Is Saddam On the Fast Track to Martyrdom?

The hanging of Saddam Hussein apparently is imminent. According to some accounts, it could happen as soon as today.

Once upon a time, the execution of the Iraqi dicator would have been cause for an enormous celebration in Iraq and an enormous sigh of relief in the free world. As a reluctant supporter of the U.S. invasion early on, I looked forward to this day. Even as things began to unravel in late 2003, the discovery of a cowering Saddam in a rat hole made me enormously proud of the soldiers on the ground even as I was coming to realize that the men who had sent them to hunt him down were arrogant liars.

I wanted Saddam to face justice in The Hague, but reluctantly agree with the White House-orchestrated decision to have him tried in an Iraqi court. The resulting proceedings were a modest if wobbly triumph despite the repeated efforts of the dominant Shiites to manipulate the proceedings as Saddam himself might have had he still been in power, as well the suspect timing of a death sentence read out two days before a do-or-die mid-term election for George Bush’s Republican Party.

Once upon a time, the White House hoped that a guilty verdict, death sentence and execution of a dictator whose crimes beggar belief, would enable Iraq to exorcise its demons. Me, too. But it won’t make a jot of difference to a people whose lives are overwhelmed with death and destruction worse than Saddam visited on them.

Sadly — so sadly — Saddam’s hanging will be little more than yet another violent act in a place where lives are now measured by how many family members a person has lost to kidnappings and suicide bombings that are an inevitable result of a mission so fraught with failure that future historians will have no difficulty characterizing it as the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history.

As extreme as it may have seemed at one time, it is worth considering whether Iraqis were better off under Saddam Hussein.

That would have been a extraordinary question in 2003. Saddam was, after all, a saber-rattling tyrant. He operated a feared secret police, a system of prisons and psychiatric hospitals full of people who were tortured and held without charge or trial, as well as rape camps. But three and a half years later, the question has taken on a shocking legitimacy.

And in turn leads to another:

George Bush and his neocon brain trust have taken a broken country and broken it all over again. They have succeeded in doing the impossible by making many Iraqis nostalgic for the bad old days.

Will the U.S. guarantee that Saddam Hussein’s legacy is martyrdom instead of infamy?