Saddam Hussein, former Iraqi leader convicted of crimes against humanity, has been executed this morning for crimes against humanity — just before dawn Iraq time (see Wikipedia). A slew of news analysis and historical tidbits have resurfaced, with the wide view that his death will be of little real significance for the situation in Iraq and the wider Middle East. If anything, Saddam's death outlines how his trial went — and failed — and the effects will be of historical symbolism and the small group of Saddam's Baathist loyalists up in arms while many celebrate. First of all, hanging a person is not the greatest way to start a country's legal system; the ensuing celebrations (from Iraqis and those US government) do not help frame the nation as all-too-well either, as if the violence did not already show Iraq to be in deep, serious strife. The reactions have largely been mixed.
The trial of Saddam Hussein and some of his closest minions was supposed to show Iraqis how bad their former regime had been and how a trial and the legal system should operate. It was all a judicial disgrace. More than a handful of countries seem to think that the execution will — if anything — increase the problems in Iraq. It is not going to have a positive effect, that's for sure. I should say that I am not at all a proponent of capital punishment.
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As I mentioned in my previous post on Saddam's impending execution, Saddam is one of several horrible former heads of state who have died this year. There was an extensive Atlantic Monthly article from 2002 profiling the dictator Saddam, who is to be buried with his brothers.
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What will the hanging of Saddam Hussein accomplish? What was it meant to accomplish — besides killing Saddam, that is. Between 5:30 and 5:45 (AM) local Iraqi time, the hanging took place. The era of Saddam’s domination in Iraq is now definitely over; he ruled absolutely for nearly 25 years before being overthrown in the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The execution was videoed to quash doubts that the execution was staged, though the actual act of hanging was not photographed (only before and after). “A dark chapter in Iraq’s history has come to an end” said Iraq state media while reporting the execution of Saddam. The immediate aftermath of the execution yielded little reaction in the Iraqi capital city of Baghdad. As word spread of Saddam’s death, some small crowds formed in celebration, a minority mourning the death of their former leader. One can only hope that the book of Saddam is really closed and that no new complications — such as a worse-than-expected reaction from Sunni Iraqis — will spring up as a result of the hanging. Initial media reports said that Saddam was killed alongside his half brother and a judge from his regime, both tried alongside him, though those reports were found to be erroneous. The judge and the half brother will be executed after the Eid holiday.
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Rehabilitation certainly would not have been a judicial option for his crimes, but his execution was not just either — nor is the state or otherwise unwarranted killing of a human being (e.g. not for self defense, etc.). Saddam Hussein: a power figure, a murderer and torturer, a danger to regional security, an overall bad man — but as a human being capital punishment should not have been executed (pun) upon him. I will not miss him, and I hope few or no others do, but that does not mean I am content with his hanging or the effects it will bring to an already destabilized — to say the least — region. Most emotions had already been expressed over the merits and failures in the man of Saddam Hussein, so many of the reactions to the news of his hanging are expected.
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Saddam Hussein’s trial, which started in 2005 and ended earlier this year, was supposed to show Iraqis how their leader had poorly led them; the crimes he had committed. The trial was also supposed to illustrate an atypical example of the criminal justice and legal systems for the fledgling Iraqi government and citizens being introduced to ‘democracy’. The failures of this trial — on a human rights, legal, and political scale — are momentous enough to make this “example” trial have a negative affect on Iraq. It was a botched trial, it is believed that the display of ‘justice’ did not even teach the Iraqis or their government anything about how a justice system is supposed to work. The long list of additional charges against Saddam will either be dismissed or will be filed and brought against him in his absence [post mortem]. The latter would be ridiculous, I think history has already made its judgment and there is no reason for the Iraqi judiciary to further ridicule itself. The decision on the other charges against Saddam and how the government is to go about treating them is yet to be announced. The “new direction” for Iraq was a heavily rhetoricized American political plan which emphasized the positive points that trying and convicting Saddam would bring — namely a national unity against Saddam, making at least some unity. However, that “new direction” outcome was about as good as the neoconservative doctrine that got the US to invade Iraq in the first place. “National reconciliation” was another key political point, which was minimized by the botched trial of Saddam and the subsequent hasty decision to execute him.
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I am reading — among other things — a book called The J Curve. The author, Eurasia Group president Ian Bremmer, wrote an article a while back using parts of the chapter of his book on Saddam's Iraq (which I just finished).
You can learn a lot about a country by looking at the relationship between its stability and its "openness." Stability is a measure of the extent to which a country's government can weather a political, economic or social crisis. Openness is a measure of the degree to which people, ideas, information, goods and services flow freely in both directions across a state's borders and within the country itself.
Some countries (the United States, Germany, Japan and many others) are stable because they are open. Other states (North Korea, Cuba, Iran and others) are stable because they are closed. In each of these closed states, a small governing elite has isolated the country's citizens from the outside world and from one another. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was stable because it was closed. President Bush hopes the new Iraq will be stable because it is open.
Imagine a graph on which the vertical axis measures a state's stability and the horizontal axis measures its openness. Each nation appears as a data point on the graph. Taken together, these data points produce a pattern very much like the letter J. Nations higher on the graph are more stable; those lower are less stable. Nations to the right of the dip in the J are more open. Those to the left are less open.
For a country on the closed left side of the curve to move to the open right side, it must pass through the dip in the J -- a period of dangerous instability. In the early 1990s, South Africa, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia each descended into this dip. South Africa re-emerged on the right side of the J curve as an open post-apartheid state. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia came apart and ceased to exist.
Right-side states have a collective interest in helping to shepherd authoritarian left-side states through the unstable dip in the curve toward a stability that is sturdier because it is based on openness. The Bush administration hopes to achieve just this kind of transition in Iraq.
In the spring of 2003, the United States pushed Iraq into the dip in the J curve.
The Bush administration finds itself in this position because it ignored one of the fundamental lessons of the J curve: it's one thing to destabilize an isolated authoritarian state; it's quite another to transform it into a country in which political and social stability is grounded in the free flow of ideas, information, trade and people.
That's something that Iraqis will one day have to do on their own.
The situation in Iraq is worse now than it was under Saddam, there is no question about that.
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One interesting thing is how Saddam stayed in power through his foreign policy disasters, including the invasion of Kuwait in 1991 — which he lost — and the skirmishes with Iran throughout the 1980s (and other dates), namely the
Iran-Iraq War — of which no one really won. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died as a result of Saddam’s tight and ruthless, and paranoid, stay-in-power policies, his attacks on Kurds and other ethnic and political factions resisting him, and from the stringent sanctions placed on Iraq [by the US]. Saddam
lived a life of harming others for his own gain; for his thirst for power and to retain that power. He ruled
by fear.
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Now a problem is that Iran is as powerful as ever, extending their Shia influence into Iraq too (Iraq's leading coalition is of the Shia Islam sect, Iran is a Shia Islamic state). Saddam — a Sunni — kept Iraq a major stabilizer in the Sunni-Shia Middle Eastern power vacuum. Now, Iran is almost unchecked in power at a time when it is taunting the international community. Also, the Sunni elite that used to run Iraq were dismissed in disastrous American policies in Iraq, increasing the number of guys with money, power/influence, and guns — three things that those former Baath party elites had. This made the ensuing insurgency all the more strong and make Shia-Sunni tensions build up to a high level of civil war that Iraq is in today.
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The New York Times had an
excellent editorial on the subject.
The important question was never really about whether Saddam Hussein was guilty of crimes against humanity. The public record is bulging with the lengthy litany of his vile and unforgivable atrocities: genocidal assaults against the Kurds; aggressive wars against Iran and Kuwait; use of internationally banned weapons like nerve gas; systematic torture of countless thousands of political prisoners.
What really mattered was whether an Iraq freed from his death grip could hold him accountable in a way that nurtured hope for a better future. A carefully conducted, scrupulously fair trial could have helped undo some of the damage inflicted by his rule. It could have set a precedent for the rule of law in a country scarred by decades of arbitrary vindictiveness. It could have fostered a new national unity in an Iraq long manipulated through its religious and ethnic divisions.
It could have, but it didn’t. After a flawed, politicized and divisive trial, Mr. Hussein was handed his sentence: death by hanging. This week, in a cursory 15-minute proceeding, an appeals court upheld that sentence and ordered that it be carried out posthaste. Most Iraqis are now so preoccupied with shielding their families from looming civil war that they seem to have little emotion left to spend on Mr. Hussein or, more important, on their own fading dreams of a new and better Iraq.
What might have been a watershed now seems another lost opportunity. After nearly four years of war and thousands of American and Iraqi deaths, it is ever harder to be sure whether anything fundamental has changed for the better in Iraq.
Toppling Saddam Hussein did not automatically create a new and better Iraq. Executing him won’t either.
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