Remembering Saddam

Friday ended as a grim and depressing day. Not that I doubt Saddam guilt's for one second. He was clearly guilty of the crimes he was convicted of and for much, much more. By all accounts, he was a crude, sadistic and brutal megalomaniac rivaling some of the worst dictators the world has ever seen. He was responsible for the deaths in Dujail but also for the thousands of deaths and disappearances among Iraqis of all ethnicities and sects. He is also guilty of the starting the Iran-Iraq war and the invasion of Kuwait. What made yesterday grim and depressing is the was the way Saddam's execution was handled and its timing.

It was not supposed to happen this way. His prosecution, trial and conviction should have been an open and transparent process. It should have set a precedent for the region and for the world that such tyranny and brutality is unacceptable. Saddam needs to be remembered for all his misdeeds and held accountable for all of them. All Iraqis needed to see what happened during his reign. For those brutalized by his regime, it would be a cathartic process, a legitimization of their grief, a sense that justice is prevailing and the start of the healing process. For those Iraqis still under his spell, it would have been a rude and necessary awakening.

Instead, Saddam's trial was at times farcical and at times tragic and according to independent organizations, one that was not fair and transparent. Many questions are left unanswered. Why were the crimes committed at Dujail the first ones for which he was put on trial and not the more significant crimes against the Kurds? Why the rush to carry out his sentence? There are several possible explanations all of them having to do with politics rather than the pursuit of justice. The Shia dominated government set the tone and course of Saddam's trial to cater to the will of their Shia constituency. Perhaps the government thought that by getting rid of Saddam as a symbol, parts of the insurgency may become easier to control. Or could it be that exposing Saddam's misdeeds from the 1980's may raise uncomfortable questions about what role the U.S. government played in propping up his regime -recall the image of the friendly Rumsfeld Saddam handshake.

What is also disturbing about this whole episode is that the utter American failure in the conduct of the war in Iraq and its aftermath, the thousands of civilian deaths and the descent into civil war threaten to overshadow in many Iraqi minds memories of Saddam's brutality for they are dealing with the grim reality of today. So Saddam will be quickly forgotten by many, and lionized by a few. The bigger question is whether the people of Iraq and the Middle East will have learned a lesson from his reign of terror or whether we are condemned of have history repeat itself.