Originally Posted by
econ21
We've had three locked threads connected to Saddam's execution. But it seems sad if the Backroom can't discuss a current event as salient as this, so let's try a fourth time to get a thread that does not need to be locked.
I want to have a go with a fourth thread, because the execution has created a strong, negative, feeling in me that I don't think has been articulated so far.
When I first realised that Saddam was likely to be executed - long ago, at the start of his trial - I had mixed feelings. I could see the Nuremburg analogy and I reviled the man. But confronting the reality has hardened my view against it. Seeing an old man with a noose around his neck, surrounded by hooded executioners, is a disturbing image. It reminds me of those awful "snuff" videos of the terrorists and their soon to be beheaded orange clothed prisoners. It invokes pity and sadness because it shows a man about to die. And it angers me because my government (the UK) has been complicit in what led up to it and because it lowers "our side" to a level perilously close to that of Saddam and the jihadi terrorists. I would like to say that we don't kill people in cold blood, that we don't torture, that we don't deprive people of liberty for years without trial. But I can't.
I am against capital punishment and in essence, the issue of capital punishment is almost all this case boils down to. But, like most red blooded people, I can momentarily waiver in my opposition to the death penalty when faced with a specific heinous crime or monstrous criminal. Yet, somehow, Saddam's case just reinforced my opposition to any executions.
This is despite my firm belief that Saddam was a gangster and a particularly murderous one. And I have no reasonable doubt that he committed the crime for which he was executed, as well as many more.
But there is just something repellant in coldly taking a helpless man's life. If in war, an enemy soldier is pointing a gun at you, I would have no hesitation in saying kill him. I am not a pacifist. But to take a man's life when there is a simple non-violent alternative (life imprisonment) just seems wrong. I know I can't persuade anyone of that view - it's axiomatic; you either share it or you do not. A life has an instrinsic value, whether it's that of an old mass murderer in a cell, or a newborn baby in Iraq. Taking it unnecessarily seems disrespectful of humanity, malign and I want to say devoid of love, to use the language probably derived my Christian upbringing.
I am generally suspicious of "slippery slope" arguments, but they do seem to apply here. Once you start killing people in cold blood, it becomes easier to contemplate launching a missile into an Al Jahazeera office because you don't like their message, taking a few captured insurgents round the back to be summarily executed or poisoning a dissident who is agitating against you. Executions seem to entail a state sponsored level of brutality that weaken our sensibilities and defenses against lethal abuses of state power.
Will there be an instrumental benefit in having taken Saddam's life? To be honest, I don't really care. That's not the point. You could make arguments either way, although it does not seem auspicious (some Iraqi Sunnis apparently viewing the execution as a declaration of war).
Maybe we can't discuss this issue in a civilised manner. Maybe the battlelines are too clearly drawn. It's too much a case of "one for our side!" and "gotcha!". American soldiers are being killed every week in Iraq and Saddam, probably wrongly, is identified as the figurehead of the killers. (If it were OBL instead of Saddam on the gallows, I might momentarily waiver again. But after this experience, I doubt it.) But let's try to discuss it without flames or cheap shots.
Saddam Hussein's execution: V
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