The verdict is in and former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein will be hanged.
After a year-long trial that many deemed a media circus, Hussein went out in a blaze of glory shouting, “Long live the people! Long live the Arab nation! Down with the spies!”
This leaves us to wonder whether his looming execution will provide closure and quell sectarian violence, or make Hussein a martyr and immortalize his image among followers.
Sunnis have already taken to the streets in protest chanting, “The ground will be burned.”
And while Hussein was a terrible, tyrannical ruler, hanging him will do nothing more than increase insurgent fervor and forever etch Hussein’s memory in people’s minds.
A much crueler fate for Hussein would be to let him rot in prison for the rest of his life, so that his insane rants would go unheard and forgotten.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said in an address following Hussein’s conviction that “his sentence does not represent anything because executing him is not worth the blood he spilled, but it may bring some comfort to the families of the martyrs.”
As Americans who have never had to live under Hussein’s iron fist, we are hardly qualified to tell the Iraqi people not to execute Hussein. But death by execution is not a democratic value, and by resisting the popular call for Hussein’s death, the Iraqi government would demonstrate its strength as a legitimate, democratic nation.
For many, Hussein’s death sentence was an inevitable conclusion and one that should provide closure to the millions of innocent Iraqi’s who were affected by his bloody rule. But we are hard-pressed to believe that his execution will spell the end of violence in the region.
Hussein was at his weakest when he was captured by U.S. forces in December 2003, when television stations aired pictures of Hussein emerging from his hideout, dirty, lice-infested and haggard.
But the trial that allowed Hussein to assert himself as the champion of the Iraqi people and his subsequent death sentence marked the reemergence of Hussein as a strong — albeit insane – leader.
Executing him will be the sad grand finale in the Saddam Hussein drama.