Full story here . “I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”
I just don’t have it in me to feel anything remotely like sympathy for Saddam. He’s certainly killed enough innocent men, women and children that justice is being served (and even if you think the charges against him are grossly exaggerated [which I don’t] remember that by U.S. law it only takes one {1} innocent death to be executed and by Iraqi there are plenty of non-violent capital offenses). I even have an evil little hope that he doesn’t make a good death- that he cries like a baby, pleads for his life and pisses his pants on the way to the gallows because he is the worst kind of scum: the kind that usually gets away scot free.
However, I do wonder if hated as he is he could be made a martyr in the not terribly distant future. He’d hardly be the first or arguably even the worst person ever to have a posthumous cult following, and his death is as attributible to America as it is to his judges. And if he’s not, still potentially dangerous, for as the one secular leader in that area of the world he could be held up as a villain of the “Sic semper secularitas” variety: this is what happens when you do not rule straight from Sharia. That could also be bad.
Plus that comment he made about how “if you strike me down I will only become more powerful than you can imagine…” was sort of ominous, especially the way he was wielding that flashlight at the time.
Imagine in a generation trying to teach the history of this war to the students who are born after it. “America was attacked on 9-11-06 by planes hijacked by 19 Muslim extremist Fundamentalists, almost all of them from Saudi Arabia and blooded in Afghanistan. We declared war on those responsible by crippling the Taliban in a matter of weeks before spending the next several years deploying far more troops to the destruction of the most powerful non-Fundamentalist in the region who in addition to not being an ally of most Fundamentalists was in fact hated by them for not being a Fundamentalist. But, he was a veddy veddy bad man. And Saudi Arabia we did nothing to because they were our friends. Any questions? No, I will not repeat it, that was the tenth time!”