The Execution of Saddam Hussein: A Lesson We Never Learn, But Should.

By Tecola W. Hagos

EDITORIAL

Two drastically different events occurred almost contemporaneously from opposite parts of the World. In Iraq the former President of Iraq is hanged for �crimes against humanity� (for mass murder) by his own people (with terrible assistance from the United States and allies), with thousands of Iraqi people cheering and dancing in the streets of Baghdad and several other cities and towns around Iraq . By contrast, in the United States, the ex-President of the United States, President Gerald Ford died peacefully in his bed surrounded by family and is honored by the people of the United States with a State Funeral. Nothing in life could strike us with such contrast as did these two events.

In far profound sense, such two contrasting events reflect the underlying strength or weakness of two systems or ways of life, political structure, culture, and religion. If one is gullible, one may think in terms of inferior or superior human nature looking at the two events and thereby reaching hasty and sweeping but wrong conclusions. We must start our analysis and our understanding of human life by accepting the idea that there is only one universal human nature, and that it is life�s special conditions of culture, religion, available resources, geographic setting et cetera that molds such universal nature to manifest itself into differently specialized social groups.

As human beings, we all have our passage down the corridor of time: wherein a few of us walk on wobbly legs on razor-thin edge of benevolent human transcendent, compared to a lot of us running down the far expansive avenue of pervasive state of nature that is brutal, violent, and nasty. I see in the two disparate events that took place a metaphor of human existence. I see no winners but the tragic processes of human life. It seems Unamuno had understood life better and closer to the truth than Nietzsche who could only perceive of human existence in the narrowest of terms that of power and dominance, for example.

All day long, on December 30, 2006 the State Funeral of President Gerald Ford was orchestrated in all its dignity and pomp. On the other hand Saddam Hussein met his death by hanging in a concrete bunker in prison and was bundled off to an undisclosed dusty town to be buried without any public recognition. Are two human beings, who were at one point, in their respective lives, at the very pinnacles of power, so far apart in their essential humanness that one is almost edified while the other is put to death as the vilest of criminals and his corps buried with little fanfare? If we consider the political life of Gerald Ford we find destructions and death on monumental scale too even though Gerald Ford is not personally engaged in such atrocities. Gerald Ford as part of the Government of the United States as a Congressman had endorsed and approved funding of the Vietnam war and other numerous incidents where the United States Government military forces had killed literally millions of people in other parts of the world. Of course, there is no comparison between these two human beings in the way they carried out their political lives. Nevertheless, it will be a gross error to see one as all pure and the other all evil.  

In the end, Saddam Hussein mustered great dignity walking to his death with such detachment that he recovered most of the dignity he lost when he was captured disheveled in a foxhole unbecoming of a person who claims descent from Nebuchadnezzar the Great King of Babylon. From the footage I saw on TV, Saddam Hussein faced his executioners with his head held high with absolute calmness that defy logic. By contrast, his executioners could not even dare show their faces, hooded and anonymous. Tragically, the Western leaders such as George Bush and Tony Blair and their collaborators the motley Arab leaders, secure behind their military might looked more like whimpering Lilliputians issuing bland press releases.  Saddam, at the end exited an enigma, leaving all his antagonists to ponder the virtue of hanging an old man who has been reduced to nothing.

Personally, despite my absolute hate for Saddam Hussein because of what he has done destroying the lives of millions of his own people, I felt this unexpected pang of compassion watching him on TV shovel his way to the gallows. In the end what I saw was just a man at the end of his rope, literally and figuratively, without a past, just a man being killed by his fellow man. I learned two significant facts about my self: first that I am not a good politician; and second, I will never be an executioner. Although, often enough both functions would overlap, we delude ourselves by trusting our politicians to do the right thing by us. Often, they serve their own self-interest more than leading us into enlightenment. I have been told by my teachers, friends, and venerated books that politics and religion must be delaminated from each other and the principles to be employed in either do not necessarily have unanimity. Such verdict on the human capacity tells us more about our deficiency as we are rather than describing a set of limitations on what we can be.

This brief essay is not a eulogy or a requiem to a brutal tyrant, but a sad observation of life in its specificity and in its generality too�as Unamuno would put it, �a tragic sense of life.� I cry for all of us, for all human kind, what a sorry figure we cut even in times of our greatest triumphs. What all these condense to is that one group of people are dancing in their streets after hanging their former President, while another group of people in another part of the world are giving a dignified send-off, a State Funeral, to their former President who lived to the ripe old age of ninety three years pampered and indulged. If you would allow me to speak out of character for a second, let me say that the moral of the story is that it is better to be the Ex-President of the United States than that of Iraq .

Tecola W. Hagos

Washington DC

30 December 2006