncertain since Saddam's capture three years ago, the carrying out of an essential but unpleasant duty.  It marginally enhances Iraq's propects, and ours.  But Saddam's death (as opposed to his deposing) has no impact whatsoever on the deep dysfunction and hatred that is rending what passes for Iraqi society.  The unbridled display of dancing and shooting says more about that than the death of one man — monstrous though he was — who has been imprisoned for three years.

Saddam's death is a marker worth observing.  It is not something to go up in a balloon over.

Posted on 12/30/2006 9:31 AM by Andy McCarthy
Comments
30 Dec 2006
Hugh Fitzgerald
"Marginally enhances Iraq's prospects,and ours..."

More likely to do two things: First, create a Sunni martyr, a permanent symbol of the loss of Sunni power to the Rafidie dogs, the Shi'a.. Second, because the Shi'a rulers insisted on this quick execution, and refused to wait until the trial, already begun, devoted to Saddam Hussein's mass murdering of the Kurds, this will be taken by the Kurds as a symbol, as it should be, of the essential Arab indifference or disinterest in what happened to them at Arab hands.

Both will contribute to the break-up of Iraq. Both will help to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam.

Thus the execution, done as it was done by Muslims themselves, will help the Camp of Infidels.




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