The Discerning Texan
-- Edmund Burke
Saturday, December 30, 2006
On the Death of Saddam
No, there is nothing funny about killing this brute, a man who has shown no remorse nor the slightest flicker of regret at the trail of dead bodies he has left in the wake of a life spent torturing and murdering anyone who opposed him. The fact that the world knew of this brutality and did nothing about it – including the US government who marginally assisted the beast in his war of conquest against Iran – only goes to show that anyone who believes in the efficacy of the UN is only kidding themselves. Tyrants like Saddam will exist as long as the governments of the world carry on business as usual with the despots while trying to block the screams of their victims from conscious thought.
Saddam may have been a particularly brutal tyrant. But the difference between his regime and the regimes of dozens of others around the world is only a matter of degree – thousands dead or tortured instead of hundreds of thousands. It says a lot about humanity at this stage of our evolution as a social species that we can be so sanguine about the murderous depredations of a Robert Mugabe or a Islom Karimov simply because the body count hasn’t achieved the elevated status of a Saddam or a Kim Jung Il. We in the civilized world can tune out the cries for succor from the oppressed rather easily – international law, free flow of oil, international commerce, even the War on Terrorism – take your pick. One excuse is as good as another.
I wish I could believe that hanging Saddam will make other tyrants pause and clean up their acts, hoping to avoid suffering a similar fate. But you and I know that is wishful thinking. What is more probable is that the dictators will redouble their efforts to stifle opposition thinking it will guarantee their security – at least from their own people.
But in the end, whether it’s having your neck snapped by a taut rope or dying peacefully in your bed, the criminal oppressors who cause so much human misery and suffering will all come face to face with their own mortality. And I have to believe that as the curtain rings down on their existence, the cold hand of fear will grip their failing heart as they contemplate an eternity that may include torments far surpassing those they meted out during their useless, failed existence on this planet.
In that last point, about facing one's mortality, even Saddam seems to have come to peace with it in this sense: he reportedly urged Iraqis to forgive one another and warned that the true evil to be concerned with is Iran.
So, perhaps, even tyrants are capable of moments of sanity. If those were indeed his dying words, Saddam's former Baathist zealots would do well to consider and heed them. But in any case this much is clear to all Iraqis--who either prospered or suffered under this mass-murderer--he will never return to power again. And so the only way now is forward.
Perhaps the last words of a tyrannical mass-murderer facing his own death can somehow have enough impact on some of his former henchmen as to become his one documented act of clarity and compassion in an otherwise monstrous existence.
