Saddam Hussein is dead. Does that fix anything? No, it does not.
Yes, he tortured and killed a lot of people, but the United States helped put him in power years ago. After no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, Bush needed another excuse for having started a war there. Hussein, no longer doing our bidding, was convenient. We were in Iraq to free its citizens from a madman, Bush said.
Now we have had a hand in Hussein's hanging, showing that we are still the barbaric nation many think us to be. No matter how horrific a person's crimes, what right has any other person to take a criminal's life? Life is sacred.
Once again, I am ashamed of my country. When will sanity and morality—not religious zealotry—return?
Iraq Saddam Hussein hanging war duplicity Bush EditorMom
Saturday, December 30, 2006
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4 comments:
When I briefly lived in Houston (fourteen months that constituted the longest five years of my life), I caught an anti-death-penalty lawyer on a tv news interview who posited, "there are folks that deserve killin'," but that it was still immoral for the state to kill them in our name. I thought that a particularly apt formulation in Harris County, which then and now executes more individuals than any of the forty-nine states that aren't Texas. It's a shame the message didn't get to Shrub.
However, in this case, I think we have to accept the fact that in Iraq life is cheap and the death penalty is part of their culture. Much as we might wish that were not the case, there was no way that Saddam was not going to be executed at some point.
If you think 14 months in Texas seemed like forever, imagine how interminable the first 23 years of my life—spent in Texas—felt.
And yes, I knew Hussein's execution was pretty much inevitable. But I still maintain that every life is sacred.
Hussein was taunted by ski mask wearing thugs who claimed to be killing him in the name of Muqtada al-Sadr - the latest bad boy on America's kill list. So - we turned over an enemy of the United States to enemies of the United States. And to top it all off - Saddam was killed on the eve of a Muslim holy week whose core tenet is forgiveness and release of prisoners. How much worse could we have managed to fuck this up?
Saddam Hussein killed a lot of people. And he wrote romance novels.
Killing people is wrong, no matter what they've done in the past.
(I don't mean to imple that writing romance novels is bad; I've written them myself! That was the thing that made the man human, to me.)
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