January 1, 2007

Thanks, Iraq: Liberty and Justice Win One

You don’t have to be a fan of capital punishment – and I am not – to recognize when someone richly deserved it. And while the life-valuing purist in me wishes on some level that there had been another way, it’s hard not to see the dear departure of Saddam Hussein as an achievement all its own.

Amid all the sectarian violence, the celebrated troop-death milestones and debates over the use of the term “civil war,” let’s take a moment to acknowledge that Saddam’s plunge from the gallows was an important event for many reasons.

It hasn’t been the norm throughout history for brutal tyrants to come to such swift and decisive justice through a judicial process handled by their own people. Nicolae Ceausescu was shot in the head by an angry Romanian mob and thrown in a ditch with his nasty, evil wife. Benito Mussolini was hanged upside down in the public square by a similarly angry Italian mob. Manuel Noriega was tried, convicted and jailed by the United States, not by Panama.

Lovely men, all. I can’t manage to muster a single tear for any of them.

But Saddam’s path to justice was far more satisfying on many more levels. Yes, the Iraqi people needed America’s help to depose him and hustle him out of his spider hole. There is no reason to hold that against them. If you were living under the iron rule of a man who was not afraid to use chemical weapons on his own people, you’d be afraid to make trouble too. After hundreds of thousands of Iraqis ended up in mass graves at the hands of Saddam, his sadistic sons and the rest of his henchmen, they deserved the American assist.

That said, the Iraqis did a wonderful job of taking it from there. In spite of having no experience in such matters, in spite of the murder of several lawyers and threats against judges associated with the case, in spite of the attempt by Saddam’s defense team (including former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark) to turn the trial into a circus – then claim it was unfair because it had been a circus – the Iraqi judicial system produced a clean conviction that had no trouble standing up on appeal.

The Iraqis also admirably turned away the protests of UN types who wanted to take the trial out of their hands and send it to the Hague, where Slobodan Milosevic had managed to fend off justice until death took him first, and Saddam would surely have been able to do the same. Taking the trial out of Iraqi control and putting it in an international forum would have been preferable, so went the argument, because it would have garnered more international acceptance.

To hell with that. Most of the people who would have preferred a Hague trial would have also preferred to leave the butcher in power in the first place.

Dealing with Saddam’s crimes was the job of the Iraqis. It was they who suffered under his brutality. It was their right to mete out justice. No one had the right to take that away from them, and it is to the eternal credit of George W. Bush that he not only gave them the opportunity, but refused to see it taken away from them when self-righteous diplomatic types demanded that he do so.

Saddam’s execution should not be overlooked when the benefits of Iraq’s liberation are recorded in history. It is huge. Liberty requires the right to self-determination, and by handling Saddam’s path to justice as independently and completely as they did, the Iraqis showed the rest of the Middle East region not only that they could move toward freedom, but that they would know what to do with their freedom once they achieved it.

Whatever else yet happens in Iraq’s struggle to achieve peace and freedom, they scored a huge achievement when they made Saddam Hussein hang high. They served notice to every dictator, tyrant and thug across the globe that those who suffer under their despotic oppression would, given the chance, deliver the justice they deserve.

President Bush is correct when he says that liberty is not America’s gift to the world, but is God’s gift to all mankind. Sometimes it just needs a little help getting unshackled. In Iraq’s case, it clearly needs a lot of help. But Americans should not forget who laid the groundwork for the bloodbath with which we are grappling today.

Some who have lost all sense of perspective have actually argued that Iraq would have been better off with Saddam left in charge. The Iraqis have now answered this claim, with the tug of a rope and the snap of a neck. It’s good when liberty and justice win one.