I love how the United States can find cause to celebrate the sentencing of Saddam Hussein to death by hanging. Here there is such a steadfast and obligatory bond between our version of democracy and capital punishment. While all modern democracies have eschewed the death penalty, the US has clung to it as an anchor in the self-deluded rhetoric of deterrence. I mean, hell, the state-sponsored murder of Timothy McVeigh on June 11, 2001, kept America real safe from terrorists for at least three months. I bet the Department of (Orwellian) Justice was real mad that the 9/11 hijackers committed suicide instead of waiting around for the government to do its job. Is this the freedom and democracy we intended to impose upon Iraq? Surely yes. Is this progress in the Middle East? Yes, but my name’s not Shirley. The true banality of this sentence (with apologies to Hannah Arendt) is that Saddam is being sent to the gallows for 148 deaths while there have been more than 45,000* civilian deaths since the US invasion. Who is going to hang for those deaths? (I can only hope it will be people like Andrew Sullivan who supported the illegal and immoral invasion in the first place.)
If you’re American, remember to vote (for the lesser of two evils) tomorrow.
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* CORRECTION: The latest estimate of civilian deaths in Iraq since the US invasion is closer to 150,000.