The Noose
Perhaps it is crass somehow to view the execution of Saddam Hussein as a time to speculate on the morality of capital punishment. It's probably more a combination of my Jesuit education, my (weak) knee-jerk liberalism and the relative distance we have in this country from the true brutality of Saddam the dictator (brought on by his belittlement as a man and as a leader by the Bush administration in concert with the American media, despite their need at times, and ironically, to portray him as a dangerous menace.)
Nevertheless, it is startling to see Saddam at one moment a slightly unhinged, and clearly disturbed but no less a vital living person and then to see him and what we know as moments later wrapped dead in a shroud. And perhaps even more disturbing, at least to me, is that it is we who made it happen. We are complicit, along with the government we elected, in all the events in Iraq. We have brought about the fall of Hussein's "government", we have ushered in a deadly civil war and we have sent more than 3,000 of our country men and women to a battlefield death. And now we have executed a death sentence on Saddam Hussein.
In the days following 9/11, in the face of images of fellow NY'ers leaping from the Twin Towers, I wished for the same for Osama Bin Laden. I think what I said was that, if we catch him, we should take him to the top of the Empire State Building, set him on fire and throw him off. So who am I to talk? I don't know nearly enough about Middle East politics to have a meaningful opinion about what all this is doing to our safety and to the stability of the world. There are those that would say we have no business in Iraq and we're just making them hate us more. Others would say that they got what was coming to them--they attacked us and now they're facing the consequences. So Saddam is dead. He sent thousands to a similar fate so what's wrong with him facing it himself. And he at least got a fair trial.
I just hate that our country has become one that causes chaos. One that tortures and then even says torture is OK. One that executes. I know, I'm soft. I'm easily disturbed. I'm unrealistic. But where do we go from here? What happens when another horrible thing happens in an American city? When 50,000 Americans die in some bombing or mass poisoning? You know the things they've been predicting since 9/11. Where do we go? Who do we kill then?