The US and the executions

Another short piece for TCS, answering the question as one of a group of panelists, "Should the US have done anything to stop the execution of Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants?":

Capital punishment is wrong in principle. The sordid hanging of Saddam Hussein after a partial trial was not just wrong but abhorrent. But the US was nevertheless right to leave to Iraqi’s the business of punishing their former dictator and his co-defendants.

By executing leaders of the former Baathist regime, the Iraqi administration missed a rare opportunity to take the moral high ground, and sectarian divisions between Sunni and Shia have probably widened as a result. But Saddam and his associates were undoubtedly guilty of crimes against humanity and responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Shia and Kurds. Many victims and their relatives would have seen a reprieve for Saddam as irresponsibly unjust, and the government calculated that the good will of the previously persecuted was worth the further alienation of the Sunni community. Whether or not we in the West agree with this assessment, it was one for the Iraqi government to make; if Iraq is ever to develop as a functioning state it must be given room for independent policy, and arguably-hypocritical US intervention to stop the executions would have served only to erode the Iraqi government’s fragile legitimacy. Coalition governments ripped Iraq apart by demolishing Saddam’s regime and imposing a new one. Imposing our values as well would have only deepened the chaos.

Saddam

Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was hanged at dawn. The former Iraqi dictator had seemed destined for such a fate ever since his capture in December 2003, but his execution, mandated early last month by the Iraqi Special Tribunal for the killing of 148 people in the town of Dujail in 1982, is nonetheless deplorable. As many commentators have been keen to argue, keeping him alive would perhaps have allowed Iraq the cathartic process of bringing him to judicial account for the innumerable other crimes of which he is accused, while killing him carries the very real risk of exacerbating further the sectarian horrors which ravage Iraq. Yet such claims are far from certain. It would be optimistic to credit the trials as they stood, widely perceived as a sham in the Sunni community, as reconciling Iraqis with a communal heritage. The American and Iraqi governments are not wholly naive in hoping that the passing of the old dictator may do a little to actually contain factional violence by quashing the hopes, and indeed fears, of those for whom a return to the old order was still conceivable. A neutral position on the relationship between Saddam's death and Iraq's stability is also possible. As Adnan Pachachi, a former President of the post-invasion Iraqi Governing Council, argues, "I don't think it will make much difference, frankly". The ultimate effects of Saddam's death are simply too ambiguous a foundation on which to condemn it.

Yet the execution of Saddam Hussein is nonetheless a deplorable act - not because of any mooted impact on contemporary Iraq, but because it is simply never justified for the state to claim the right to take another's life. Amnesty International counted 2,148 executions and 5,186 sentences of death in 2005. When the figures for 2006 are released, Saddam will simply be one among many. Each deserves censure. But Iraq is and was, as Saddam's foreshortened trials showed, a land cursed with abominable acts. To abhor the hanging of a human being, even one guilty of crimes against humanity, may be an appropriate response, but it should pale beside the revulsion we feel for the sectarian atrocities which are occurring on a daily basis. External pundits and politicians have briefly concerned themselves with the fate of Saddam, but the real debate remains how best to contain and curtail this violence. Coalition troops, who captured Saddam just over three years ago, remain the only bulwark against full-blown civil war. Whatever the impact of the former dictator's execution, no-one should be simply giving up on Iraq. The case that withdrawal is the least-worst option - abandoning Iraqis to a slaughter with the potential to far surpass those of Saddam - is one which is yet to be convincingly made.