ON THE WHOLE, EID RATHER BE IN PHILADELPHIA::

Hussein Is Put to Death: Former Iraqi President Hanged Before Dawn in Baghdad (Sudarsan Raghavan, 12/30/06, Washington Post)

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was hanged in the predawn hours of Saturday for crimes against humanity in the mass murder of Shiite men and boys in the 1980s, sent to the gallows by a government backed by the United States and led by Shiite Muslims who had been oppressed during his rule, Iraqi and American officials said.

In the early morning, Hussein, 69, was escorted from his U.S. military prison cell at Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad airport, and handed over to Iraqi officials. He was executed on the day Sunni Muslims, of which Hussein was one, begin celebrating the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. [...]

In Crawford, Tex., President Bush said in a statement that Hussein received "the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime." He added, "Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people's resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people's determination to create a society governed by the rule of law."

After the execution, celebratory gunfire broke out in Baghdad. Iraqis across the nation sent text messages to their relatives and friends as soon as they heard of Hussein's execution. Ali al-Hayeri, one of the witnesses who testified openly in the Dujail trial, said he received his first text message at 3:15 a.m. It read: "We congratulate you for the execution of the tyrant Saddam."

"This is what should happen," said Suad Shakir, 52, a resident of the Karrada district in Baghdad, and a Christian. "People will be relieved. I hope that it will bring good to Iraq." She said she wanted Hussein to be executed. "He hurt Iraqis," she said. "We haven't seen anything good from him."

Sic semper tyrannis.

MORE:
Justice for Saddam, Precedent for the Future: America and its allies deliver a warning to future dictators. (Mario Loyola, 12/29/06, National Review)

Dictators around the world can draw some comfort from the bloody nose America has taken since the capture of Saddam. But not much. They now know something important. Though absent from any formal articulation of international law, new standards of governance are evolving as a matter of state practice. Regimes that support terrorists or allow their territories to become sanctuaries for territories risk elimination. Regimes that fail to account transparently for their WMD activities may be rendered transparent by force. And regimes that abuse their own people risk having to answer for their crimes eventually.

The capture, trial, and execution of Saddam Hussein ends a terrible chapter in the history of Iraq, even if — thanks to the terrorists — things have gone from bad to worse for many Iraqis. Iraq has become today’s Russian Front — the terrifying center-of-gravity in a new world war.

And yet as that struggle continues, it is fitting and just to meditate a moment on something nobody could have imagined in decades past: Saddam got what was coming to him.

Dictators around the world have one more reason to think that they will get theirs too if they are not careful. America and its partners have made terrible sacrifices since the toppling of Saddam’s dictatorship. But we will never know how much suffering we saved future generations by making this example of Saddam. For the victims of future dictatorships as for the victims of his own, this just and fitting end to the career of one of the most sadistic and destructive criminals of modern times can only strengthen the vital hope that justice prevails in the end. And that is worth many sacrifices.

Saddam Hussein executed (The Guardian, December 30, 2006)

Saddam's execution, which became imminent after his appeal was this week rejected, has brought to an end the life of one of the Middle East's most brutal dictators.

Launching the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, campaigns against the Kurds and putting down the southern Shia revolt that followed the 1991 Gulf war - triggered by his invasion of Kuwait - put the casualties attributable to his rule into the hundreds of thousands.

But his conviction was for a relatively lower figure - the deaths of 148 men and boys from the Shia Muslim town of Dujail, where members of an opposition group had made a botched attempt to assassinate him in 1982.

In Iraq opinion was divided sharply along sectarian lines, with Sunni Muslims warning of "bloodbaths in the streets". Even among the Shia, terrorised for decades by Saddam, there was a sense of hopelessness. "They can kill him 10 times but it won't bring safety to the streets because there is no state of law," said one Shia taxi driver who gave his name as Shawkat.

In the Kurdish north, jubilation was tempered by the fear of deeper sectarian tensions and disappointment that Saddam would now not be able to stand trial for other charges including the Anfal attack on the town of Halabja that killed 5,000 people in 1988.

"It would have been much better for the execution to have taken place in Halabja, not in Baghdad," said Barham Khorsheed, a Kurd.

Obituary - Saddam Hussein: April 28, 1937 - December 30, 2006: Former Iraqi dictator who ruled his country without mercy and struck fear into the heart of millions (Times of London, 12/30/06)

Saddam Hussein was a tyrant whose actions brought down unimaginable catastrophe on Iraq and its peoples. From an early age, he had enjoyed inflicted suffering on those around him and, when he came to positions of political power, those whom he could not force or corrupt into submitting to his will, he maimed, murdered or made to flee.

He started two major international wars - one against Iran, the second as a result of aggression against Kuwait - which cost an estimated one million lives. He instituted genocidal campaigns against the Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Marsh Arabs in the south. Ruling through the Sunni minority of which he was a member, he ignored the claims of the country's majority Shia population.

The third war in the region - which brought him and his regime down - was not directly begun by him, but by apparent American - and British - fears of a perceived threat his arsenal of weapons posed to international security. This time Saddam misjudged the event - and certainly the American mood.

Hussein legacy: Megalomaniac, nationalist leader (Aamer Madhani, December 29, 2006, Chicago Tribune)

Over his 24 years as president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein earned the moniker Butcher of Baghdad by ruling with brute force, torture and cunning.

His regime murdered at least 300,000 of his countrymen, according to estimates by human-rights groups. During his reign, neighbors spied on each other and children were taught at school to tattle on their parents if they spoke against the regime. More than 1 million Iraqis were killed in wars against Iran, Kuwait and the United States on his watch.

Iraqis, by and large, say they suffered terribly at the hands of the dictator.

Justice, Iraqi-style (NY Daily News, 12/30/06)

Saddam Hussein, flushed from a "spider hole" in Tikrit a bit more than three years ago, may, as you read this, be in another kind of hole, one that's 6 feet deep. Or perhaps he is ashes and dust. Either way, he would have been brought to a fitting end.
It is not often that the world witnesses justice administered in orderly, lawful fashion to a mass-murdering despot. And Saddam had his days in court, afforded the benefits of due process that he never extended to the victims of his barbarity.

If his trial was at times a circus, that's because he made it a circus. And if there was a hitch or two in the proceedings, that's because the Iraqis rather nobly conducted them on a battlefield. For, make no mistake, this was sovereign Iraqi justice, applied by a nation struggling to leave behind a brutal past.

Final chapter in life of brutality: Slaughter of Iraqi civilians avenged at last (CORKY SIEMASZKO, 12/30/06, DAILY NEWS)
Tyrant pays for his horrors: Saddam hangs at dawn in Baghdad (RICHARD Sisk, 12/30/06, NY Daily News)
A thug who used terror and war to stay in power (Rory McCarthy, December 30, 2006, The Guardian)

Saddam was at heart a thug, born into a violent childhood in a country whose history has been shaped by great political violence. He studied law in Baghdad and Cairo, but was not an exceptional student. Instead, he strong-armed his way up the hierarchy of the Ba'ath party until he rose to the presidency in 1979. He relied on the skilful promotion of others from his hometown of Tikrit until he had a web of kinship and tribal loyalty around him. Those who crossed him or looked like rivals paid with their lives, as the "hero of national liberation" cemented his power.

Promptly he led Iraq into war with Iran, a punishing eight-year conflict that left more than 1 million people dead. It is one of modern history's most grisly ironies that he only held out so long against a more numerous opponent because of the covert support of the west, which saw his regime as the lesser of two evils.

War was to characterise Saddam's rule, the glue he used to hold together his country and to maintain the dominance of his Sunni Muslim minority over the persecuted Shia and Kurdish communities.

As the Iran-Iraq war ended, he went into battle against the Kurds of northern Iraq, committing some of the gravest war crimes of his regime, wiping out villages with chemical gas attacks at a time when he was still an ally of the west. He sent his forces storming into Kuwait in 1990, disguising a long-harboured land grab with atavistic notions of pan-Arab unity. When western forces pushed his troops back, he then went to war on the Shia and the Kurds who had risen up in rebellion against him at home. He deployed his troops and his attack helicopters and the uprising was crushed with summary brutality. Graves across the south and the north were filled with the bodies of thousands of rebels. Most of those corpses were only recovered, mourned and reburied 12 years later, after Saddam's fall. The most modest assessments put at 200,000 the number of Iraqis who "disappeared" in the Saddam years.

His actions brought punishing UN sanctions, which in a decade transformed what had been a prosperous, oil-rich nation into an economic basket case. Scientists and musicians became taxi drivers and cigarette sellers. Saddam, his family and their cronies grew wealthier and wealthier. And the paranoia deepened. There were at least a dozen intelligence agencies, mostly spying on each other and all spying on the Iraqi population. "There was an eye on everyone, and an eye for everyone," one Ba'athist said later.

Hanging on a Muslim holiday is criticized (Ashraf Khalil, 12/30/06, LA Times)

The Muslim religious holiday Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, is meant to commemorate Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son on God's orders.

But now the holiday could also be associated with something else: the execution of ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

The Iraqi government's push to hang Hussein this morning, when much of the Muslim world was celebrating Eid, drew criticism from Islamic leaders in the Middle East and America.

"Executing any individual during this holiday period indicates poor judgment and a lack of sensitivity," the Muslim Public Affairs Council said in a statement.

As the Hussein drama played out Friday in Baghdad, millions of Muslims gathered in Saudi Arabia for the Hajj pilgrimage, a pillar of the Islamic faith that every Muslim is required to perform at least once if able.

"Connecting this to a religious occasion will just widen the gap between the factions in Iraq," said Muhammad Eissa, a University of Chicago professor of Arabic and an Islamic scholar.

The Sunni had thirty years to hang him themselves. They didn't.
‘I Saw Fear, He Was Afraid’: In a NEWSWEEK exclusive, the man hired to videotape Saddam Hussein’s execution recalls the brutal dictator’s humble final moments. (Michael Hastings, 12/30/06, Newsweek)

Ali Al Massedy was 3 feet away from Saddam Hussein when he died. The 38 year old, normally Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's official videographer, was the man responsible for filming the late dictator's execution at dawn on Saturday. "I saw fear, he was afraid," Ali told NEWSWEEK minutes after returning from the execution. [...]

Ali was greeted as a hero when he returned from the execution a little after 7 a.m., flying in with other officials and landing in two helicopters in the Green Zone. A convoy of 20 or so GMCs and Toyota Land Cruisers waited outside to drive some of the Iraqi officials home.

The Iraqi bodyguards, mostly Shiites they said, had passed the time smoking and praying—some prayed on cardboard mats on the street.

It was a cold morning in Baghdad, a few degrees above freezing, and in the post dawn light the guards' breaths could be seen in the air. When the thudding of helicopters began, the body guards rushed towards the entrance to the landing zone. They swarmed around Ali, snapping digital pictures on camera phones and cheering. "Saddam finished, Saddam finished," a guard who gave his name as Mohammed told NEWSWEEK. Ali looked somewhat stunned as he exited, carrying the camera.

"All Iraqis will be happy," he says. "This is the most important day for me [as a cameraman,]" he said. "This page [in history] is over, this page is over. All Iraqis will be happy from the north to the south to the east to the west."

The Defiant Despot Oppressed Iraq for More Than 30 Years (NEIL MacFARQUHAR, 12/30/06, NY Times)
Feared and Pitiless; Fearful and Pitiable (JOHN F. BURNS, 12/31/06, NY Times)

NOBODY who experienced Iraq under the tyranny of Saddam Hussein could imagine, at the height of the terror he imposed on his countrymen, ever pitying him. Pitiless himself, he sent hundreds of thousands of his countrymen to miserable deaths, in the wars he started against Iran and Kuwait, in the torture chambers of his secret police, or on the gallows that became an industry at Abu Ghraib and other charnel houses across Iraq. Iraqis who were caught in his spider’s web of evil, and survived, tell of countless tortures, of the psychopathic pleasure the former dictator appeared to take from inflicting suffering and death.

Yet there was a moment when I pitied him, and it came back to me after the nine Iraqi appeal judges upheld the death sentence against Saddam last week, setting off the countdown to his execution. As I write this, flying hurriedly back to Baghdad from an interrupted Christmas break, Saddam makes his own trip to the gallows with an indecent haste, without the mercy of family farewells and other spare acts of compassion that lend at least a pretense of civility to executions under law in kinder jurisdictions. From all we know of the preparations, Saddam’s death was to be a miserable and lonely one, as stark and undignified as Iraq’s new rulers can devise.

Many Iraqis, perhaps most, will spare no sympathies for him. However much he may have suffered in the end, they will say, it could never be enough to atone for a long dark night he imposed on his people. Still, there was that moment, on July 1, 2004, when Saddam became, for me, if only briefly, an object of compassion.

Dictator Who Ruled Iraq With Violence Is Hanged for Crimes Against Humanity (Marc Santora, James Glanz and Sabrina Tavernise, 12/30/06, NY Times)

Saddam Hussein, the dictator who led Iraq through three decades of brutality, war and bombast before American forces chased him from his capital city and captured him in a filthy pit near his hometown, was hanged just before dawn Saturday during the morning call to prayer.

The final stages for Mr. Hussein, 69, came with terrible swiftness after he lost the appeal, five days ago, of his death sentence for the killings of 148 men and boys in the northern town of Dujail in 1982.

Darn, they came so close to getting that bit right, but what came for Saddam was the "fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword."

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 30, 2006 1:14 AM