How Does Saddam’s Offing Play In Suleimaniya?

The Kurdistan Observer offers a terse editorial about the premature execution of the man who made their lives miserable for three long decades:

The hanging of Saddam for the Dujail killings will go down in history as a major setback for Kurdistan. The premature execution will deal a severe blow to Kurdish aspirations for justice, freedom, and independence. The opportunity to record in detail the atrocities of the Arab regime in Southern Kurdistan is now in doubt. Without a Saddam trial, the chances of documenting the genocide in court are now diminished and with it the prospects of having this documentation as an internationally recognized legal basis for an independent Kurdistan free of Arab oppression. An alarming possibility for the rush to hang Saddam might be that the execution had to be carried out as a milestone to set the stage for George Bush to declare a new phase and direction for Iraq. In this new direction, the main goal will be for an Iraq that is simply able to govern and sustain itself. All other aims including aspirations for self-governance in Kurdistan will go by the wayside. So, as we mark another failure for Kurdish desires for freedom and liberty, all we can hope for is that we are better prepared to avoid blunders in the bumpy road ahead in the year 2007.

Hitch actually called the rush to snuff part of a Shia-orchestrated "coup d'etat" (his term). It may well be, as I heard one legal expert tasked with training the Iraqi magistrates put it, that Saddam's trial was an exercise in serious jurisprudence despite its outward appearance as a circus. However, there's no arguing that another major opportunity was lost in not having a tyrant answer for his worst crimes. Slobodan Milosevic denied the world the pleasure of hearing a "guilty" verdict, as did Augusto Pinochet and Saparmurat Niyazov, but Saddam was physically healthy enough to carry on a years-long adjudication of his dictatorship, which would have forced those who now mourn Iraq's descent into chaos and carnage to realize that the preceeding conditions were not the stuff of kite-flying desert idylls. An early image of the waste and recklessness that has characterized so much of this war was one of artifact robbery and vandalism, the physical erasure of Iraq's history. What a shame that with the simple snap of a rope we should meet the sequel to this erasure three years on.