This is as good as it gets. Some snippets:
Opponents of capital punishment may have contemplated Saddam's execution by recalling Groucho Marx's quote about never forgetting a face: For you, I'll make an exception.
One might argue that the trial could have been less farcical; one might have enjoyed seeing Saddam answer for all his crimes, including the deaths of 100,000 Kurds in 1987-88. In the end, however, he had but one neck to give for his country, and he proved that no man is above the law. Especially the one concerning gravity.
...
This is not the time to lament the dictator, but of course that's what many did. As his appointed hour grew nigh, the humanitarians of the world found a new champion.
"He held the country together!" Well, if President Bush gassed New York and California and outlawed the Democratic Party, he could impose the same sort of remarkable cohesion.
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If this was a peaceable world, with no Darfurs or Hezbollah wars or Somalia clan-spats or auto-explosive jihadis anxious to perforate infidels on God's behalf, Saddam would have stood out as a throwback, an anachronism, a monstrosity who taxed the conscience of the just.
In this world, however, he had television correspondents seek his company and call him Mr. President. If his death seems anticlimactic, it may reflect the shame of a world that shrugged at his thuggery.
"We had him in a box!" some said. That was debatable, then. Now he's in a box for real. It does not solve the problem of Iraq. But it solved the problem of Saddam.
Jan. 3, 2007
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