Invitation to a Hanging
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
It’s going to be illuminating in the coming weeks to see the reaction to the sentence of death handed down against Saddam Hussein by a courageous court in Baghdad. The ex-dictator was convicted of crimes against humanity for reacting to an assassination attempt in 1982 in the village of Dujail by having 148 men and boys of the village killed. He showed no remorse, refusing to stand for his sentence until he was hoisted up by his armpits. He ranted throughout the proceedings about the illegitimacy of the court and called out about God. The most odious of his lawyers, Ramsey Clark, was ejected from proceedings by the judge, using the unceremonious words “out, out.” But as word of the sentence spread throughout Iraq it was greeted, save in some of the Sunni sections, with outbursts of joy. The verdict and sentence deserve to be met here in America with grim satisfaction that in the face of all kinds of dangers — including warnings that the sentence would ignite a true civil war — Free Iraq’s tribunal did its duty.
Saddam’s fate is now going to an appeals process. It’s one of the marks of civilization. In the case of, say, Tojo, the appeals took a matter of weeks. He was proven guilty on November 12, 1948, and mounted the gallows on December 23, after sending his false teeth to his wife and calling out “Banzai” and shaking hands with the American officers who escorted him to the death house, according to a Buddhist priest quoted by the Associated Press. In the case of Eichmann, the appeals took slightly less than six months, during which pleas for mercy came even from some rabbis. When the mastermind of the Holocaust finally met his fate at the prison at Ramle, New Yorkers were treated to an editorial in the New York Times noting that Germany wasn’t the only country where hatred existed and discussing the lack of civil rights in America.*
No sooner was Saddam’s sentence handed down than the hard left factions jumped in. Amnesty International issued a statement saying it “deplores”the death sentence, as it reckons the process was flawed and unfair. Human Rights Watch issued a statement criticizing both the Bush administration and the post-Saddam government of Iraq and predicting that the verdict “will not stand the test of history.” The U.N. bureaucracy will probably faint. The sentence, however, was greeted with quick approval by the Democrats, who seemed to tumble over themselves an effort to get out statements of approval of the capital sentence. Governor Dean praised the verdict and commended our soldiers for protecting the trial itself. Senator Reid expressed the hope that the verdict would be an “important part of healing,” and the ranking minority member of the Armed Services Committee in the House, Congressman Skelton, saw the verdict as reflecting “that the Iraqis have established a rule of law and a functioning judiciary system.” Senator Biden harrumphed that “justice was served.”
The Democrats’ reaction underscores one of the few similarities between a gallows and election. They both concentrate the mind. Yet no sooner had the Democrats expressed their approval of the verdict than they all went back to Kerrying on about the very war that made this triumph of justice possible. Mr. Dean goes on to complain that “and growing sectarian violence will be an even greater concern following this verdict,” Senator Reid that the Iraqis “have traded a dictator for chaos” with “our troops caught in the middle,” Mr. Skelton that the verdict “may very well inflame sectarian violence in some areas.” It’s as if they were all singing from the same song-book.
These are the kinds of caveats one has come to expect from the Democrats, which is something to remember in the voting booth tomorrow. The Democrats react with outrage if one questions the party’s commitment to victory even while they favor a policy of abandoning the Iraqi institutions liberation has helped create. We have no doubt that the most Americans see this sentence as a courageous act, an essential step in the road to quelling the violence against Iraq’s freely elected government. From the start, we have favored lustration. And we have favored it as coming from Iraqi institutions, as opposed to, say, a United Nations or hybrid tribunal. So long as Saddam breathes, he is an incentive to violence on the part of those who dream of the days before democracy. Peace will have a better chance when he is in his grave.
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* “Hate is murder,” the Times, on June 2, 1962, editorialized in respect of the execution of Eichmann. “Was pre-war Germany the only country in which this murderous emotion was allowed full play? No. In different forms it was encouraged in Russia and other Communist countries. It was stimulated in Spain, where it put a dictator in power. It is a deadly disease everywhere races are in conflict. What of our own country, where the power of the Federal Government has had to be invoked to secure equal justice for a racial minority?”