I prefer to see him hanged from the point of view of justice.
Actually, if we were going for any real justice, he oughta be shredded. Slowly and publicly, preferably over an extended period of time.
Shred a bit, heal a bit, shred a bit, heal a bit. Lather, rinse, repeat.
But leaving aside the issue of justice for a moment, the real value of seeing Saddam at the end of a rope is what I commented the day of his sentencing: seeing Saddam get his just desserts just might make one or two other would-be tinpot dictators think twice before emulating his career.
Or, to put it conversely, what the Dulleye Llama is arguing for really represents nothing less than the empowerment of those who mass-murder other human beings. The eventual unintended consequences are hardly in line with his ideals of respect for human life.
But it seems a lot of people have difficulty with the concept of respecting the lives of the innocent as contrasted with respecting the lives of those who murder them.
Exactly. The absolutist view of capital punishment ignores the real-life consequences. For instance, what if Hitler could have been assassinated before millions of innocent human beings were exterminated as if they were so many vermin? Anti-death penalty absolutism tacitly says that the millions of victims were expendable, so long as the most hideous example of human life is revered as sacred.