According to the New York Times, Osama Bin Laden was not hanged tonight for his leadership in killing more than 3,000 Americans in the past decade.Everyone agrees that Saddam Hussein was a dictator; that he was a pompous, arrogant, and murderous thug. News flash: the world is full of them, and a lot of them are waking up this morning in their palaces with their henchmen still doing their dirty work and making lives miserable for their fellow citizens; Robert Mugabe, for example, or Kim Jong Il, or any number of other Presidents-For-Life that dot the globe. Even Fidel Castro is still around, although not for very long. But we're not doing a whole lot about those folks. That's because they didn't make the mistake sixteen years ago of invading a tiny little neighboring country with friends in high places that resulted in a disproportionate response of retaliation by countries whose attitudes about the Middle East and oil haven't changed since T.E. Lawrence wore a bernoose.
Some other fellows were. One was hung after being convicted of killing 148 citizens of the country he ruled, 24 years ago. He was also awaiting trial for killing thousands of others - perhaps as many as 200,000 over the course of his rule - though tens of thousands were active in violent efforts to depose him.
The man, dubbed ‘Not Osama’ by my sources, was last implicated in those killings at least seven years before a massive war was launched by a group of a couple of dozen politicians and political analysts in the US. Their objective to topple his government and capture him was achieved three years ago, at a cost of several hundred lives of mostly US troops and less than 30,000 mostly Iraqi civilians and troops.
My source indicates the US group - led by the son of a US President who previously had supported arming the newly dead guy as late as 1990 - was “terribly sorry so many Iraqi civilians had to die to capture the bad man”, adding “we really didn’t mean to.”
The execution of Saddam Hussein isn't the last act of this tragedy. It's just the entr' acte, a touch of grand guignol spectacle provided to keep the audience's attention. And while we're on the subject of theatrical metaphors, let's not overlook the Oedipal overtones of this war; the struggle between the father and son on a scale that would make Sophocles quit the business.
Certainly Saddam Hussein deserved justice. But he wasn't the one who launched the attacks of September 11, 2001; that one got away, so Hussein stood in for him. (It's a little like the capture and execution of Benito Mussolini in 1945; it had no effect whatsoever on the outcome of the war -- he had been stripped of power two years before -- but it just felt good to get rid of him.) As for the rest of the world's dictators, they aren't exactly shaking in their boots over the execution of Hussein. In fact, they probably slept right through it.
