I am glad he is gone too, befor e he could be freed by some Sunni team. It is too bad the idiot Shiites couldn't conduct things in a better fashion, still it was ten thousand times better than being thrown off a building and a million times better than being ground up by a chipper.
The Strong Man expects to die in one of two ways — with a nine millimeter ballot (ie, assassination) — or old age. That has certainly been the case in the Middle East. A public, legal trial followed by court-sentenced execution? That isn’t going to happen unless…unless a democracy replaces a tyranny. This is astonishing news — history altering news. For centuries the terrible yin-yang of tyrant and terrorist has trapped the Middle East. In 2003 the US-led coalition began the difficult but worthy effort of breaking that tyrant’s and terrorist’s trap, and offering another choice in the politically dysfunctional Arab Muslim Middle East.Frankly, I doubt Robert Mugabe will get any message at all from this. But except for that quibble, I think the views in this quote are correct.Saddam’s demise serves as object lesson and example. In late 2003 every Middle Eastern autocrat saw the haggard Saddam pulled from the hole; now they’ve seen him hung. The larger message: To avoid Saddams fate means political liberalization. The message extends beyond the Arab Muslim Middle East. Iran’s mullahs see it. At some reptilian level, destructive despots like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe also understand it.
I recall reading about a number of problems with those hangings-- the trap doors were two small, the prisoners disfigured their faces banging the too small openings going through . . . the British were so appalled that they sent their own professional to conduct the future hangings.
Certainly, I would have much preferred that Saddam's hanging be conducted in a more professional and dignified manner-- forcing him to wear a hood as proper protocol even though he refused it, singing him a couple of hymns before the trap door was sprung and so forth.
But the United States didn't conduct the hanging-- they handed the prisoner over in respose to a legal request from Iraq's freely elected government officials.
From what I could see, they conducted the hanging in a fairly dignified manner under the circumstances-- giving him a cloth wrap around the neck before affixing the noose and dropping him sufficiently to acheive a fairly quick and painless death, in sharp contrast to how victims of his regime were executed. Recall also that standard hanging protocol in the Middle East is nowhere near as advanced as what was done with Saddam. Iran, f'rinstance, uses a crane to hoist the condemned off the ground. Syria uses a short-drop "dangle and strangle" method. It appeard that the gallows used for Saddam was built by a professional or at least someone with the engineering know-how to ensure the prisoner was humanely hanged.
Agreed that the taunts were out of order, but they don't come anywhere close to the indignity of being dropped into a plastic shredder.