Saddam and the Death Penalty
What a suspenseful moment it must have been last night during Diane Sawyer's "Primetime" interview of George Bush. The question was whether Bush thought Saddam should receive the death penalty. Here's an excerpt from the interview:
"He is a torturer, a murderer, and they had rape rooms, and this is a disgusting tyrant who deserves justice, the ultimate justice," Bush said in an interview with Diane Sawyer for the ABC News show "Primetime." White House officials confirmed Bush was referring to capital punishment.
Oh, really? We needed the White House to confirm that Bush was talking about the death penalty? This is a guy who had 152 people put to death during his six years as governor. Ya think?
I figure Saddam is pretty much the modern litmus test for how people feel about the death penalty. If you can't support it for Saddam, you can't support it, period. Personally, I maintain my belief that morally (and in this case, strategically), the U.S. ought not be involved in the death penalty. Now, the Iraqis might feel a little differently about it, and I think it's their right to decide what to do with him.
Here's an interesting quote from Ginan Ibrahim, a 28 year old Iraqi woman at a rally yesterday: "The Iraqi people should decide how Saddam should be executed. Either we cut off his head or cut him to pieces."
I suspect they'll end up doing both, and they might also stone all the little leftover pieces of his body for good measure.
I wonder if the potential method of Saddam's potential execution will become an issue in the larger death penalty debate? The bizarre history of the death penalty in the U.S. has seen a transformation in the ways that the state can kill people. Hangings and firing squads, once fashionable, gave way to electric chairs, then lethal injections, then repeated viewings of "American Idol" while eating bag after bag of Olestra-laced Doritos.
But cutting people up? We just don't do that in this country. I'm not sure why, really. Maybe it's considered passe. Perhaps it's barbaric. Maybe it messes up the afterlife for either the cutter or the cuttee. Or maybe it's just too hard to keep your fine cutlery sharp after that kind of work. Who knows?
Bottom line, I doubt too many people outside of the Vatican will have a whole lot of sympathy for what happens to the guy, one way or the other. I know I won't. Maybe that means I'm not an absolutist in my beliefs about the death penalty, but I'm fine with that. I think there's a pretty damn big difference between your garden-variety murderer (who may or may not have been fairly represented, or even be guilty at all), and your 30 year dictator-type who crushed a culture and a people and pretty much beyond a shadow of doubt committed genocide, mass murder and mass rape.
I personally can't identify with the thirst for blood that so many people feel who advocate the death penalty here in the U.S. But people who have seen their families, culture and country destroyed by a despot for nearly all their lives?
I think you cut those people some slack, and let them do what they will to the guy. People are people, and reason and morality probably is no match for rage and despair writ that large, for that long.
10:56:38 AM 
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