MAYBE WE SHOULD GIVE HIM A CONSULTING CONTRACT INSTEAD

Don't hang Saddam (Christopher Hitchens, National Post, November 7th, 2006)

The case for carrying out the sentence of death, or for not protesting if it is carried out, is the following: Saddam Hussein has been tried under Iraqi law as it stood when he was dictator and has been sentenced according to that law. It is not for anyone else to tell Iraqi courts and judges what to do or to suggest retrospective changes in the system. He had the day in court that was denied to his victims, and the sentence should stand, even if the Iraqi parliament should later decide to abolish capital punishment.

There is another argument that has nothing to do with law. It concerns the bizarre word closure. A better word might be catharsis. After 1945, for example, it would have seemed grotesque that millions of Jews and Poles and Russians and Gypsies should be dead and their murderers still alive and able to give interviews and write memoirs. The hanging of the principal Nazi criminals was more an act of hygiene than of law, as well as an absolute assurance to their surviving victims (and to their remaining sympathizers) that there could be no second act. One's humanity, here, is partly enlisted for once in favour of the death penalty. Nuremberg pressed the last breath out of the putrescent body of fascism, and it allowed others to breathe more freely at the same time. Iraq is a country absolutely febrile with rumor and paranoia: I never cease to be amazed at the way in which people's expressions still change into a flicker of fear when the name of their sadistic former boss is even so much as mentioned.

Millions of people will not even start to relax until they are absolutely sure that the great werewolf will not come back. In this sense, you could argue that hanging the chief butcher and torturer would be an act of mass emancipation. But this still seems to me to be more like an exorcism than an execution -- a concession to superstition and primitive emotion. And we have enough of both in today's Iraq.

One strong objection to all executions is that they involve the destruction of evidence. Once the accused has been removed from the scene, he cannot shed any more light on the crime, investigation of which often has to be reopened. The trial of Saddam Hussein, like those of Pinochet and Milosevic, ought to have been the occasion for the assembling of a huge and conclusive archive of evidence, which would stand for all time as a monument to justice and an insurance against later "revisionism."

There are good principled arguments against capital punishment, but if Mr. Hitchens believes in them, why does he not just say so? Why, having articulated the case for hanging Saddam with such compelling flair, does he then descend into tranzi drivel about how Iraqis should continue to live in terror so we can all “learn” from wallowing endlessly in the details of the murders of their families?