The Execution of Saddam

by: Dark Wraith

Update
10:20 p.m. EST--Saddam Hussein has been executed.

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Saddam Hussein is "hours" from execution, according to his attorneys. In my editorial of November 6, 2006, "In Moot Defense of Saddam," I set forth my condemnation of what constitutes yet another brutish violation of international law by the Bush Administration and its various agents of opportunity.

Writing at her blog, BlondeSense, Liz notes that Saddam's execution is the result of conviction on capital charges related to "...killing 148 people who were planning to assassinate him back in 1982." In comments on the thread from that article at BlondeSense, I expressed my assessment of what will result from Saddam's hanging. In edited and expanded form, I herewith publish that assessment as an editorial position of The Dark Wraith Forums.

Spiteful vengeance breeds spiteful vengeance. Despite the belief by neo-conservatives and a fair number of supporters of capital punishment that they are the best at all manner of retributive violence, and despite the American people's belief that we are seeing the worst of the quagmire that has become our unjustified, illegal attack on and occupation of Iraq, we as a nation have not even begun to see what horrors may rise from the sands of that grim and ancient land.

The old saying, "Paybacks are a bitch" is an understatement when it comes to the consequences that will flow from the execution of Saddam Hussein. The Sunnis who were Saddam's associates, allies, and family will ensure that the payback for our killing of him constitutes the kind of bitch that will keep on giving and giving, generation after generation. We are opening something far worse than the garden-variety war we've been losing in Iraq.

We are, in fact, about to open a tribal blood feud.

George W. Bush, the man whose base of support in the Christian Right has long looked to him to return America to a country of traditional values, has now succeeded in reviving for all Americans one of the deepest and most ancient of such values. The right of a tribe to exact revenge upon an offending tribe will now be exercised by the Sunnis, be they Ba'athist remnants, al-Qa'ida terrorists, villagers from Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, or some other force with timeless values, old means, and newly inspired motive.

Whether we in our individual leanings be conservative or liberal, Leftist or Right-wing, we are now—perhaps in a way entirely foreign to us in all our modernity—members of a tribe by virtue of an act by the leader. As such, each of us individually now qualifies by ancient rites and privileges of the aggrieved to pay for what has been done to a member of another tribe, one far more attuned to "traditional values" than we.

And yet, when that payback is visited upon us—and it will come to us—we shall scream bloody murder at the injustice of the outrage. That, of course, is to be expected of a tribe that has lost its understanding of tradition.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

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