While President Bush was taking his holiday to reflect on what to do now in Iraq, the Iraqis themselves took a step that may have entirely preempted his reflections. The botched execution of Saddam Hussein revealed the depths to which Iraq has sunk and the seeming hopelessness of our efforts there.
When we invaded Iraq and removed Saddam Hussein, we ended a tyranny. But so far we have been unsuccessful in implanting a real democracy or the culture that goes with it. Instead, we have created the conditions in which a country that had been held together by fear of Saddam Hussein is now fragmenting into a country held together by nothing at all.
I am no fan of the death penalty. But it is possible to try and to execute someone in a way that respects certain basic principles of democratic civilization. These principles include a trial that meets basic due process standards, adequate representation for the accused, an appeals process that is rule-bound and that is understood, respected and employed, and, when all appeals are exhausted, an execution that respects the basic human dignity of the one to be executed.
I do not know how the trial of Saddam Hussein will be viewed in the long run. It was certainly not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but there was at least an attempt to follow basic due-process standards. But once the decision to execute Hussein was made, everything beyond that broke down completely. Iraq's own laws related to the appeals process were ignored, the timing of the execution violated Iraqi laws related to executing someone during the politically sensitive Id al-adha holiday, and of course the whole world now knows that the execution of Hussein was a half-public spectacle of sectarian taunts and ghoulish reveling. Saddam was mocked as he went to his death, and photographed, and videotaped, and humiliated.
For at least two years, competing narratives have circulated related to what is happening in Iraq. The official administration perspective has been that a democracy is blooming, with however much difficulty, and that the country is on its way to becoming a functioning state under the rule of law, governed by officials serving the well-being of the nation and protected by military and police forces of growing competence.
The alternative view has been that Iraq is devolving into a cesspool of sectarian division, in which the previously ascendant Sunnis are losing power, the previously downtrodden Shiites are gaining power, and that such tribal identities eclipse any glimmer of shared national identity and loyalty. Perhaps the gravest evidence of this reality is the way in which Iraq's “security” forces, primarily the police, are so often at the scene of the crime for some of the worst mass killings of the new era. The police forces have essentially become covers for militias and death squads.
Hussein's execution helps to seal the deal, for me at least, in deciding to believe the narrative of sectarianism rather than democracy. It was not a democratic Iraqi state, operating according to the coolly rational standards of law and respecting the dignity of all of its citizens, that executed Saddam Hussein. It was instead a gleeful mob of Iraqi Shiites, celebrating the downfall of their enemy and mocking him to his death.
Hussein was a horrible man. But this botched execution deeply offended all of Sunni Iraq, as well as much of the rest of the world. The faint hope that Iraq might evolve into a nonsectarian democracy seems a mirage. Sunnis will undoubtedly be deepened in their impulse to flee the country if they can or to turn to their own militias and death squads.
The United States is the occupying power in Iraq. News reports seem to show that considerable U.S. efforts were made to slow down the execution and to make it fit with Iraqi law. However, in the end the U.S. did turn Hussein over to the Iraqi government, which proceeded with the chaotic execution. The fact that we protested the way Hussein's execution was handled will probably earn us little goodwill from Sunni Arabs who have experienced this event as a deepening of their humiliation and their vulnerability.
I don't see how we can justify the death of one more American soldier in the cause of a “democracy” such as the one on display at the execution of Saddam Hussein. Let's bring the troops home.
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— David P. Gushee is University Fellow and Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tenn. www.davidgushee.com