Few shed tears for Saddam Hussein. His crimes are known and his personality was hardly endearing. But there are many voices being raised against his flawed trial and his rushed execution, deliberately timed to fall on the first day of the Muslim Eid Al-Adha feast.

While it’s true that some Iraqis celebrated his demise in southern Iraq, Baghdad’s impoverished Sadr City and in the US town of Dearborn, Michigan, overall Muslims were shocked to wake up on the first morning of Eid to the sight of the former Iraqi leader’s head in a noose. Some Iraqi officials said the hanging was an Eid gift. It was one that most Muslims could have done without.

Glenda Jackson, a British Member of Parliament likened the televised execution to an Al-Qaeda beheading video. She was right. There were the now familiar hooded men preparing to take a life in a squalid environment. The difference is the victim had once been their leader. He showed no remorse and had no intention of begging for mercy.

The Iraqi prime minister, who signed Saddam’s death warrant, said like all tyrants Saddam was “frightened and terrified”. But if he was, this didn’t come across in the videos where a still defiant Saddam was seen calmly ready to face his death. One eyewitness said he saw a smile on his lips. Saddam told another not to be afraid.

This certainly wasn’t the kind of hoped-for PR that the Americans capitalized upon when they dragged a bearded and unkempt Saddam out of his spider hole. And it didn’t compare to the photographs of Saddam being medically examined or washing his own clothes dressed only in his underwear.

They thought they had a man who was broken and bowed but during his court sessions he proved them wrong again and again demanding to be given the title President of Iraq.

Whatever one thinks of Saddam, there is no disputing the fact he went to his death with courage and dignity. His daughters in Jordan said they were proud of the way their father conducted himself during his final hours.

Saddam refused tranquillizers and a meal of chicken and was denied a last cigarette. This was a man who wanted to be in control of himself until the last second. Perhaps he feared the meal might be drugged.

It was evident that his government-appointed executioners could have done with a few lessons in dignity. Their faces covered by black balaclavas, they taunted Saddam in his final moments, accusing him of destroying the country and wishing him to hell. They made clear their allegiance to the fiery religious leader Moqtada Al Sadr even as Saddam recited the Shahada. As he swung from the rope, they could hardly contain their glee.

George W. Bush described Saddam’s death as a milestone yet just hours later more than 80 Iraqi civilians were blown up, victims of the sectarianism that has gripped Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion.

Nouri Al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, sees Saddam’s execution as a turning point facilitating the coming together of Iraqis of all sects, but the fact that Saddam, a Sunni leader, was hanged by Shiites doesn’t bode well for unity. It isn’t surprising that some Sunnis feel humiliated by the process while others are vowing revenge attacks.

For the Arab world this was a dark day. For many, the sight of an Arab leader being treated like a common criminal by the puppets of foreign invaders was a humiliation as there was no respect afforded to his former 25-year tenure as president.

From the West there was the usual hypocrisy. Countries which reject the death penalty on moral grounds lined up behind “sovereign” Iraqi justice, yet those same countries attack Libya for passing a death sentence on foreign medics accused of contaminating children with the HIV virus and Pakistan for condemning a British Pakistani to death for allegedly killing a taxi driver.

Sadly, the full extent of Saddam’s crimes and the complicity of Western countries in those crimes will never be known. With Saddam’s death went his secrets and we may never know who was behind the eight-year war with Iran, who supplied the gas that killed Iranian soldiers and Iraqi Kurds or whether the US gave the green light to Saddam to invade Kuwait in 1990.

It was no accident that Saddam was tried and condemned for Dujail where Shiite villagers were executed in reprisal for an assassination attempt. This case had no foreign linkage and in any case the Kurdish judge, who made no secret of his contempt for Saddam and his defense team, had instructions to keep mention of the West out of the courtroom.

Those who celebrate Saddam’s passing would do well to reflect on the crimes of others, such as those who were behind ten years of sanctions that robbed 500,000 Iraqi children of their lives. Or those who, in 1991, bombed the Al-Ameriya shelter when up to 1,200 Iraqi women and children were incinerated.

To my mind the biggest crime of all was perpetrated by leaders who invaded a homogenous nation on the back of lies causing the death of over 600,000 civilians, turning that country into a splintered, shattered cesspit of blood, tears and hate. Unfortunately for them, their fall guy has finally fallen. He will soon be forgotten. He can no more be blamed. He rests in peace, which is more than can be said for them and the region they have so cruelly violated in pursuit of treasure and hegemonic power.