Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader reads on the news wire that Saddam Hussein is likely to be hanged at dawn. (That would be the middle of the night for me in the Villainschloss.)
Long time readers will know that not only did your Maximum Leader support the US invasion of Iraq (and he continues to think that it was a good move at the time). And they will surely know that he has no problem executing people. Indeed, some people just need killin’. Saddam Hussein is one of those who need killin’.
Excursus: Did your Maximum Leader once write a post about why he thought that WWII war criminals (high-ranking Nazis and Japanese) should have just been rounded up and executed? Was that a blog post? Was it a paper in graduate school? Anyway… Since your Maximum Leader’s archives (and trackbacks) still aren’t fully functional; he can’t tell you for sure.
But, your Maximum Leader isn’t in favor of killing Saddam Hussein. At least not now. It seems to him as though once you’ve started a whole judicial process and queued up cases against him, you need to finish the process. Your Maximum Leader might have felt a little different if he had been convicted and immediately conveyed to the place of execution. (Does anyone do that anymore? Conviction in the morning and execution at sundown… Trust your Maximum Leader, you’ll see a bit of that during the Mike World Order.) But since the Iraqi government has lined up further cases against their former leader; it seems as though they should just keep on convicting him of further crimes and when they’ve had enough trials then kill him.
It is possible that the Iraqis are ready to be done with Saddam now. Perhaps they don’t really want to go on with more trials. They’ve had enough. Thirty years of dictatorship and oppression can do that to you.
Of course one wonders about the fallout of a Saddam execution. While there aren’t lots of Iraqi “Whites” leading armies to free their “Tsar” from the “Reds,” there might be a small number of Sunni insurgents who will give up the will to fight once Saddam is dead. Very few most likely.
Frankly, your Maximum Leader feels that the hanging of Saddam Hussein will likely result in giving insurgents an excuse to kill more Iraqis. Not that keeping him alive will result in insurgents killing fewer of their countrymen.
Your Maximum Leader supposes he is more ambivilent about killing Saddam than he suspected. Hanging is probably too good for ‘em. But, your Maximum Leader supposes that the Iraqi government isn’t about to drop Saddam off the back of a truck in a Kurdish village announcing “Here’s Saddam! Do what thou wilt.”
Now THAT would be justice.
Carry on.
