Saddam Hussein enters death, deported thereto by a court elected governance sustained, and the man who disturbed so much for a country and the world, we might have been told these last couple of days, makes in absence no difference to the living.
What's one man? A lot, if he will be a master to slaves.
One variation on Hussein's penalty bearing no significance or relevance is to compare the execution to the poor profits of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. Analogies to the Weimar Republic and Versailles are inapt, but illustrative of the weakness in justification for clemency.
If the fall of the Weimar were simply a matter of the severity of collective punishment, then Italy should not have fallen to fascism a decade before the rise of the Nazis. And if Germany's national socialists were to have relied solely on depression and public discontent, the Third Reich would never have come to be.
What was necessary was a methodical undermining of successive elected parliaments, chiefly by one man, General Kurt von Schleicher, who after three years could finally persuade a senile President Paul von Hindenberg to appoint "that little Austrian corporal" to chancellorship of a coalition government. The last German autocrat ascended not because the Great War ended with an exaction of vengeance, but because the victors' treaty did not, as in 1945, deracinate institutions of Germanic authoritarianism.
The trial, conviction and execution of Hussein and any other culpable adjutants is, whatever the emotions or difficulties of the moment, one step in the eradication of authoritarian culture. Now, the dictator's executioners indeed included Shiites who, as has been confirmed, were chanting, with one reference to a late Shiite cleric. On one hand we shouldn't let modern Western timidity of religious zeal color our judgment of men who, in spite of themselves, mocked a man who literally controlled most aspects of their lives in all memory. On the other, the Iraqi state is in contention, and compulsion is the way of those who also speak like the gallows' witnesses.
The following has already been stated by some commentators, but thankfully so: the deposition of Saddam Hussein is nearly without precedent. One hundred years ago the balance of democratic governments were interested in the larger world mostly to find their own ways. Fifty years ago the free world defended itself along boundaries and prosecuted crimes against human dignity out of obligation to closure.
Then there is Manuel Noriega, removed from power in a single American stroke, whose former estate of Panama is now liberal and free. Even with other factors engaging the campaign in Iraq, that Hussein was indicted, captured and consigned to a sentence begs whether dictatorship is a crime that the democracies should finally see codified. Men kill other men for power because they believe they can do it with impunity, but now despotism could be a fugitive's affair.
As to the trifecta that is a declared enemy of Iraqi democracy — gangs mostly under Muqtada al Sadr, Ba'athists and Saddamites, and al Qaeda — their provenance is denied when one conflates forgiveness with a recognition of wrong, and places Hussein's end in terms of "Iraqi reconciliation." All sources of finance and guidance of the three are themselves fascistic: Syria, Iran, and other quasi-governmental totalitarian parties in the region.
These actors are not driven by grievance or cause. They simply want — like Saddam Hussein — total, arbitrary control over as many people as possible, and will use violence and fear to attain it. And they, like Saddam, must not be excused but confronted, defeated, and destroyed.