Saddam Hussein’s execution will not cause many to shed tears. Unfortunately, nor will it end the violence in Iraq. The dictator had absolute power over his people for almost three decades. The extent to which he abused that power is now apparent in the widening Iraqi tragedy. His legacy is now being written in the blood of rival Iraqi factions, stirred on by the nihilistic evil of Al-Qaeda and Saddam’s most loyal and entrenched Baathist thugs. Saddam did not rule Iraq for Iraqis. He ruled it for himself, assisted by a coterie of relatives and acquaintances, almost exclusively from around his hometown of Tikrit and from behind the high walls of his sprawling presidential palace in Baghdad, which today is the heart of the Green Zone. No Iraqi was safe from Saddam’s violent rule, Sunnis included. Saddam ruled Iraq by intimidation not inspiration. His ouster removed the fear but did not create the inspiration. Americans have only made matters worse. Their bone-headed invasion unleashed the rivalries that Saddam never tried to settle but simply suppressed with the utmost brutality.
When Washington so cynically encouraged and backed him in his assault upon Iran, he must have imagined that he stood upon the threshold of conquering world statesmanship. The war did not go as he had planned but he wrongly believed that he had earned American gratitude for acting as their surrogate against the hated Tehran regime. He had, as usual, overestimated his self-worth in the eyes of the US. Unfortunately, in his death Saddam was able to deliver a final contribution to animosity between Muslims and the Western powers that control Iraq and who certainly could have had an influence on the timing of the despot’s execution.
Many on the so-called Arab Street are wondering why the butcher of Baghdad had to be hanged on the morning of Eid Al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, a day when Muslims worldwide symbolically re-enact God’s test of Abraham by killing an animal and feeding it to the poor -- a day when children often receive toys or candy and families spend time together in celebration.
Instead, children woke up yesterday morning to see parents glued to the television watching a mass murderer being ushered to the gallows sickly trying to portray himself as a Muslim martyr.
Hours after Saddam’s corpse was removed from its swinging rope, Iraqi MP Adnan Pachachi -- a man who admits that he is against the death penalty -- expressed a similar sentiment. Why, he asked. Why on a day honoring sacrifice and concern for fellow man did such an execution have to take place? This is a question that will likely be tossed around the news cycle for the coming days, with some in the Western media likely to portray Muslim reaction to the timing of Saddam’s execution as typically touchy and reactionary.
But before the Western media rushed to platitudes about Muslim reaction, they should consider what the reaction would have been by the American public had the execution of US terrorist Timothy McVeigh been scheduled for Christmas morning.
